Advancing the Study of State Infrastructural Power
The contributions of this special issue are not just a demonstration of the usefulness of Mann’s concept across a variety of substantive areas. By unpacking state infrastructural power and drawing its conceptual boundaries, the articles assembled here also raise broader issues that speak to central puzzles and debates in the study of the state.
First, the articles’ focus on the precise conceptualization and measurement of state infrastructural power has major ramifications for the study of democracy. Many works in the political regime literature define and operationalize democracy by including the effectiveness of government as a key conceptual dimension (e.g., Huntington 1968; Inglehart and Welzel 2005; Putnam et al. 1993).
Yet, as illustrated in Ziblatt’s essay on the varying effectiveness of German city governments to provide public healthcare facilities, the capacity to implement political decisions is an attribute of political authority, and not a regime quality.
Drawing a clear distinction between state infrastructural power and government accountability helps researchers to disentangle the complex causal relationship between regime type and state infrastructural power and suggests the analytical utility of a more minimal definition of democracy.
For example, works by James Holston and Teresa Caldeira (1998) on disjunctive democracy in Brazil or Steven Levitsky and Maria Victoria Murillo (2006) on the institutional weakness of democracy in Argentina have shown that the state’s ability to exercise effective control and implement policy may strengthen democracy, while the lack of infrastructural power is likely to create obstacles to the stability and inclusiveness of democratic institutions.
In this special issue, Dan Slater’s essay suggests that the causal arrow can be reversed, and that regime factors can influence the development of state infrastructural power. His comparative study of democratization in Southeast Asia shows that competitive high-stakes national elections in a context of robust mass political mobilization can lead to an increase in the power of the state.
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Distinguishing carefully between regimes and states allows scholars to explore the relationship between them, and Mann’s conceptual approach to state–society relations provide a particularly apt framework for this purpose.
By putting the concept of infrastructural power to work, this special issue also allows us to highlight two concepts that Mann’s framework fails to sufficiently distinguish: spatial and social control. In his original definition,
Mann emphasized the inherently territorial nature of state infrastructural power, focusing on the capacity of state institutions to radiate outwards from the centre and exercise control. As such, Mann ultimately does not clarify whether he refers to control over territory or control over social relations.
Yet, as Schensul’s article shows, the distinction between the spatial and the social is crucial. Even the presence of “logistical techniques” such as schools or police officers in the most remote areas may not guarantee control over society.
Schensul’s study of post-apartheid Durban argues that the preexisting public infrastructure in fact undermined the capacity of the city government to foster racial integration, whereas previously stateless territories were those most easily transformed.
If we follow Mann’s (1986) approach and think of society as constituted of multiple, overlapping social networks (pp. 1–3, 13–17), social control needs to be treated as analytically distinct from spatial control.
As recent examples from the immigration and the nationalism literatures illustrate, states may employ infrastructural power to exercise control over national minorities situated outside their territorial boundaries (Brubaker 1996; Fitzgerald 2008).
The actual exercise of state infrastructural power may not only vary across territory, but also across social categories of membership and exclusion, such as the distinctions between citizens and foreigners, men and women, or fully included “nationals” and racial minorities (Marshall 1963; Winant 2001; Wimmer 2002).
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Similarly, spatial and social control do not automatically translate into the state’s ability to implement policy, highlighting a tension within Mann’s very definition of state infrastructural power.
Vom Hau’s study of state infrastructural power and nationalism shows that even though in mid-twentieth-century Argentina the state marshalled comparatively higher levels of state infrastructural power than the Mexican state during the same period, the former did not manage to institutionalize a new national ideology as a hegemonic frame of reference.
The improved technologies of control, such as tax revenues, schools, police officers, and roads available to the Argentinean state, did not translate into an enhanced capability to implement its goals.
Thus, the ability of a state to penetrate its territories needs to be analytically distinguished from the ability to implement decisions and put policy to work, and the geographic pattern of effective power will vary by objective.
The contributions to this special issue also help to differentiate between state infrastructural power and public good provision. Mann’s original conceptualization of state infrastructural power as the capacity to implement decisions blurs the line between control and provision by including a wide range of policy implementation under the rubric of state infrastructural power.
Again, this is an important conceptual distinction to draw. Infrastructurally powerful states may or may not employ their capacities to engage in the creation of public goods.
As emphasized by Ziblatt’s essay in this collection, a public good is one possible policy output sought by state elites. Likewise, public good provision is shaped by a variety of complex causal factors, among them the motivations of social and political actors and the implementation capabilities of state organizations.
