From the Editors: What Is the State For?

This note introduces our Spring 2024 issue.

War is raging in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan. Democracy is under attack. And this year will likely be the warmest on record, with devastating human consequences. Everywhere we face the failures of the modern state system to prevent catastrophe.

Leading our forum, Olúfémi O. Táíwò identifies “fossil capital”—the power and resources of the fossil fuel industry—as the principal obstacle to a more just world. The problem is not only that we are dependent on fossil fuels, but that carbon has captured the state. Despite that capture, Táíwò argues, we need a “two-step” political strategy that starts with the state. And this argument sets the stage for the wide-ranging reflections in this issue: What is the role of the state in a more just future? Should social movements work inside or outside the state? What would a just state look like, and how can we get there?

Forum respondents explore the merits of Táíwò’s state-centric proposal. Ishac Diwan and Bright Simons offer a realistic model for prodding states to cooperate. Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie warn that power always reproduces hierarchies. Gianpaolo Baiocchi draws lessons from Latin America’s Pink Tide. As many responses stress, winning elections is not enough. Change will require action and organizing at multiple scales.

Elsewhere in the issue, Leila Farsakh examines the history and fate of the movement for Palestinian statehood. Reporting from the Sudans, Joshua Craze upends the conventional view of militias as threats to state rule. Essays by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix (“For a  Solidarity State”) and Janice Fine and Hana Shepherd (“Three Cheers for the Administrative State”) offer a vision for a just state and a model for putting it into practice. And Bonnie Tenneriello documents a failure of state reform, following hard-won legislation to end solitary confinement that has done no such thing.

Plus, Richard Pithouse talks with S’bu Zikode, leader of South Africa’s shack dwellers’ movement, about why he’ll never run for political office. Jonathan S. Blake reviews recent books by Philip Pettit, Charles S. Maier, and Natasha Wheatley. And Peter E. Gordon traces the rise and fall of theory’s engagement with “real questions of suffering and social transformation.”

Answering those questions is our task today. As Baiocchi concludes, “We will need to rethink what it means to engage institutions—abolishing, reforming, and reinventing them in ways that express our creativity, empower communities to decide on matters that affect them, balance inside and outside strategies, and activate popular politics.”