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 cen-tury 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 un-stoppable march towards homogeneous polities desirable or im-moral. 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

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