speciWc narrative, rhetorical, or argumentative features of state power. Thus case
studies of policy making suggest that state policies do not objectively represent the
interests located in or beyond the state or objectively reXect ‘‘real’’ problems in the
internal or external environments of the political system. Policies are discursively-
mediated, if not wholly discursively-constituted, products of struggles to deWne
and narrate ‘‘problems’’ which can be dealt with in and through state action. The
impact of policy-making and implementation is therefore closely tied to their
rhetorical and argumentative framing. Indeed, whatever the precise origins of the
diVerent components of the modern state (such as the army, bureaucracy, taxation,
legal system, legislative assemblies), their organization as a relatively coherent
institutional ensemble depends crucially on the emergence of the state idea.
Such discourse-theoretical work clearly diVers from state-centered theorizing
and Foucauldian analyses. On the one hand, it rejects the reiWcation of the state;
and, on the other, it highlights the critical role of narrative and rhetorical practices
in creating belief in the existence of the state. This role is variously deWned as
mystiWcation, self-motivation, pure narrativity, or self-description but, regardless
of standpoint, discourses about the state have a key constitutive role in shaping the
state as a complex ensemble of political relations linked to society as a whole.
8 The ‘‘Strategic-relational
Approach’’
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
An innovative approach to the state and state-building has been developed by Jessop
and others in an attempt to overcome various forms of one-sidedness in the Marxist
and state-centered traditions. His ‘‘strategic-relational approach’’ oVers a general
account of the dialectic of structure and agency and, in the case of the state, elaborates
Poulantzas’s claim that the state is a social relation (see above). Jessop argues that the
exercise and eVectiveness of state power is a contingent product of a changing
balance of political forces located within and beyond the state and that this balance
is conditioned by the speciWc institutional structures and procedures of the state
apparatus as embedded in the wider political system and environing societal rela-
tions. Thus a strategic-relational analysis would examine how a given state apparatus
may privilege some actors, some identities, some strategies, some spatial and tem-
poral horizons, and some actions over others; and the ways, if any, in which political
actors (individual and/or collective) take account of this diVerential privileging by
engaging in ‘‘strategic-context’’ analysis when choosing a course of action. The SRA
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