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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS State Power And Social Forces : Domination And Transformation In The Third World by Edited by Joel Samuel Migdal , Edited by Atul Kohli , Edited by Vivienne Shue
This eminently readable 1994 collection of high-quality, country-specific essays on Third World politics provides, through a variety of well-integrated themes and approaches, an examination of state theory as it has been practised in the past, and how it must be refined for the future. The contributors go beyond the previously articulated bringing the state back in model to offer their own state-in-society approach. They argue that states, which should be disaggregated for meaningful comparative study, are best analysed as parts of societies. States may help mould, but are also continually moulded by, the societies within which they are embedded. States capacities, further, will vary depending on their ties to other social forces. And other social forces will be capable of being mobilised into political contention only under certain conditions. Political contention pitting states against other social forces may sometimes be mutually enfeebling, but at other times, mutually empowering.show more