A timely collection on contemporary relationships between the state and society, which uses case studies beyond the heartland of political theory to consider state control under challenge or in transition.

Introduction – Crises of power and the state in global realities Bruce Kapferer; Chapter 1 – Challenges to the European state: the deep play of finance, demos and ethnos in the new old Europe Don Kalb; Chapter 2 – State formation, territorialization and the challenge of movement Hege Toje; Chapter 3 – The state? What state?: state, confessionalism and civil society in Lebanon Anh Nga Longva; Chapter 4 – `Yogya Inc.’: transformed kingship in decentralizing Indonesia Eldar Braten; Chapter 5 – Resistance as a problem: an ethnic minority and the state in twenty-first century Indonesia Olaf H. Smedal; Chapter 6 – Sovereignties in the making: reflections on state and society in the Sudan Leif Manger; Chapter 7 – Pastoralists at war with the state: historical armed violence in the shadow state of north-eastern Uganda Eria Olowo Onyango; Chapter 8 – Buddhist cosmological forms and the situation of total terror in Sri Lanka’s ethnic civil war Bruce Kapferer and Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne; Chapter 9 – Inside and outside the state in Italy and Botswana: historical and comparative reflections on state apparatuses of capture and rhizomic forces Ornulf Gulbrandsen; Chapter 10 – Arts for the people: public support and private patronage Judith Kapferer; Chapter 11 – Repressive ententes, organized crime and the corporate state Donald M. Nonini; Afterword: notes on crisis and transformation of political orders in the global arena Jonathan Friedman; Notes on the contributors.