Beyond States and Empires: Chiefdoms and Informal Politics

Abstract

At the very beginning of the twenty-first century, the sovereignty and near supremacy of the state are being challenged. Barely half a century ago, some scholars envisaged an inevitable or direct historical path to more consolidated and larger polities: a world government, possibly a planetary state, at the very least a concert of nation-states (Carneiro 1978; Hart 1948). Now this appears to have been a flight of fancy. Even in the face of a revolution in telecommunications and a powerful process of economic globalisation, it has become evident that there has been no linear progression in political development or centralisation. Political philosophers may find the prospect of an unstoppable march towards homogeneous polities desirable or immoral. Social scientists simply register the forces which go against it and, indeed, which may well pose dangers to the nation-state as it evolved during the last two centuries. Globalisation, the quest for democracy, as well as new processes of collective identification, have enabled people to become