State Formation

DAVID NUGENT AND ADEEM SUHAIL

Emory University, United States

Anthropology has a deep history of engagement with state formation. Ever since the
field t ook s hape a s a n a cademic d iscipline i n t he l ate n ineteenth c entury, scholars
have struggled to understand the conditions that variously enable or disable organized
political subjection. For most of the twentieth century, academic writing about state
formation was structured by the shifting dynamics of nation and empire. The dominant
national/imperial projects in which anthropology was embedded—the English, the
French, and the United States—were confronted with distinctive challenges to the
reproduction of rule and produced conceptualizations of state formation that reflected
the dilemmas peculiar to each.
As the twentieth century wore on, however, the conditions in which political subjec-
tion unfolded changed profoundly, and in ways that made earlier, national/imperial for-
mulations seem increasingly parochial. Confronted with the disintegration of the Euro-
pean colonial empires, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and
the broad range of globalizing material and cultural forces referenced by the term “ne-
oliberalism,” scholars were led to refl ect in new ways about the bases of state formation.
What had been a series of different conversations rooted in distinct national/imperial
traditions merged to form something of a shared, transnational field of discussion. It
was in this context that the questions that dominate contemporary debate were framed.
Most of the scholars who joined in this emergent, transnational conversation
acknowledged that the processes that enable the reproduction of rule have both
meaningful and material dimensions. That is, implicit in their writings is the notion
that state formation is a cultural process, rooted in violence, which seeks to normalize
and legitimize political subjection in large-scale, stratified s ocial o rders. E ven so,
during the 1980s two distinct traditions of investigation emerged that were to define
the parameters of scholarship in the decades that followed.
One group of scholars focuses on the organizational challenges involved in efforts to
normalize political subjection. Implicit in their approach is the assumption that pro-
cesses of state formation culminate in an institution. This institution, they argue, has
unique coercive capabilities, which allow those who direct it to oversee the reproduc-
tion of rule. The institution in question is the state. The key task these scholars set for
themselves has been to identify the distinctive trajectories of state formation that have
produced different forms of state in the various regions of the world.
A second group of anthropologists takes a very different approach. These scholars
approach state formation as a cultural process—a process by which the intolerable (i.e.,
political subjection) is made to appear, if not tolerable, then certainly inevitable. Implicit
in this view is that processes of state formation do not produce a coercive institution
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1809
2 S TAT E F O R M A T I O N

but the illusion that such an institution exists. Coercion, these scholars argue, is built
into the very fabric of contemporary social orders. It is a mistake, therefore, to attribute
this violence to a broad, overarching institution that imposes its will on recalcitrant
populations. Doing so masks the very process of normalization that scholars of state
formation need to understand.

State formation as organizational process

The normative trajectory of state formation: Western Europe and its others
The 1980s is commonly regarded as a historical watershed, when processes of political
subjection that had been in place for decades began to unravel. On the one hand, the
forms of rule associated with the era’s socialist regimes showed clear signs of weaken-
ing, as reflected in China’s extensive restructuring, the efforts of the Soviet republics
to become independent polities, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
On the other hand, the “capitalist democracies” were involved in a restructuring of their
own, systematically dismantling the post-World War II welfare regimes and devising
new institutions of global governance. In other words, all around the world efforts were
underway to challenge, scale back, or dismantle existing state structures.
In the context of this broad retreat of the state, and the extensive disorder and distress
that accompanied it, scholars were led to think carefully about the basis of the state sys-
tem that seemed to be coming down around them. Many were drawn to a (normative)
conceptualization of the state that they attributed to Max Weber. Weber had argued
that “a state is a human community that … successfully … claims the monopoly of
the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber 1946, 78). Scholars
interpreted Weber’s “human community” as “institution” and the “successful claim to
the monopoly on the legitimate use of force” as “a monopoly on violence.” On this basis,
they concluded that the state is an institution with a monopoly on coercive power, one
that stood at the intersection of a territorially bounded national arena and a globalized
“international” arena.
Having identified the form of state that had gone missing, as it were, scholars set
for themselves two primary tasks. The first was to understand why this particular state
form had emerged in the select countries of the North Atlantic where it was (said to
have) formed. The second task was to identify the processes that had interfered with
the formation of this (normative) state form elsewhere. A work that proved especially
influential in making sense of both of these questions about state formation is Charles
Tilly’s seminal 1985 essay, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.” Tilly
argues that state formation in Western Europe had followed a unique path. Processes
of extraction, accumulation, and war making, he asserts, came together in historically
contingent ways to generate a highly distinctive form of state. This was the territorially
delimited, coercive institution whose core features had been identified by Weber and
that was clearly expressed in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648)—regarded by many as the
origin of the modern state system.
 S TAT E F O R M A T I O N 3

