Scholarship on the state has been oddly parochial, focused on the domestic and national scales to the exclusion of the international and transnational. This habit of presuming the nation-state as a bounded container is particularly entrenched in work on the state, understood in Weberian terms that are conceptually insulated from democratic practices. Democracy, in turn, is often taken as an already defined category of regime rather than a quality of political action as it plays out in state-building. By taking both democracy and the nation-state for granted, scholars leave unspecified what should be empirically explained. Even comparative analyses of welfare states, which should be more cosmopolitan, tend to reify national differences by naturalizing the comparative framework rather than by historicizing the mutual constitution of systems of social provision. During this conference, we hope to advance a transnational conversation with scholars from the U.S. and Europe to interrogate the development of the democratic state in trans-Atlantic context.
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