State Power, Global Power

Adaptation and the state: Latin America and the challenge of capacity-building under globalization

“…Yet, in practice, the role of these relationships in enhancing the adaptive capacities of the nation-state and particular vulnerable populations may be limited since it is unlikely that new institutions (such as markets and NGOs) will be accountable for the politically costly redistributive policies needed to increase adaptive capacity to the most vulnerable. 6 Hence, it is increasingly clear that the usefulness and relevance of the state is far from over (Jessop, 2002;Aronowitz and Bratsis, 2002;Newell, 2002;Painter and Pierre, 2005). The state is not only an important actor in governance mechanisms at the local and global level but also a ''de facto'' distributor of resources, signatory of international accords, policymaker, and locus for political mobilization and constraints.…”

Politics of the Corporation

“…We find that both on the national and on the international level the lack of a coherent framework to understand the power of the corporate form has direct implications for the concept of state. Some have argued that the development of the TNC and the wider context of globalization subvert ‘… the very concept of citizenship’ and support ‘the partial or complete displacement of the old regulatory institutions and the sovereignty of the nation‐state’ (Aronowitz and Bratsis, , p. xv). However, such arguments about the growing irrelevancy of states have been widely criticized in political theory.…”

“…The corporate form comes with peculiar qualities, which have captured the imagination of political scholars (Bowman, ). It is recognized as a dominant economic concept (Aronowitz and Bratsis, , p. 14; Buxbaum, ) which has transformed the US economy into an oligopolistic economic system (Chandler, ) by allowing for ‘extraordinary – and potentially eternal – concentrations of capital and people under one command’ (Robé, , p. 53). The capacity to exercise concentrated power with regard to the individuals under its jurisdiction (Buxbaum, , pp.…”

“…On the basis of this history, I will argue that contemporary concerns of a democratic deficit (Scherer and Palazzo, , pp. 917–918) and the debate with regard to ‘demise of the state’ (Aronowitz and Bratsis, ) should not be understood as spatial, territorial or geographical issues (Brenner, ; Swyngedouw, ), but rather as the results of shifts in the relative position of the corporate form and the state, which result in the repression of the sovereign prerogative to grant and control constructs with legal, economic and political agency in the (inter‐)national domain.…”

Networks and globalization policies

“…Nor do histories of how such arrangements are appropriated by the state tell the whole story of globalization processes and their effects. A deterministic role of the hegemonic state has been highly contested and varieties of pluralistic theory articulated concerning interventions of middle classes, workers, the poor and others in issues of exchange in the industrial era (Aronowitz and Bratsis, 2002;Tilly, 1996).…”