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Interpreting Territory and Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Mark Bevir
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Abstract

The article offers an interpretive approach to understanding Jim Bulpitt's Territory and Power in the United Kingdom. The first two parts interpret Bulpitt's text by locating it respectively in its historical and contemporaneous contexts. It argues that Territory and Power belongs in a broader movement to rethink the state in a way that accommodates the rise of new behavioural topics. Territory and Power also defends modernist empiricist approaches to institutions and other mid-level topics against the positivism and general theories of behaviouralism. The final part points to an interpretive approach to the state as an alternative to the behaviouralism and institutionalism that lurk behind Bulpitt's ideas. A thoroughly interpretive approach would decentre territory and power, revealing them to be contingent and shifting products of struggles over meanings.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 45 , Special Issue 3: Territory and Power and the Study of UK and Comparative Politics , 2010 , pp. 436 - 456
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2010.

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References

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