Rachel Strohm

There’s a new interview up at Theory Talks with Jean-François Bayart, author of the seminal work The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly.  Money quote:

Not only does neoliberal globalization not undermine the state, but more fundamentally, for two centuries, it is indeed globalization that spawned the universalization of the nation-state as a mode of political organization.  …  [For instance,] the integration of the former Soviet economies into the global capitalist system has not occurred in par with the dissolution of the Soviet space in I don’t know what kind of political and non-state no man’s land, but rather with the creation of a whole series of states which vindicate their nation-statehood, even though we know that these nations are very recent and by-products Stalinist theories of nationalities at that.

One might even go further than this and point out that not only has globalization supported the spread of the Westphalian state, but it’s also spread very specific forms of governance, such as multi-party democracy.