Tilly’s interpretation of Western Europe’s unique path of state formation influenced

a wide range of scholarship. This scholarship explored the alternative ways that pro-
cesses of extraction, accumulation, and coercion had come together in national polities
outside of the West to produce deviations from the North Atlantic norm. Each distinct
path of (non-Western) state formation had produced an equally distinct type of state.
These included sultanistic, absolutist, authoritarian, monarchical, dictatorial, patrimo-
nial, security, and prebendal, to name but a few.
Tilly’s work on state formation also helped inspire another avenue of research. This
scholarship explores the formation of statelike structures of a nonnational nature, which
are based on the management of illicit processes of extraction, accumulation, and coer-
cion. These make up what scholars refer to as the “parapolitical,” a domain of covert
relations that operate at once within and between polities and remain largely hidden
from public view. The parapolitical involves quasi-legal and illegal relations formed
between state security apparatuses, “terrorist” organizations, and transnational crim-
inal syndicates. These relations are characterized as intrinsically sinister, as a threat to
the monopoly on legitimate force to which states are said to aspire.

State formation despite the state

While many scholars responded to the disorder of the 1980s by identifying norma-
tive and nonnormative forms of state formation, others derived a very different set
of lessons from the instability of the era. Despite the fact that state structures were
in clear retreat all around the globe, organized political subjection appeared to be as
strong as ever. In other words, the processes that were responsible for the reproduc-
tion of rule appeared to be independent of state structures. Confronted with this fact,
scholars began to look in new directions to understand the bases of organized political
subjection.
It was in this context that the ideas of Michel Foucault became influential. Fou-
cauldians initiated an important discussion about the dynamics of political subjection
beyond the state by distinguishing different forms of power. They proposed that power
in its “sovereign” and “disciplinary” guises had been replaced by governmentality, a
“biopolitical” form that seeks to manage population. Population was regarded both as
the subject and object of government. It was an aggregate category managed through
a confluence of multiple instruments and modalities rather than by a unitary political
formation (the state).
Governmentality was thus an ensemble of institutions, instruments, and procedures
that allowed for the management of population. This ensemble implied a new form of
capitalist political economy, with an added emphasis on economic and other forms of
“security.” Second, governmentality invoked the emergence of the knowledge systems,
sciences, and academics necessary to effectively “govern” as well as produce legitimacy.
Finally, it traced the dispersal of the practice of power to disparate social sites that are
not explicitly identifiable as “the state.”
Instead of asking who possesses power in the state, the social sciences drew on Fou-
cauldian insights to interrogate the “art” of governance. Many scholars came to regard
4 S TAT E F O R M A T I O N

the idea of the State (with a capital S) as a metaphor rather than a concrete reality. Fou-
cauldians argued that, “the dream or nightmare of a society programmed, colonized
or dominated by ‘the cold monster’ of the State is profoundly limiting as a way of ren-
dering intelligible the way we are governed today” (Rose 2006, 145). This implied that
anthropologists concerned with organized political subjection should extend their field
sites to bedrooms, factories, and shopping malls, children’s homes, kitchens, and cine-
mas, operating theaters, and classrooms. Thus, they came to see the State as a powerful
way of codifying and managing—or, alternatively, contesting and overturning—existing
practices of rule.

