Boundaries and Belonging: States and Societies in the Struggle to Shape Identities and Local Practices

This interdisciplinary volume maintains the importance of a spatial understanding of society and history, but suggests a way of conceiving of borders and space that goes beyond a school map of states. Its subject is the struggle among differing spatial logics, or mental maps. It is concerned with the meaning that state borders hold for people, but recognizes that such meaning varies and is contested by other social formations. To what degree do state borders encase the mechanisms that make the decisive rules governing people's lives and to what extent do they give way to other rulemakers? To what extent do states circumscribe the communities to which people feel attached and to what extent do they intersect with other communities of belonging? These essays home in on the struggles and conflicting demands on people, given that state borders are not automatically pre-eminent and that other spatial logics demand attention.

Table of Contents:
List of contributors; Preface and Acknowledgements; Part I. Introduction: 1. Mental maps and virtual checkpoints: struggles to construct and maintain State and social boundaries Joel S. Migdal; Part II. On the Eve of the Nation-State: The Ottoman Empire: 2. Do states always favor stasis? Changing status of tribes in the Ottoman empire Resart Kasaba; 3. The preamble boundaries of Ottoman jewry Sarah Abrevya Stein; Part III. The State and 'Dangerous Populations': 4. 'Dangerous populations': state territoriality and the constitution of national minorities Adriana Kemp; 5. Making Myanmars: language, territory, and belonging in post-socialist Burma Mary Callahan; 6. Institutionalizing virtual Kurdistan West: pro-Kurdish politics in Western Europe Nicole Watts; Part IV. Inscribing Membership and Contesting Membership in the Nation: 7. Challenging boundaries and belongings: 'mixed blood' allotment disputes at the turn of the twentieth century Lauren Basson; 8. Belonging and not: civil boundaries in Rossland, BC during the Great War Kenneth Lawson; 9. Boundaries and belonging in conditions of extreme politicization: the Chinese state in private and public spaces, 1949–1968 Neil Diamant; 10. Reproductions and maintenance of group boundaries: Why the 'secular' Wtate matters to religious authorities in Israel Patricia Woods; Part V. Beyond the State: Transnational Forces and the Challenge to the State: 11. Belonging in the PACE lane: fast border-crossing and citizenship in the age of neoliberalism Matthew Sparke; 12. Contested boundaries: citizens, states, and the supranational belonging in the European Union Lisa Conant; 13. Boundaries of the nation-state and the lure of the Islamic community in Turkey Yesim Arat; Part VI. Conclusion: Conclusion Beatrice Hibou; Index.

Review :
From the hardback review: '... these well-written, interesting chapters form a useful addition to the study of political identities.' Political Studies Review From the hardback review: '... this is an excellent book providing the necessary detail on which the development of viable theory on the role of the state in creating identities and senses of belonging depends.' Progress in Human Geography From the hardback review: 'The major strength of the book is that it raises questions which are not viewed as fashionable in the dominant tradition of social enquiry, and it provides new conceptual tools for their imaginative interpretation. Although this book would generate interest among students of potical society in general, scholars of comparative politics and sociology will find it indispensable and deeply innovative in its inquiry.' Development and Change