Description: The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research on them has proliferated and diversified. Yet, too many scholars inhabit separate academic silos, and theorizing of states has become dispersed and disjointed. This book aims to bridge some of the many gaps between scholarly endeavors, bringing together scholars from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives who study states and empires. The book offers not only a sample of cutting-edge research that can serve as models and directions for future work, but an original conceptualization and theorization of states, their origins and evolution, and their effects.
Brief description: Kimberly J. Morgan is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, Washington DC. She received her PhD in political science from Princeton University, New Jersey and has been a fellow at New York University's Institute of French Studies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Scholars in Health Policy Research program at Yale University, Connecticut, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Dr Morgan is the author of two books, Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and the Politics of Work-Family Policy in Western Europe and the United States(2006) and The Delegated Welfare State: Medicare, Markets, and the Governance of Social Policy (with Andrea Louise Campbell, 2011), and is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of US Social Policy (2014).
Review Quotes: Advance praise: 'This cornucopia offers fresh vantages, understanding, and instruction about the modern state and how it might best be studied. Grounded in an appreciative and critical appraisal of recent scholarship, its imaginative essays direct fresh considerations and deepen our analytical tool kit.' Ira I. Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University