State/Nation Histories, Structural Inequalities and Racialised Crises

This paper draws attention to blind spots in understandings of ‘the state’ in International Political Economy. A genealogy of political centralisation that begins not with modern but the earliest (ancient) states reveals the requisites of successful state formation and how these constitute structural inequalities with enduring effects. Stark inequalities within and between nations figure in producing and exacerbating myriad problems, even global crises. I focus here on how economic inequalities are historically shaped by and today are variously reproducing racial logics that percolate through and exacerbate a global rise in xenophobia, alt-right nationalisms and anti-migrant hostilities. I trace linkages among inheritance, birthright citizenship, economic ‘gaps’ and immigration policies to reveal racial logics shaping the practices, policies and institutions of today’s global political economy. Historically, my broad-stroke survey illuminates how states–through coercion, regulation and legitimation–produce and sustain the social violence of intersecting structural inequalities, and how we are ‘blinded’ to this by normalisation of ideologies that both reproduce and mask operations of power. Methodologically, my account argues that in a state-based system, ‘economic’ inequalities are never simply that, but always (though variously and complexly) produced by and producing racialised, sexualised and geopolitically differentiated inequalities.