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Moreover, there is no assurance that state elites actually exercise the infrastructural power at their disposal, even if the resources and technologies of control are in place. Therefore, we must empirically distinguish between the resources constitutive of infrastructural power and the actual use of those resources.
It also remains an open question whether the goals that underpin state action shape the effects of state infrastructural power. Lange and Balian’s study of the effects of state infrastructural power on civil violence suggests that it does.
Their case study of Botswana indicates that when state elites used roads, police officers, and schools with the explicit aim of fostering national development, the containment of civil violence was a more likely outcome. By contrast, the case study of Burma shows that when state infrastructural power was employed with the stated goal of suppressing ethnic minorities, it had conflict-instigating effects. Thus, state infrastructural power is neither good nor bad, yet the goals for which infrastructural power is used may affect how it is deployed and the actual outcomes it generates.
Harms
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In 2018, harm reduction faces both major challenges and clear opportunities. While the biannual Harm Reduction Conference in the US, held this year in New Orleans, saw its largest number of attendees over – over 2,000, according to its organisers – the toll of overdose death remained relentless.
Various forms of illicitly manufactured fentanyl are now the leading cause of overdose death in North America– a distressing statistic, especially for a form of drug that barely had any presence in the US and Canadian markets until the last four years. The harm reduction movement itself is thriving this year also saw Canada’s well-attended Stimulus Harm
Reduction Conference in Edmonton. In both the Us and Canada, there is clear movement towards expanding needle and syringe exchange services, naloxone availability and, in the US, creating safe injection facilities (SIFs). Politically, while strong opposition remains – especially in the American South – the media, parents’ organisations, most recovery advocates and even many politicians have finally recognised that harm reduction is essential to save lives.
The rise of illicit fentanyl’s themselves is just about the clearest case one can make for harm reduction: despite a literally poisonous supply, millions of people are still taking street opioids in an underground market that lacks quality control.
It’s hard to argue that anything short of providing a safer supply – both through traditional medications like methadone and buprenorphine and via prescription heroin, hydromorphone (Deluded) and perhaps others – will be able to end the crisis, if done to scale. Indeed, while harm reduction itself and its ideas are strong, many people in the field are struggling in the face of so much death and so little access to the best tools to save lives.
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Asia has made strides in increasing the availability of harm reduction services such as needle and syringe programmes (NSPs) and opioid substitution therapy (OST), as well as access to treatment for HIV and viral hepatitis. Significant progress has also been made in understanding the nuances of how people across Asia in different contexts experience psychoactive substances.
Where harm reduction services are available, access and retention rates in programmes remain low, and many areas that need these services simply do not have them. Further, emerging trends in drug use, and a better understanding of the needs of different populations who use drugs, means that new initiatives are required.
The region is witnessing an increase in amphetamine-type stimulant (ATS) use without an increase in harm reduction for these people. Services for ATS that are founded in the same harm reduction principles that allowed us to respond effectively to opiate and injecting drug use need to be developed and provided.
There is also greater recognition of the need for gender-sensitive and gender-responsive harm reduction services. Women have experiences with drug use and the drug trade that differ from men’s.
Especially, but not limited to, societies where women are idealistically painted as nurturing or pure, their involvement with drugs expose them to a greater degree of vulnerability to physical and sexual violence, exploitation and stigmatisation. In the criminal justice system alone, while women make up a smaller percentage of the prison population compared to men, they are the fastest growing group of prisoners.
The enforcement of harsh drug policies is exacerbating this problem. The steps required to develop harm reduction honest and pragmatic information; create programmes and responses around their needs, rather than imposing unrealistic goals; and ensure their meaningful involvement throughout the process.
Asia’s progress in harm reduction will continue to be undercut if we don’t address a prevailing and growing culture in many Asian countries, one that still believes in punishment as the most effective way to deal with any behaviour it deems deviant. Responses to drug-related issues continue to be couched in a repressively punitive social and policy environment.
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Thus, state infrastructural power, at its core, is about the capacity to exercise control. While some public goods, such as security, provide precisely this kind of capacity, others, such as public sewers, might not.
Another important realm where this special issue moves beyond Mann’s original work is legitimacy. Even though Mann builds extensively on the Weberian definition of the state, he does not further develop the legitimation of authority in his conceptualization of state infrastructural power.
While it is certainly important to conceptually distinguish between state infrastructural power and legitimacy, the precise relationship between the two merits more attention. Supporting beliefs that represent state organizations as bearers of legitimate authority facilitate the actual exercise of state infrastructural power.
