ETHNOGRAPHIC EXPLORATIONS OF THE POSTCOLONIAL STATE EDITED BY THOMAS BLOM HANSEN AND FINN STEPPUTATPREFACE The ideas that led to the conception of this volume grew out of the intellectual environment of the research program Livelihood, Identity and Organization in Situations of Instability, which materialized thanks to the Danish Council for Development Research, the Centre for Development Research in Copen- hagen, Institute of Anthropology at Copenhagen University, and International Development Studies at Roskilde University. The LIVELY program brought together researchers from a variety of academic fields in an effort to synthe- size ongoing theoretical and empirical work on violent conflict, migration, and popular culture. Because these subjects converged on the culture of states yet challenged the idea of the state as something given and immobile, we conceived the idea of an international seminar on the States of Imagination in the postcolonial world and invited a number of prominent and talented scholars for the event. The idea of States of Imagination was enthusiastically received, and the seminar, which took place in Copenhagen in the midst of winter 1998, elicited a collection of fascinating papers, most of which appear in this volume. We are grateful to the participants of this seminar for contributing to an intellec- tually stimulating seminar and for challenging and refining the common approach that now emerges from the volume. We would also like to express our appreciation of the support and inspiration we have received from our colleagues in the LIVELY program: Karen Fog Olwig, Bodil Folke Frederik- sen, Preben Kaarsholm, Henrik Ronsbo, Ninna Nyberg Sorensen, and Fiona Wilson, as well as Peter Gibbon, Poul Engberg-Pedersen, Jan Ifversen, KarutiKanyinga, Thandika Mkandawire, Afonso Moreira, Kirsten Westergaard, and other good colleagues. Finally, we would like to thank our secretary, Annette Smedegaard Chris- tiansen, for working hard with us throughout these years, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for Duke University Press for their encouraging and constructive suggestions, which have improved the final product. viii PREFACE INTRODUCTION States of Imagination Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat . « «as if every man should say to every man, I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner——Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan The state has once again emerged as a central concern in the social sciences. It has also been rediscovered by practitioners of development and powerful international agencies such as the World Bank (1997), which now advocates “good governance” by lean and effective structures of government. However, in the vocabulary of World Bank economists the state and its institutions re- main strangely ahistorical entities, a set of functional imperatives of regula- tion arising from society but devoid of distinct characters and different his- torical trajectories. In this influential train of thought the state is always the same, a universal function of governance. In the 1970s, theories of the capi- talist state also privileged the state’s functions in reproducing labor and con- ditions for accumulation of capital over its forms and historicity. Also, when Evans, Ruschemeyer, and Skocpol (1985) “brought the state back in” as an actor in its own right, their conceptualization of state revolved around certain assumed core functions and historical tasks that every state presumably had to perform. The current rethinking of the state occurs at a juncture where the very no- tion of the state as a regulator of social life and a locus of territorial sover- eignty and cultural legitimacy is facing unprecedented challenges. Ethnic mobilization, separatist movements, globalization of capital and trade, and