Paper short abstract:

Political anthropological studies of the "postcolonial" State fail to challenge Eurocentric comparative perspectives that obscure links and processes of global domination. Understanding the State from its "margins" can be more fruitful only if such margins are not located exclusively in the "South".

Paper long abstract:

Latin American, Asian, and African countries are often lumped together as "postcolonial". Some analyses classify these "new" nations as "weak" or even "failed" in accordance with their distance from the liberal democratic baseline. Such comparative perspectives are not entirely challenged by anthropological analyses that "disaggregate" the State into the multitude of practices and representations in which it appears in everyday life. This useful procedure is seldom directed to countries like the US or the UK, as supposedly strong and developed states. Moreover, the concomitant critique of the "legacy of colonialism" may obscure contemporary processes of global domination and local strategies of resistance to such domination. Framing States in transnational dynamics may thus be more fruitful than dichotomizing between North and South. A focus on the translocality of the national State also casts new light on the notion of "its margins". Taking such margins as the rule rather than the exception, we can go beyond an emphasis on local appropriations of modern liberal rationalities to understand how the State is actually produced in the multiple spaces where political action occurs. Deemed marginal with respect to the hegemonic centres of intellectual production, anthropologists from "peripheral" countries have nonetheless a central role to play in this respect: they conceptualize the "State" which affects them and which they construct through dialogues with subjects who are also fellow citizens.