From the State to Others and from Others to the State? Interview with Jeanne Bouyat, Amandine Le Bellec, & Lucas Puygrenier
Jeanne Bouyat, Amandine Le Bellec, and Lucas Puygrenier recently edited a book published by Palgrave Macmillan in the Sciences Po series in International Relations and Political Economy. Entitled States and the Making of Others, the work uses a series of original case studies, rarely studied together, to examine the way in which states make Others and, ultimately, how these Others make them in return. How does this occur, and what does the concept of othering entail? The three editors answer our questions in this interview.
Lucas Puygrenier: Arguably, the social sciences have long been concerned with the dynamics of othering in political societies, particularly in relation to issues of racism, migration, poverty, gender, and sexual identities. Our book is an attempt to bridge this diverse scholarship by bringing to the fore the role of the state. Adapting Charles Tilly’s famous phrase “wars make states and states make war”, our main contention is that states make Others as Others make states: state actors and policies produce and reproduce Others through labelling them as such, while processes of othering contribute to the formation of the state and the expansion of its activities. (...)
