Doctoral Dissertation Research: State-Making Amidst Precarity

新的民族国家，无论是非法的还是合法的，都在现代世界中不断出现。有些国家受到国际社会的欢迎，而另一些国家则仍然处于边缘地位，在那里它们可能成为重大政治和经济问题的根源。社会科学家知道，新的国家不会在一个单一的时刻出现。相反，它们是一个长期过程的结果，在这个过程中，个人走到一起，创建新的机构和集体身份和使命感。这个过程在一个国家得到承认之前很久就开始了，而且在很久之后还在继续。然而，尽管新国家对全球安全的重要性，但它们的发展，特别是独立后的发展，并没有得到很好的理解。在这项由该奖项资助的研究中，加州大学戴维斯分校的研究生克里斯蒂安·多尔在詹姆斯·H。史密斯将利用这个难得的机会，调查独立后国家形成的初始阶段。多尔将分析2011年才成立的新国家南苏丹的国家形成。他将在南苏丹首都朱巴进行为期一年的民族志研究，在那里，国家和民族认同的想法正在积极辩论和新颁布。他将采用社会科学研究方法的组合，从多个利益相关者和组织层面收集数据。他将与州规划者、监管者和社区代表进行半结构化访谈。他将在国定假日的州仪式期间采用参与者观察方法，了解南苏丹州的官方观念和南苏丹国家认同是如何形成和表现的。他还将在朱巴社区进行参与式观察，收集关于国家如何在日常互动和体验中形成和经历的数据。将特别关注土地的征用、新住房和办公室的建设、企业的经营、政府和国际组织项目的实施以及对时事的公开讨论。通过捕捉官方和地方的想法和行动，研究将提供一个必要的了解如何在当今世界上国家决策发生，社会理论家和政策制定者都需要的信息。

New nation states, both outlaw and legitimate, continue to arise in the modern world. Some are welcomed into the world community while others remain on the fringes, where they may be the source of significant political and economic concerns. Social scientists know that new states do not come about at a single moment. Rather, they are the outcome of a long process in which individual people come together to create new institutions and a collective identity and sense of purpose. The process begins long before a state receives recognition and it continues long afterward. However, despite the importance of new states for global security, exactly how they develop, particularly post-independence, is not well understood. In the research funded by this award, University of California at Davis graduate student, Christian Doll, who is supervised by Dr. James H. Smith, will take advantage of the rare opportunity provided by the recent coming into existence of a particularly precarious new state to investigate the initial stages of post-independence state-making on the ground.Doll will analyze state-making in the new nation of South Sudan, which was founded only in 2011. He will undertake a year of ethnographic research in South Sudan's capital city, Juba, where ideas of the state and of national identity are being actively debated and newly enacted. He will employ a mix of social science research methods to gather data from multiple stakeholders and organizational levels. He will conduct semi-structured interviews with state planners, regulators, and community representatives. He will employ participant observation methodologies during state ceremonies on national holidays to understand how official ideas of the South Sudanese state and South Sudanese national identity are formed and performed. He also will conduct participant observation in a Juba neighborhood to collect data on how the state is made and experienced in everyday interactions and experiences. Specific attention will be paid to contestation over land, the building of new housing and offices, the running of businesses, the implementation of government and international organization projects, and public discussions of current events. By capturing official and local ideas and actions, the research will provide a needed understanding of how state-making takes place in the world today, information needed both for social theorists and for policy makers.