Reconstructing State Capacity

Workshop Theme

In recent years, questions of state capacity have returned to the center of sociolegal and political economy scholarship. Across diverse contexts, the functions of the state have become increasingly contested and reworked. Governing capacity is expanded and intensified in some domains, while deliberately curtailed, dismantled, or redirected in others, often in ways that reflect shifting political coalitions, economic interests, and struggles over authority. Yet “state capacity” is frequently invoked as if it were a fixed or technical attribute, something states either possess or lack, rather than a politically contingent and historically produced achievement that must be continuously assembled and sustained.

This workshop starts from the premise that state capacity is shaped and contested through multiple, intersecting processes in which law plays a central mediating role. Legal rules, institutions, and vocabularies organize administrative power, structure enforcement, and reallocate authority across public and private actors. Through these processes, law legitimates coercion, withdrawal, or redistribution. At the same time, law is also a site through which state capacity is hollowed out, fragmented, selectively redeployed or strategically reconfigured to manage competing demands and institutional contradictions– often in ways that intensify inequality, shift risks onto households and communities, and entrench new forms of dependence and control.

We invite papers that examine state capacity as a relational phenomenon situated within law and political economy and produced through ongoing struggles among states, markets, and societies. Such struggles unfold across legal fields, spatial scales, and historical moments, generating uneven and often contradictory forms of governing capacity. Rather than treating the state as a unitary or coherent actor, the workshop encourages analyses that foreground the legal techniques, organizational practices, and social conflicts through which governing capacity is assembled, undermined, and reconfigured. We also welcome analyses of how states navigate and operationalize internal tensions—between market and plan, formal law and informal authority, domestic sovereignty and transnational integration—as productive dimensions of governance rather than failures of coherence.

Topics of Interest

We welcome papers on a wide range of topics related to law, political economy, and state capacity, including but not limited to:

• Legal foundations and transformations of state capacity in different political economies
• Industrial policy, regulation, and the legal infrastructures of economic governance
• Privatization, outsourcing, and the deconstruction or redistribution of public authority
• State capacity, corporate power, and mechanisms of regulatory capture
• Law, coercion, and repression as instruments or dimensions of governing capacity
• State capacity and social provision, welfare, and redistribution
• Citizenship, migration control, and border governance
• Crisis governance, emergency powers, and forms of legal exceptionalism
• Comparative, transnational, and postcolonial perspectives on state capacity and its variation across time and space
• Non-Western modalities of state capacity, including hybrid forms that combine market governance with political monopoly, and the strategic appropriation of Western legal knowledge
• Tensions between state capacity and regime legitimacy, including how states manage contradictions between economic governance and political authority

About the Global Law and Political Economy Series

The Global Law and Political Economy Workshop is an annual one-day event bringing together LPE scholars from around the world to explore central themes at the intersection of law, political economy, and social change. Held the day before the LSA Annual Meeting, the workshop creates a dedicated space for sustained discussion and exchange. Each year, the workshop is organized around a thematic focus that reflects pressing questions in the field. Past editions have examined the law and political economy of social reproduction (Chicago, 2025) and this year’s workshop is focused on the topic of the reconstruction of state capacity (Berkeley, 2026). The 2027 workshop will be held in connection with the LSA Annual Meeting in Hong Kong — look out for the call for papers later this year.

The workshop combines plenary sessions with smaller breakout groups, allowing for both wide-ranging debate and close engagement with individual papers. It has become a key gathering point for the global LPE community — a place to develop new ideas, forge connections across disciplines and regions, and advance the collective intellectual project of the network.