POLS 084. State Formation & State Building (CP)

The world used to be divided among empires, dynasties, confederations, alliances, leagues, city-states, and kingdoms. Now, only one species of political organization survives: the nation state. These “stationary bandits” command vast populations and resources, competing with one another even as they collude to reinforce failing states and rebuff non-state actors like pirates, terrorists, criminal syndicates, and revolutionaries. Civil wars are fought for control of the state, often destroying the central prize in the process. Utopian schemes and calls for global cooperation always seem to crash like waves against state borders. How did we arrive here? Why did the state, as an organizational scheme, emerge in Europe? Why did it spread across the globe? Are states born of war, trade, laws, or mutual recognition? How do new states establish rule and build new national identities? How do states die, and should we bother rebuilding them when they do? Are new species like the European Union ahead of their time, or evolutionary dead ends? Will mega-corporations, climate change, international institutions, the internet, and transnational movements kill states forever, or is the demise of the state system greatly exaggerated? Drawing on the state formation literature and historical and modern examples, we’ll put the leviathans that lord over us under the microscope. Topics covered include: the state, its competitors, warmaking as statemaking, colonization and decolonization, authority and awe, the resource course, fragile and failed states, nationalisms and pan-nationalisms, ideology, alternatives to the state, globalization, neomedievalism, and future directions.
Social Sciences.
1 credit.
Fall 2025. Casey.
Catalog chapter: Political Science
Department website: swarthmore.edu/political-science

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