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The concept of accountability politics is defined as the arena of conflict over whether and how those in power are held publicly responsible for their decisions. Explaining accountability requires disentangling states from regimes. This chapter provides the political context for understanding the book's research strategy, which compares rural civil society-state relations across regions, branches, and levels of government, with a special interest in understanding how initiatives for change can scale up, down, and across between the local and regional and the national and transnational. The sub-national comparative method is pursued with institutional ethnography and quantitative indicators, both interpreted through a political economy focus on incentives.

This chapter provides an overview of book's main themes. This book explores Kuwait and Jordan as two states that have similar clientelistic ties to the United States. Both are monarchies holding parliamentary elections, and each has similar levels of support for its Islamist opposition movements. However, the two states vary in their levels of anti-American sentiment among these Islamist opposition forces. This core difference reveals how concerns about a country's international relations shape state–society relations more broadly. Although the book builds its argument by focusing on the cases of Kuwait and Jordan, it also draws on evidence from two other monarchies that have varying degrees of anti-American sentiment among their Islamist opposition as well: Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Further, it extends the findings to Palestine's democratic experience, which resulted in Hamas' parliamentary victory in 2006.

Presents a comparative overview of non-profit or third-sector organizations in a wider welfare policy and civil society context. It addresses the social, economic, and political developments that have made this set of institutions more central to policy debates in developed market economies; in particular, within a broad policy framework known as the Third Way, which, unlike other policy approaches, pays the greatest and most systematic attention to the non-profit sector. The chapter finds that the strength of the Third Way stance toward the non-profit sector is closely related to its weakness: Because its basic perspective towards voluntarism and civil society overlaps significantly with those of neo-liberalism on the one hand, and with approaches in reformed minded post-corporatists countries, its distinct policy thrust is hard to fathom. Indeed, many countries practice some form of ‘third-wayism’ in their search for new policy approaches to modernize the welfare state.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to explore the politics of the “choreography of sacred spaces” within the framework of state-society relations and to examine the positions, roles, and agency of various actors and institutions in an attempt to differentiate between the political and the religious features of the shared or contested space. It seeks to understand whether sharing and contestation are politically or religiously motivated. The chapter then discusses the three main areas of research that this book explores. It starts with issues of coexistence that are fundamental to understanding the kinds of arrangements that can be found within shared sacred sites and the consequences of those arrangements. It then examines characteristics of shared sacred sites, including narratives, centrality, and indivisibility, to underscore how such features are theorized in the literature. Finally, it discusses the various ways in which state-society relations, state structures, and the impact of state policies contribute to sharing sacred sites.

On the morning of April 22, 1989, seven days after the emergence of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement, a state funeral was held for Hu Yaobang inside the Great Hall of the People. The previous night, about 50,000 students had gone to Tiananmen Square, just outside the Great Hall of the People, in order to be part of that funeral. The 1989 Beijing Student Movement has three major characteristics: frequent government policy changes back and forth from concession to repression, quick and successful participant mobilizations, and the dominance of traditional forms of language and action during the movement. This book argues that the rise and development of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement can be explained in terms of state-society relations in China, understood in three impure dimensions: in terms of the nature of the state, of the nature of society, and of the economic, political, and ideational linkages between the state and society. It examines the role of intellectual elites in the 1989 Movement, economic reform in China, state legitimacy, and public opinion about the Movement.

This chapter presents a dense historical and theoretical discussion of how state-society relations have been theorized in both the Subaltern Studies project and in more recent Foucauldian studies of subaltern politics. The chapter argues that both perspectives fail, to fully appreciate the production of subaltern political agency and its containment in and through the state, and how subalterns use the full resources of ‘democracy’ and ‘modernity’ available to them, traversing Chatterjee’s spatial divide of ‘civil’ and ‘political’ society. The chapter turns to Gramsci to provide a conceptual armoury capable, on the one hand, ‘of grasping how subaltern politics is always-already imbricated in state-society relations, and how, on the other hand, state-society relations simultaneously enable and constrain subaltern politics’.

This chapter examines how particular state-society relations contributed to the rise of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement and shaped its development. It first looks at the history of China's historical state-society relations before the rise of the 1989 Movement and provides an overview of Chinese society in the 1980s. For the purpose of understanding the origin of the 1989 Movement and mass participation during it, the chapter focuses on the social changes brought about by the largely state-led reform. The scale and impact of the social changes brought by the economic reform was revealed by waves of “social fevers” during the 1980s. Both the high culture fevers and the popular culture fevers resulted from a sudden influx of new information from the West and a simultaneous rediscovery of the Chinese past. This chapter also discusses China's transition to a market economy.

