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Must every state be a nation and every nation a state? Or should we look instead to the example of countries such as India, where one state holds together a congeries of "national" groups and cultures in a single and wisely conceived federal republic?

The bulk of scholarly literature views nationalism as harmful to democratic transition. Yet Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan indirectly suggest that nationalism may benefit democratization. This study shows that under the right conditions nationalism can benef

this change at the top level arose from years of steady electoral growth (notably, in Brazil and Uruguay), while in other countries it was the fruit of social movements capable of overthrowing neoliberal parties and governments (Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuel

Current approaches to democratic state building place serious conceptual limits on policy options. A democratic future for Bosnia's people will require far more searching engagement with identity formation and its politicization than reform efforts have s

A number of scholars have recently claimed that 'stateness' is a prerequisite for democracy. However, a large-N empirical appraisal of this new research agenda is still pending. In this article, we demonstrate that stateness - conceptualized using the twin attributes of the monopoly on the use of force within a sovereign territory and a basic agreement about citizenship - is to a large extent a necessary condition for the four democratic attributes of electoral rights, political liberties, the rule of law, and social rights. However, the analyses also show that stateness is especially critical for the latter two attributes whereas the former two are sometimes encountered in its absence. These results are robust and they fit well into the dominant writings on democratization, which emphasize that in the present 'liberal hegemony' democratic elections are often grafted onto weak states - but that the rule of law and social rights are much more intimately wedded to structural constraints such as stateness.

Systems of governance are legitimised as an almost indispensable response to global co-ordination over matters of environmental degradation. Considering sustainable development as the key label for 'common-sense' political approaches to environmental degradation and a key informant for international environmental policy-making activity, this article seeks to problematise such a widespread discourse as (re)productive of (hetero)sexist power relations. As such, this article, informed by Foucault's conceptions of governmentality and biopower, contends that the global thrust towards sustainable development projects works to construct identities and discipline power relations with regard to gender and sexuality. Specifically, I argue that the disciplinary narratives and apparatuses of international sustainable development initiatives work to construct gendered identities and naturalise heterosexual relations. To demonstrate this, this article focuses on the discourses surrounding one of the most important international documents directed at informing national environmental policy, Agenda 21.

Looking at the formation of transnational advocacy networks, this article argues that central aspects evade attention unless approached from a discursive orientation. Utilizing interviews and first-person observation from a particular example of transnational mobilization-critical of negotiations to expand the World Trade Organization's General Agreement on Trade-in-Services-the article demonstrates how an expanded focus on discourse can help research better understand: (1) the self-driving momentum within networks through which those actors involved experience a reconstituted identity and affinity to one another; (2) the role played by earlier moments of collective action in providing both an infrastructure of pre-existing relations and politicization from which the network may draw upon; (3) the often porous character of campaign activity where there is rarely one but, in fact, many overlapping networks at play as part of a much wider discursive process; and (4) the role abstract signifiers such as 'global'-as in 'Global Campaign for …'-play in framing the network despite an often uneven geographic distribution to campaign activity and power within the network