Boaventura De Sousa Santos in conversation with Denis Maksimov: state, nation and alternatives
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, image source
The conversation between Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Denis Maksimov about nation state, it’s contemporary condition and evolution in the context of the challenges of 21 century.
Can a state exist without a nation? Can functions of a state be replaced by other entities? Some quotes from the conversation:
“Nation state is a modern fiction.”
“State builds its own erosion by privatisation.”
“We need not alternatives - we need alternative thinking about alternatives.”
“Institutions are used extra-institutionally to control them. Trump legislates by Twitter.”
“We reproduce the state in the process of undoing it.”
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is a sociologist and legal scholar. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as the director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. He has written and published widely on the issues of globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, human rights, social movements and the World Social Forum. His most recent publications include If God Were a Human Rights Activist (2015), Epistemologies of the South. Justice against the Epistemicide (2014), and Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation (2002).