Part 4: Toward Renaissance16

Chapter 16: Contention and the Crisis of the Modern State: Centralization and Fragmentation

The modern state was born of exhaustion: after thirty years of war that set Europe ablaze, an entity holding a monopoly on force and law became the answer to a single question: how do we stop killing ourselves? The chapter follows this entity’s journey from protector to oppressor and from the community of faith to the territorial state, the silent contention between state and society, what happens when the balance breaks and despotism follows, and then the security state that sees its own people as the enemy. It presents examples from three continents where peoples rose, and concludes that the state is neither an idol to be worshipped nor necessarily an enemy to be torn down, but an instrument in the human project.

The book is being prepared for publication, in Arabic. These pages offer glimpses of it, not its text.

Cases in this chapter

This chapter does not open with one of the numbered cases.

The Cases