Editorial: Towards a Regional Political Science
Editorial: Towards a Regional Political Science
复制标题
社论:走向区域政治学
DOI:
10.1080/00343404.2012.746443
复制
发表时间:
2013
期刊:
影响因子:
4.6
通讯作者:
Jeffery C
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Jeffery C
This special issue challenges the tendency within political science to focus on the nation-state as the main unit of analysis in studying social and political life, and, in consequence, to neglect the region as a unit for political analysis. This tendency has been widespread in the social sciences and has been criticized as a ‘methodological nationalism’: social scientists all too easily reproduce unreflected,‘naturalized’assumptions that the nation-state, as MARTINS (1974, p. 276) put it in an early critique, is ‘the terminal unit and boundary condition for the demarcation of problems and phenomena for social science’. It is the ‘terminal unit’in the sense that modernization and ‘progress’ were achieved through the institutionalization of mass democracy and welfare statehood within the nation-state. It is the ‘boundary condition’because it demarcates what is held to be the most important scale at which social and political life is organized, and distinguishes between different nation-states so that comparative analysis at that scale can be carried out. To paraphrase Ulrich Beck’s comment,‘it is a nation-state outlook on society and politics, law, justice and history’that has governed the social science imagination (BECK, 2002, p. 52). Such naturalized assumptions about the nation-state have fallen under a powerful challenge (CHERNILO, 2007). Much of that challenge has come from those working on trans-nationalism: in the advocacy of a new ‘cosmopolitanism’by Beck and colleagues (BECK, 2000, 2002, 2007; BECK and SZNAIDER, 2006; BECK and GRANDE, 2007); in anthropological work on migration (for example, WIMMER and GLICK SCHIL-LER, 2002); in international relations work on globalization and European integration (for example, CERNY, 1997; SCHOLTE, 2005; EGEBERG, 2008); and (though with different terminology) in public law work on the emergence of new patterns of sovereignty that transcend the ‘nation-state’(for example, WALKER, 2008). Such work on trans-nationalism has been a powerful corrective to methodological nationalism. It has, however, had little to offer in understanding developments within the state. Indeed, in some cases the transnational critique of methodological nationalism has had the effect of compounding the neglect of substate regions as significant units of analysis by arguing that a European, or cosmopolitan, or globalized scale for the analysis of social and political life is, or should be, regarded as the most important for social science research (JEFFERY and WINCOTT, 2010, pp. 174–175). This twofold neglect of the sub-state region–through the preference of nation-state and trans-state scales of analysis–does not apply uniformly across the social sciences. Work on the region is widespread in human geography and spatial economics, driven on by a number of seminal contributions (for example, OHMAE, 1993; STORPER, 1995; AMIN and THRIFT, 1995), and captured in a terminology of a (now not so)‘new’regionalism which has launched its own factional disputes (for example, LOVERING, 1999; WREN, 2009) carried out in bespoke journals including
登录
查看更多内容
DOI:
--
发表时间:
2006
期刊:
影响因子:
--
作者:
K. Harrison
通讯作者:
K. Harrison
影响因子:
1.9
作者:
C. Jeffery;Daniel Wincott
通讯作者:
Daniel Wincott
DOI:
--
发表时间:
1998
期刊:
影响因子:
--
作者:
M. Keating
通讯作者:
M. Keating
DOI:
--
发表时间:
1996
期刊:
影响因子:
--
作者:
D. Hearl;I. Budge;Bernard Pearson
通讯作者:
Bernard Pearson
DOI:
--
发表时间:
2008
期刊:
影响因子:
--
作者:
Ossip Fürnberg;K. Schnapp
通讯作者:
K. Schnapp