Seminar: Theories of the State SoSe 2022

Prof. Dr. Nikita Dhawan

Tuesday (5): 14.50-16.20

Room: GER 054 U

Start: 12.04.2022

POL-WO-Forschung
PHIL-PV-THEO-3
PHIL-PV-THEO-2

Critical political thought is caught in a double-bind vis-à-vis the state: On the one hand, the state has historically been the source of racial, economic and gender violence and repression. And yet, emancipatory strategies contend with the state to promote justice and equality through progressive policy-making and good governance in the economic, political and social spheres. Even as the state is known to perpetuate racist, sexist and capitalist ideologies, the hope is that the state can function as a site of redress towards racial, gender and economic equality.

In this class, we will engage with liberal, republican, Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, queer and postcolonial theories of the state to address these ambivalences and understand how the state reinforces but also mitigates global inequality and injustice.

High level of English proficiency not essential.

Readings: 

Jessop, Bob. 2016. The State. Past, Present, Future. Cambridge: Polity.

Foucault, Michel. 2008. [1978-1979]. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham/ London: Duke University Press.

Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity.

Mills, Charles. 1997. The Racial Contract. New York: Cornell University Press.

MacKinnon, Catharine. 1989. Toward a feminist theory of the State. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Brown, Wendy. 1992. Finding the Man in the State. Feminist Studies 18 (1): 7-34.

Davis, Angela. 2005. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. New York: Seven Stories Press. 

Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press.

Scott, James. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven/London: Yale University Press