Analogously, state infrastructural power contributes to the construction of legitimacy, which can be further subdivided into two complementary but analytically distinct forms, identity legitimacy and output legitimacy.
Vom Hau’s essay emphasizes the former, suggesting that infrastructurally more powerful states may exhibit the organizational machinery and the territorial reach to instil a sense of belonging
among their citizenries. Likewise, the everyday presence of state organizations may engender beliefs in the taken-for-granted-ness of state authority
By contrast, Ziblatt’s study of public good provision reflects an output perspective on legitimacy. In this view, infrastructurally powerful states may be better able to provide certain basic services and goods, which in turn enhance the legitimacy of state organizations among the citizenries.
Finally, this special issue also points to the complicated relationship between state infrastructural power and state action. The concept does not capture the goals the coercive, extractive, and regulatory capabilities of state organizations are used for. State infrastructural power has been employed for engendering greater well-being, as well as for committing some of the worst atrocities in human history.
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Overall, the contributions to this special issue illustrate new and valuable ways of putting the conceptual framework of state infrastructural power to work. Covering topics as diverse as democratization, civic violence, race relations, nationalism, and social development, the articles assembled here carefully unpack state infrastructural power for investigating the strength of the state. Jointly.
These articles also advance beyond Mann’s initial conceptualization to address distinctions between state infrastructural power and public good provision; between spatial and social control; between control and policy implementation; and the relationships between state infrastructural power and the goals of state elites, legitimacy, and democracy.
The articles, in their substantive analyses of a wide range of geographic contexts and aspects of social science, thus illuminate the fruitfulness of state infrastructural power for the precise and nuanced study of the state
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Naloxone, SIFs, syringe programmes and current medication treatments are all necessary – but far from sufficient. Progress towards racial and economic justice also remains too slow. The death of harm reduction giant Dan Bigg, the man who brought naloxone out of the hospital and into the street, has been painful – as has the loss of so many other loved ones.
Many harm reductionists are now traumatised by so much rapid loss. In light of this situation in which real political progress has been made – but not quickly enough and always, in the US, facing a potential backlash from the Trump administration – we need to take good care of each other. Harm reduction doesn’t just apply to the people who use drugs that people in the field work with – it applies to all of us.
We need to bring the compassion and kindness and non-judgmental support we want for people who use drugs to ourselves, too. Harm reduction has gone from an idea shared by hundreds in the late 1980s and 1990s to an international movement of thousands or more.
The power of the idea that drug policy should focus on reducing harm rather than use remains unparalleled: more and more people recognise both the racism and the futility of the war on
certain drugs and those who take them. More and more people are asking, “If drugs are really a public health issue, why are we still locking people up to try to solve it?”
More are questioning the morality of “sending a message” by allowing people who take drugs to die preventable deaths. Harm reduction works. This is no longer up forebitten evidence for harm reduction has only grown stronger over the years. Initiatives that emanate from harm reduction framework – that prioritise health and welfare, guarantee human rights, and promote social justice – save lives. But only when people are able to access them. In the past few decades,
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The call for drug-free societies grows louder, and with it, the dehumanisation of people who use drugs. In the Philippines alone, where the current president has famously called for an all-out “war on drugs”, the past two years has seen thousands of people killed and tens of thousands more deprived of liberty. Support for such zero-tolerance rhetoric has spread, with neighbouring countries adopting similar approaches.
Compounded with diminishing funding for harm reduction in the region, these punitive environments risk us backsliding from the progress we have worked so hard for. Yet, there are pockets of hope. Communities who recognise the negative consequences of dehumanising drug policies.
People who are seeking better solutions but are unable to find or understand them. People who are unable to reconcile which policies and services work with what they have been taught is good and bad. The challenge falls on those of us pushing for progress and human rights to extend our reach and communicate to those outside the drug policy and harm reduction bubble.
We must empower people to respond based on compassion and evidence instead of misguided idealism. It is imperative for us to keep developing and delivering services and programmes that are responsive to the needs of people who use drugs, and to shift the prevailing mindset in many of our countries where they must thrive.
For young advocacy groups (like the one I am involved with) that must navigate such extreme social and political conditions, the Global State of Harm Reduction anchors us in a global context and builds foundation for the much-needed evidence and perspective to do our work.
Harm reduction reminds us that a deep respect for the value and dignity of each person drives all our actions. For decades, thousands of lives have been ruined in pursuit of an unrealistic drug-free goal. Weare at a pivotal stage for drug policy in the region, and it falls on us to steer it in the right direction.