The May 4th Movement of 1919, the December 9th Movement of 1935–1936, and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement are the three largest student movements in the history of twentieth-century China. Why did the 1989 Movement have a particular pattern of activities and what was the impact of those activities on the dynamics of the movement? So far, scholars have approached this type of question from a cultural perspective. For example, to prevent other Beijing populations from joining the demonstration, students often set up picket lines and made anyone who wanted to join a march show his or her student identity card. This chapter asks why movement participants adopt certain forms of rhetoric and action and not others, focusing on the role of state-society relations. After a short introduction to the two earlier student movements, it examines the patterns of movement rhetoric and activities during the 1989 Movement. It then describes the different state-society relationships underlying the May 4th, December 9th, and 1989 movements.

This introductory chapter provides an historical and historiographic overview of the Partition Studies. In addition, it makes historiographic connections between post-partition nation building in India and East Pakistan through the establishment of borders, the place of small scale violence, refugee rehabilitation policies in the aftermath of the Partition, and the relationship between the new states and its citizens. It contends that the Partition, rather than being confined to the year 1947, was a long process involving knee jerk policy making on the part of the new states which impacted their minorities citizens differentially and produced multiple categories of identities, some of which acquired documentary validation through the establishment of passports and visas. The chapter engages and situates the book within the new scholarship of Partition argues that Bengal Partition should be central to the understanding of South Asian Partitions, rather than be seen as a regional alternative to the standard Punjab Partition narrative.

This chapter focuses on the reconfiguration of state–society relations in Poland and Russia, with particular emphasis on the role played by taxation in the redistribution of power resources between state and society. It begins by comparing taxation and state coercive power before discussing how state coercion in Poland was subsumed into a system of legal-administrative checks that promoted the rule of law, the institutional embodiment of “legalistic consent.” It then considers how Russia's legal system abetted the rule by law, the institutional embodiment of “bureaucratic coercion.” It also examines Poland and Russia's divergent paths to very different types of postcommunist capitalism. In Poland, the tax system contributed directly to the consolidation of “social-market capitalism”; in Russia, the tax system led directly to the consolidation of “concessions capitalism.”

This chapter discusses three issues: First, in sharp contrast to its repeated political upheavals during the 1980s, China exhibited a prolonged period of political stability in the 1990s. Second, although China has experienced many positive changes in the 1990s, the state-society relations that led to the rise and shaped the development of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement have not been fundamentally altered. Therefore, another large-scale social movement is still possible in China in the future, and, once it begins, it may also follow a dynamic similar to that of the 1989 Movement. To avoid having such a movement happen again, the current Chinese leaders need to place political reform at the top of their agenda. This chapter also highlights some major theoretical goals as well as the basic characteristics of state-society relations theory. Finally, it examines how intellectual elites, rank-and-file intellectuals and students, and urban residents contributed to political stability in the 1990s.

The introduction first provides a historical background for the book during the period from the 1924 establishment of the Whampoa Military Academy to the 1945 end of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Xu goes on to introduce the major themes that the book aims to engage with, namely state-building and state-society relations in modern China, war and soldiers in Chinese military history and literature, as well as social emotion and mass mobilization in the Chinese Communist Revolution. Xu argues in the introduction that her book focuses on both social and cultural impacts of war in order to treat war as a cultural event for the people it influences rather than simply an analysis of politics and strategy. Xu ends this section by introducing the chapter structure and primary sources of the book.

Among Per Pinstrup-Andersen’s most important contributions to contemporary understandings of hunger, malnutrition, and food security has been his emphasis on the distribution of food, and the critical role of government interventions in getting food into the mouths of the most vulnerable and insecure. This chapter builds on this work and argues that the nature of a government’s interventions in food security depends at least in part on state–society relations, or the relationships between the state and civil society organizations (CSOs) and social movements. The chapter focuses on contemporary Latin America and argues that organized civil society groups pressure governments to enact anti-hunger legislation and implement far-reaching food security programs. It highlights seven ways in which civil society contributes to government hunger commitments and the development of effective programming on food security: state formation, giving voice to excluded and vulnerable groups, framing, targeting, oversight, pressure, and project implementation.

This chapter explains the primary focus and the theoretical devices for the book, introduces Vidin region and provides a brief outline for the chapters. Provincial councils were key offices of Ottoman governance from 1840s onward. In the broader context of Ottoman liberal-capitalist social formation during the long 19^th century (1789-1922), local councils provided a venue for local agents pursue competing political and economic strategies. Conventional historiography on 19^th century Ottoman state-society relations puts a lot of emphasis on an imperial regulation from 1864 in explaining provincial councils as an extension of imperial centralization policies. This study shifts the focus of research on provincial documents produced by such councils to reveal how these offices and practices of Ottoman governance served as a platform for the political and economic negotiations of provincial agents pursuing their interests. The documents produced by the provincial councils in Vidin County in Ottoman-administered Bulgaria provide a rich source to explore the dynamics of 19^th century Ottoman governance in its full richness focusing on property rights, security matters, market order and population management.