State formation as a cultural process

Ordering the everyday: State formation and the mundane

An influential counterpoint to the academic literatures that regarded the state as an
institution were those that viewed it as a mask for processes of political subjection. As
early as the 1930s, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown had made the novel observation that the state
was “a fiction of the philosophers” that “does not exist in the phenomenal world” (1940,
xxiii). In the 1980s, Philip Abrams drew out the implications of this observation. In the
process, he articulated an important alternative to normative approaches to state for-
mation. In his highly influential “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State” (1988),
Abrams argued that state formation is best understood as an ideological project that
invokes the authority of an illusory object (the state) in order to naturalize the repro-
duction of rule. In other words, while the state has no material existence, the idea of the
state is extremely powerful. As Abrams famously asserted, “the state is not the reality
which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask that prevents our
seeing political practice as it really is” (1988, 58).
Inspired by Abrams, anthropologists went on to explore ethnographically the pro-
cesses by which political actors and groups invoke “the state” to legitimize their claim
to the right to rule over others. Their research helped to define a novel approach to state
formation. According to these scholars, state formation consists in part of an arbitrary
and highly interested claim to authority, made in the name of the state. It consists in
equal measure, however, of the processes that conceal the interested nature of this claim.
State formation also consists of the processes that delegitimize challenges to that claim.
Indeed, it is the struggle that ensues from attempts to naturalize the imposition of rule,
these scholars suggest, that shapes the terrain of people’s everyday political constraints
and possibilities.
Anthropologists influenced by Abrams’s focus on the seemingly mundane practices
of those who claim or deny an affiliation with the state. This claim or denial is what
Abrams called the “mask” of rule. While the state is indeed a masked claim to author-
ity, these scholars argue, this claim is forever confounded by the dilemmas of seeking
to manage the tensions and contradictions of complex, stratified social orders. It is
precisely because the state is not at all what it purports to be, they assert, that state for-
mation must be understood as made up of two parts: the illusory idea of the state and
 S TAT E F O R M A T I O N 5

the very real “system” of material relations that tries to maintain the illusion of coher-
ence and control. The tension between “idea” and “system” means that state formation
is never complete and at most achieves an unstable form of stasis.
Abrams’s pathbreaking work on state formation as an inevitably tense and unsta-
ble set of contradictions (mis)representing themselves as a coherent institution also led
scholars to explore how the mask of coherence was constructed. Many focused on the
construction of boundaries, which divide everyday experience into seemingly discrete
and separate realms. These anthropologists argued that the construction of an illusory
boundary between state and society is crucial to the process by which the mask of the
state is made. While not a part of the phenomenal world, this boundary is nonetheless
of crucial importance precisely because it is imagined to be real. Indeed, the construc-
tion of this boundary is integral to the process by which the state comes to appear as a
real and autonomous structure. It is not the state that should be the object of inquiry,
these scholars argue, but rather boundary making—and the processes that invest the
state/society divide with such deceptive reality. Despite appearances much to the con-
trary, the state is an illusory effect of mundane, everyday ordering processes.
Inspired by these fresh insights, anthropology extended the study of state formation
into the novel arenas of the quotidian and ostensibly unremarkable. These new research
sites, where the exercise of power could be linked to tangible actors and their social rela-
tions, were a far cry from the centralized institutions and normative processes that were
the focus of much other research on state formation. Central among the new mundane
sites and processes that became of interest to anthropologists were those that involved
everyday encounters between the representatives of state bureaucracies and the people
those bureaucracies were intended to serve. In these encounters, scholars explored the
social production of indifference, neglect, and exclusion—processes that contributed to
the illusion that the state was an institution apart.
Anthropologists also investigated the mundane processes involved in constructing
territorially based imaginaries of political order. Seemingly neutral processes of cartog-
raphy and topographic representation, scholars asserted, make it possible to imagine the
state as a real entity located above and beyond the immediate circumstances of everyday
life. These same processes make it possible to envision an entire system of such states,
which interact with one another on a global scale. This symbolic geography contributes
directly to the illusion that states are real institutions that stand over and act on human
society.
Abrams’s view of state formation as an ideological project led scholars to explore the
related ideas of Antonio Gramsci, especially his evocative notion of hegemony. Viewing
hegemony as a predominantly material and organizational process, these anthropolo-
gists analyzed official efforts to make everyday social processes legible to and manage-
able by those claiming the right to rule. From the tumultuous state-building processes
in Liberia to the collectivization projects of the Soviet state in Russia, from the vio-
lent regime of British imperial officers in the highlands of Burma to urban planning in
New York, scholars traced how specific projects of state formation unfolded in cultur-
ally, geographically, and historically diverse contexts. This attention to the politics of the
everyday marked a move away from the idea of the state as a hegemonic institution and
toward contested, statist projects promulgated in the name of modernity.
6 S TAT E F O R M A T I O N

