Can we domesticate the state or will it domesticate us? — James C. Scott

In Pursuit of Development

With many path-breaking books, James C. Scott has for long been a key figure in Southeast Asian Studies and in the comparative study of agrarian societies, peasant politics and resistance studies. His hugely influential scholarship crosses disciplines, shaping political science, anthropology, and history.

In this conversation, we focus on a selection of Prof. Scott's books, including Seeing Like a State, which is a magisterial critique of top-down social planning, The Art of Not Being Governed, which highlights the crucial functions of “places of refuge from the state”, and his latest, Against the Grain – which provides a deep history of the earliest states. He is currently writing a new book on the Irrawaddy River – in which he argues that engineering and damming show how humans work, violate Nature’s traffic and how humans shape land.

James C. Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and professor of anthropology at Yale University where he also co-directs the Agrarian Studies Program. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations, and anarchism. He is the recipient of the 2020 Albert O. Hirschman Prize, the Social Science Research Council’s highest honour, in recognition of his wide-ranging and influential scholarship.

Jim encourages you to support the fight for democracy in Myanmar by donating to www.mutualaidmyanmar.org

Host

Professor Dan Banik (@danbanik @GlobalDevPod)

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