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Session Submission Summary

What kind of state theories for rethinking the education-state-society relation?

Thu, April 18, 11:45am to 1:15pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Pacific Concourse (Level -1), Pacific H

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel continues a highly productive conversation began at the CIES 2017 Atlanta panel on The State and Education and continued in Mexico 2018. These panels were exploring the need to rethink state theory in the context of changes in world orders and challenges to the state’s capacity to govern.

State theory has had something of a resurgence since the events of 2008 in particular (global financial crisis), the ongoing events in the Middle East and North Africa including the war in Syria, and largest movement of refugees since the end of the Second World War, the referendum decision in 2016 in the UK to leave the European Union, and the election of Donald Trump in the US (cf. Boix, 2015; Jessop, 2016). These developments have raised questions about how we think about so-called ‘normal’ states and ‘exceptional’ states, (Jessop, 2016), as well as the relationship between territory, governing institutions/apparatus, population, legitimacy and social cohesion.

Three lines of theoretical enquiry frame the contributions to this panel. The first is that state theory itself has tended to be shaped by Weber’s understanding of the state as having a monopoly on violence. Whilst this conceptualisation helps us in understanding some state forms, particularly those which Jessop describes as having an affinity between capitalism and democracy, this view is less and less tenable as the state outsources its monopoly, or where insurgent and subaltern groups claim the right to violence.

Second, Weber’s ideal types of state have their parameters set by, and anchored in an implicit Westphalian state as the only legitimate form of state, implying other forms of state – as a form of political organisation – as being rogue, exceptional, failed, and so on. This matters in that it is this conception of the state that is mobilised by powerful international donors and other development agencies from the west in state building projects that include education in it. According to Bhambra (2014) these state building projects are a further form of violence in that they deny the possibilities for alternative forms of political organisation in ways that are more sympathetic to, and emergent from, the cultural political economy of specific territories and their populations. What might education look like in this context?

Third, the idea of sovereignty and legitimation – two key concepts fundamental to state power and political organisation – insist on a narrow range of modes of legitimation (consensual/democratic politics), and form of sovereignty (nation as the nodal scale). These two concepts are underpinned by methodological nationalist assumptions – leaving little space for thinking in more complex ways in which different scales might be mobilised to secure legitimacy for endogenous projects, on the one hand, or a redistribution of sovereignty outward, on the other. What new sources of legitimacy are evident which enable the state to govern through education?

Each of the papers on this panel explore what this means for the education-state relation in specific sites, such as Myanmar and Afghanistan, and in relation to the challenges posed when populations do not map on to rights to citizenship as in the case of Syrian refugees. These cases provide insights that offer new challenges to, and directions for, a comparatively driven understanding of the state as a form of political organisation, and education as a site for political socialisation.

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