Migdal, J., State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, ISBN 0521797063, £15.95 (pbk).

In Petals of Blood by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, Munira, a teacher from the remote Kenyan village of Ilmorog, turns to a radical lawyer in Nairobi for knowledge about his country’s history. However, in the political science books Munira receives, he comes to look in vain for anything on the political economy of colonialism or imperialism. All of the books focus on more distant themes concerning issues of social order, political control and the so-called passage from ‘traditionalism’ to ‘modernisation’. When returning the books to the lawyer, Munira complains about the lack of detail on the history and political struggles of the people of Kenya. In his reply, the lawyer recommends moving beyond the voices of educators and intellectuals—that are never disembodied or neutral—to question the individual and group interests behind them that tend to rationalise particular needs, whims and caprices. And so can one think in a similar way about Joel Migdal’s State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another.

The main interlocutors Migdal engages with are inter alia David Baldwin, Stephen Krasner, Edward Shils, Daniel Lerner, Lucian Pye and, of course, Samuel Huntington. The latter was Migdal’s dissertation advisor in the late 1960s and it is perhaps Huntington’s legacy—situated within a broader context of mainstream American social science enquiry—that pervades the argument of the book more than anyone else’s. As Migdal himself confesses, there are many shared notions throughout modernisation theory and development studies that ‘continue to sway, even today, interpretations of how change occurs’ throughout the post-colonial world (196) so that ‘important connections to past assumptions do survive’ (224). It is this legacy of political development theory that permeates the state-in-society approach developed by Migdal, which then shapes specific representations of the post-colonial world.

For Migdal, states and societies are in a recursive relationship of mutual engagement, constitution and transformation. The state-in-society approach assumes a conflictual environment within which a mélange of social organisations (families, clans, multinational organisations, domestic businesses, tribes, political parties, patron-client dyads) struggle for personal survival and vie for power. The state is imbricated in this struggle and competes to maintain social control and create the conditions for domination. Hence ‘state leaders need a set of strong state agencies to be able to make their own strategy of survival acceptable to the peasants and labourers of the Third World’ (68). An environment of conflict is therefore the overriding context within which the capabilities of states must be enhanced whilst interacting at the same time in a world social system consisting of other states, large corporations, international organisations and transnational actors. ‘The state’, it is argued, ‘is a field of power marked by the use and threat of violence and shaped by (1) the image of a coherent, controlling organisation in a territory, which is a representation of the people bounded by that territory, and (2) the actual practices of its multiple parts’ (15-16). The state, then, is conceptually redeemed by disaggregating its various ‘parts’ and studying these parts in relation to the societal arena that can ‘sap the state’s strength and eventually topple it’ (50). What we are left with is a supposedly more nuanced understanding of what constitutes ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ states by analysing the mutually constitute relationship between state and society (148).

There are several problems with this state theorising. Primarily, the state itself is regarded as a discrete institutional category, a reified thing, which still exists in a relationship of exteriority to society. State and society are taken as two separate, albeit mutually interacting, entities which results in their juxtaposition and obscures their complex character. Most significantly, the inner connection between state (politics) and society (economics) is rent asunder by such state theorising. This means that the apparent separation of the economic and political cannot be problematised or, most crucially, related to an understanding of capitalism. Put most strongly, there is a failure to conceive the state as a form of capitalist social relations, as an aspect of the social relations of production, predicated upon the reproduction of antagonisms and exploitation. The transformation of social practices and identities involved in the changing nature of sovereignty, including class (-relevant) struggle, thus becomes dissolved within a liberal pluralist competitive arena.

This not only leads to the counterpoising of state and society but also vague assertions about ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ states. The latter are deemed ‘grossly inefficient states’ because of a failure to supply security, as evidenced in the existence of crime, or due to an inability to deliver on material bargains, for example to sections of the military or bureaucracy (157). Institutional decay or breakdown distinguish these ‘failed states’ and can include ‘flimsy reeds’ (Somalia, Liberia, Afghanistan), a ‘gaggle of new states’ (Croatia, Eritrea), or ‘state wannabees’ (Palestine) (233). Besides the dubious representation of post-colonial states as ‘failed states’, there is also very little engagement with more recent state theorising across the fields of political science, historical sociology, international relations and international political economy. Discussion commonly revolves around the rather outdated debates of the 1970s and 1980s on ‘bureaucratic-authoritarianism’ and ‘state corporatism’. There is thus little attempt to update Migdal’s earlier contentions in Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (1988) in light of more recent discussion on the imported state (Bertrand Badie); on warlord politics, the state and disorder in Africa (Jean-François Bayart, William Reno, Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascol Daloz); on sovereignty as a social construct (Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber); or on state formation, elite power and subaltern resistance in the Americas (Florencia Mallon).

To summarise, there is a persistence within State in Society to counterpoise ‘state’ and ‘society’ in the representation of post-colonial states that has clear links to a period of political development theory during the Cold War. Perhaps the quintessential formulation of such interaction was Huntington’s Political Order and Changing Societies (1968). As Migdal admits, ‘no work surpassed Huntington’s in its influence on a generation of comparative political scientists studying the state’ (249). The logic of political development theory and theorists, enamoured with maintaining quiescent subjects in situations of social order and political control, still persists. The contribution of this book should be situated within the refurbishment of Cold War mental structures and thus the institutional furtherance of an American mainstream social science disciplining of state theorising.