This view of hegemony as a material and organizational process was a direct chal-
lenge to “cultural consensus” models. Implicit in consensus models of hegemony is the
idea that subject populations contribute to their own marginalization by “buying into”
the mystifying ideology of ruling groups. Scholars drew on a wide range of evidence
to argue that cultural consensus is a highly unusual state of affairs—that claims to the
right to rule have been contested and unstable throughout most of human history. As
William Roseberry shows in a very influential essay, what hegemony seeks to construct
“is not a shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for liv-
ing through, talking about and acting on social orders characterized by domination”
(1994, 361).
The implication of Roseberry’s analysis is that state formation is a normative process
of making claims about how social life should be lived. These claims are ongoing, to
such a degree that the state never stops “stating.” But so too are forms of resistance to
these claims. This means that state formation is an inevitably unfinished and incomplete
process that is forever seeking to complete itself by representing itself as what it is not—a
fait accompli called “state.”

The “enchantment” of the everyday: State formation and affective ties

Philip Abrams’s argument that the state is an illusion that masks processes of state
formation—that the state is an ideological project that obscures rather than reveals
political practice—gave rise to another influential approach to the study of organized
political subjection. This body of scholarship did not focus exclusively on the everyday
ordering practices that create the illusion of the state as an indifferent institution, stand-
ing above and acting on human society. Anthropologists who contributed to this body
of literature instead explored the processes that breathe life into the mask of the state
by evoking fear and awe, hope and expectation, joy and sorrow. Key elements of state
formation, these scholars suggest, depend on the production of “state affect”—a diverse
constellation of affective ties that bind people to the (idea of the) state.
Some anthropologists have investigated the ways in which the material and organi-
zational culture of the state contributes to the production of state affect. These scholars
show how state formation unfolds through the circulation of material culture (files,
forms, badges, and insignia associated with the state) and the proliferation of state rit-
uals. Both representation and ritual, they argue, produce contradictory, unpredictable,
and arbitrary affective outcomes and in the process serve to produce and reproduce
the mask of the state. Indeed, the wide circulation of “official” documents and routines
extend the state claim into the farthest corners of the national territory because these
elements of material and organizational culture are regarded living embodiments of the
state. Indeed, they act as powerful fetishes which carry affective energies that people
experience as real.
Still other scholars have examined how those in power seek to construct the mask
of the state by engaging in carefully choreographed spectacles, which very often
materialize in displays of public violence. The focus here is the graphic and gruesome
ways in which repressive regimes enact the state claim by orchestrating a public
theater of fear in which the audience—the general populace—is constantly reminded
 S TAT E F O R M A T I O N 7

of its inability to escape from the ambits of the state. Regimes seek to convey their
omniscience and omnipresence by engaging in a range of repressive activities. These
include familiar practices, like policing the streets—which occur in highly visible,
public spaces. These practices may also extend the apparent reach of the state into
private and illicit spaces through more atypical practices, such as searching houses and
arresting dissidents. Repressive state activities such as these reverberate through the
public sphere, often extending as far as everyday rumor and gossip mills. The actions
of those who act in the name of the state may also include kidnapping and torture of
supposed dissidents, whose bodies are subsequently disposed of and thus displayed
in public—activities that point to the existence of secret domains where state actors
engage in the most barbaric of practices. All of these combine to imply to one and all
that the gaze of the state extends everywhere.
As the foregoing suggests, most analyses of state power have concerned themselves
with contexts in which organized political subjection appears to have been accom-
plished. Much of this literature assumes the inevitability of state power, which makes
“crises” of rule appear as exceptional episodes that are deviations from the normal oper-
ation of the state. A final group of scholars explores processes of state formation in those
surprisingly persistent moments in which political rule falters or fails, when it becomes
obvious to one and all that the mask of the state is an illusion. In these moments, groups
that cling to institutional understandings of the state enter into a state of extreme anx-
iety and confusion because the order that they regard as the very essence of the state
seems to be dissipating all around them. They become increasingly delusional and para-
noid about the threats to order and seek out an explanation for what they regard as a
highly abnormal state of affairs, an explanation that can resolve their anxieties. Not
uncommonly, it is dangerous and mysterious “others” that are held responsible for the
crisis. Moments such as these, in which order has been called into question, reveal with
startling clarity that the state is a powerful but illusory claim—one that evokes affect
in order to effect processes of political subjection. These moments also show that the
affective dimension to power is not limited to subaltern groups but also extends to those
who identify with and participate in the activities of state.
A final group of anthropologists explores the contradiction between state activities
and official state representations. According to these scholars, the former are inevitably
based on violence, coercion, and exclusion. The latter, however, necessarily eschew vio-
lence and coercion and depict the state as a disinterested actor that seeks to promote
the common good. In other words, state projects can never be what they must represent
themselves as being. This means that it is crucial for those who act in the name of the
state to purge it of what it is not allowed to be and to displace state violence onto delegit-
imized substances, peoples, identities, and actions. This process of purging is ongoing
and continuous. It informs virtually every context in which the state presents or repre-
sents itself. So regular a part of state activity are these processes that they are usefully
thought of as “rites of purification.” These rites, however, do not represent themselves as
such, but rather as “anti-rites”—as activities so ordinary and so mundane that there is no
need to pay them any mind. Precisely because they seem so ordinary, these anti-rites are
integral to everyday processes of state formation, for they seek to displace state violence
onto realms said to be located outside the political community.
8 S TAT E F O R M A T I O N

