This Handbook offers a comprehensive treatment of transformations of the state, from its origins in different parts of the world and different time periods to its transformations since World War II in the advanced industrial countries, the post-Communist world, and the Global South.

Leading experts in their fields, from Europe and North America, discuss conceptualizations and theories of the state and the transformations of the state in its engagement with a changing international environment as well as with changing domestic economic, social, and political challenges. The Handbook covers different types of states in the Global South (from failed to predatory, rentier and developmental), in different kinds of advanced industrial political economies (corporatist, statist, liberal, import substitution industrialization), and in various post-Communist countries (Russia, China, successor states to the USSR, and Eastern Europe). It also addresses crucial challenges in different areas of state intervention, from security to financial regulation, migration, welfare states, democratization and quality of democracy, ethno-nationalism, and human development.

The volume makes a compelling case that far from losing its relevance in the face of globalization, the state remains a key actor in all areas of social and economic life, changing its areas of intervention, its modes of operation, and its structures in adaption to new international and domestic challenges.

This magnificent collection takes stock of what modern social science tells us about state transformations in a variety of periods, locales and levels. The editors have succeeded in the hardest of tasks, providing a robust framework that guides the essays of leading scholars. This Handbook is both a long-awaited, indispensable compendium and an enduring testimony to exceptional scholarship.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Transformations of the State
Changing Perspectives on the State
Varieties of State Experience
The Layered State: Pathways and Patterns of Modern Nation-State Building
The Emergence of the New World States
State Formation and Transformation in Africa and Asia: The Third Phase of State Expansion
State Theory: Four Analytical Traditions
Limited Statehood: A Critical Perpective
State Transformations in Comparative Perspective
Internationalization and the State: Sovereignty as the External Side of Modern Statehood
Sovereign (In)Equality in the Evolution of the International System
The Competition State: The Modern State in a Global Economy
The Embedded State: The New Division of Labor in the Provision of Governance Functions
Multilevel Governance and the State
Beyond the State? Are Transnational Regulatory Institutions Replacing the State?
Security, Intervention, and the Responsibility to Protect: Transforming the State by Reinterpreting Sovereignty
Ambiguous Transformations: The 2007-08 International Financial Crisis and Changing Economic Roles of the State
Environmental Risks and the Changing Interface of Domestic and International Governance
State Transformations Among the Affluent Democracies
The Transformations of the Statist Model
From Industrial Corporatism to the Social Investment State
The Changing Role of the State in Liberal Market Economies
ISI States Reverse Course: From Import Substitution to Open Economy
Welfare State Transformation: Convergence and the Rise of the Supply-Side Model
The State and Gender Equality: From Patriarchal to Women Friendly State?
From the Positive to the Regulatory State: A Transformation in the Machinery of Governance?
Migration and the Porous Boundaries of Democratic States
Plurinational States
The Changing Architecture of the National Security State
Transformations of the Democratic State
The Peculiarities of Post-Communist State Development: Institutional Consolidation and Elite Competition
The Transformation of the State in Eastern Europe
Resources as Constraints? Natural Resource Wealth and the Possibility of Developmental States in the Former Soviet Union
The Transformation of the Russian State
China: Economic Liberalization, Adaptive Informal Institutions, and Party-State Resilience
States in the Global South: Transformations, Trends, and Diversity
Human Development, State Transformation and the Politics of the Developmental State
Rentier States and State Transformations
Predatory States and State Transformation
State Failure and State Transformation
Ethnicity and State Transformation in the Global South
Democratization
Emerging Welfare States in Latin America and East Asia
Conclusion: States Transforming