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Guatemalan Police vs. Indigenous People Nations & States
For 300 years, nation-states grew and prospered. They waged wars on an increasingly destructive and global scale (the national security state) and they assumed broad tasks of social and economic management (the welfare state). Their ubiquity was taken for granted. But for the past 25 years or so, states have been in retreat -- weakening, shrinking, sinking as globalizing capital undermines their tax base, erodes their regulatory apparatus, stymies their policy machinery and questions their legitimacy. The future of humanity depends on what happens to states and where "sovereign" decisions will be taken instead. These materials look at these questions and track some of the main trends.
What Is a "State"?
This page starts by analyzing and deconstructing the concept of "the state," challenging taken-for-granted ideas of the immutability, inevitability, and omnipotence of this particular form of political organization. Microstates and small island developing states face special challenges and use unique strategies to survive in the global state system, and our page on experimental states shows how new technology has produced new conceptions of community and sovereignty.States and Their Future
The articles on this page provide an introduction to the forces and processes that could transform the nation-state, and hints at ways in which "sovereign" decisions are increasingly made by other actors.Statehood and Sovereignty
This page is the gateway to a set of pages that discuss movements and forces that undermine the authority of the state. The global economy increasingly usurps the power of states to regulate transnational corporations and control financial flows, while corruption drains billions of dollars that could be used toward social services. The state should not be reified or idealized, however. States fail, and new states emerge. Fluid national identities cross state borders, and some nations feel that states disregard or even violate their rights and interests.Tables and Charts
This page provides tables and charts on offshore centers, export processing zones and other matters related to nations and states.Resources and Bibliography
This section links to resources and lists books on issues of nationalism and states.
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