A crucial dimension to state formation, these scholars assert, consists of patrolling

the imaginary boundaries between the inside and the outside. Crises ensue when these
boundaries are compromised and realms that otherwise appear as separate and discrete
collapse into one another. In moments such as these, paranoia and violence are likely
to follow. Rather than being exceptions to the normal operation of the state, however,
these crises are but the most extreme and visible expressions of processes that are ongo-
ing, that are an integral part of everyday state formation. Particularly important in this
regard are the ceaseless efforts of officials to attempt to purge the state of what it is not
allowed to be—a task at once impossible and delusional. Equally delusional is the com-
plementary process of displacing state violence onto peoples, substances, and domains
said to be outside of or foreign to the state. Indeed, much of state formation consists of
(mis)representing activities that are impossible and delusional as if they are the most
ordinary and unremarkable of practices imaginable.

Conclusion

The sweeping economic and political transformations of the late twentieth century led
anthropologists to reflect in new ways on the forces that variously enable or disable the
organized political subjection of large-scale, stratified social orders. One group of schol-
ars responded by focusing on the organizational challenges involved in this process.
They assumed that processes of state formation culminate in a territorially bounded,
coercive institution known as the state. And they focused on the singular processes that
had unfolded in Western Europe to produce a highly distinctive form of state.
A second group of scholars focused on the cultural dimensions of organized politi-
cal subjection. They assumed that state formation does not produce an institution but
rather the illusion that such an institution exists. They investigated the processes that
unfold across multiple social domains to produce the idea of the state as a real thing,
standing above and acting on human societies.
Most analyses of organized political subjection assume the inevitability of state power
and treat moments of crisis as exceptional, as times when the normal operation of the
state has been suspended. A final group of scholars has questioned these assumptions
and has sought to show that crisis is the inevitable result of state activities that are
made to appear ordinary and mundane. These anthropologists focus on mechanisms
that seek to mask the delusional dimensions to everyday state activity—that attempt
to (mis)represent the remarkable as the routine. For these scholars, “the state” is by its
very nature a continual state of exception—whose exceptional nature is forever threat-
ening to reveal itself. This, they argue, is emerging as one of the defining features of
contemporary state formation.
Anthropologists have increasingly moved away from institutional understandings of
organized political subjection. They approach state formation through the lens of the
everyday and the processes by which people aggregate diverse experiences and expec-
tations to project their understandings of what “the state” should be but rarely if ever
is. In other words, scholars approach state formation as a series of ongoing moral, eth-
ical, and affective claims, which are reflected in the ways that the state is imagined in
 S TAT E F O R M A T I O N 9

its absence. Future scholarship is likely to shed further light on state formation as an
ongoing process of cultural construction rather than the consolidation of an institution.

SEE ALSO: Biopolitics; Capitalism; Corporations; Democracy; Desai, Akshay

Ramanlal (1915–94); Enlightenment, the; Evolutionism; Foucault, Michel (1926–84);
Governmentality; Gramsci, Antonio (1891–1937); Marxism; Nationalism; Neoliberal-
ism; Political Anthropology; Power, Anthropological Approaches to; Redistribution;
Sovereignty; States; States: Police Powers; Weber, Max (1864–1920)

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