When is the State's Gaze Focused? British Royal Commissions and the Bureaucratization of Conflict
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4301409 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Matthew R Keller (0000-0002-4257-020X) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 204-235 |
| Publication date | 2014-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Historical Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0952-1909 • E-ISSN: 1467-6443 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/johs.12031 |
| OpenAlex | W1547936055 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 30 |
Scholars have long documented changes in knowledge regimes and power relations characteristic of state-centric drives to pacify conflicts and govern populations. But the mechanisms through which social conflicts are "made legible" in routine policy processes - as well as the reasons why some ongoing conflicts are pacified and others are persistent - have remained less clear. I explore these issues through an analysis of the shifting analytic terrain of national-level commissions of inquiry, an historically powerful form of government organization designed to combine publicly-engaged and "objective" explanation with recommendations for concrete policies of governance. Drawing principally on 19th and early 20th Century British Royal Commissions, I show how investigations into three fields of social conflict - involving prisoners, the working class, and colonial populations - were characterized by cyclical drives to bureaucratize conflict. Yet strikingly, only two of the three substantive fields - prisons and labor - achieved relative bureaucratic closure. Evidence from commission reports is marshaled to explain why some types of conflict have been resistant to incorporation, while others are more readily absorbed into an apparatus of governance
Bureaucracy · Closure (psychology · Commission · Corporate governance · Criminology · Government (linguistics · Management · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Royal Commission · Sociology · State (computer science · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Peacebuilding and International Security · Political Conflict and Governance · Law · Public Administration
Contemporary Capitalism
The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution
The State of Exception
Origins of Democratic Culture
States of Inquiry
Cultures of Inquiry
Continentalizing Canada
Power in Movement
From Savage to Negro
The Social Shaping of Commission Reports
The political power of research methods
Tense and Tender Ties
A Sociology of Modernity
Imagined communities
Institutionalizing Peace
Riot commission politics
The Foucault Effect
Seeing the State
From Poverty to Perversity
The Colonial State as a Social Field
Articulating Theories of States and State Formation
An Anglo-American Comparison
Opium and the British Indian Empire
Reckoning Schemes of Legitimation
Commissioning Legitimacy
Race and Race Theory
Governing Terror
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2025 (10) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |