This chapter explores and evaluates poststructuralist approaches to the political theory and analysis of the state.

It begins by putting poststructur­alism into a very broad philosophical context, relating it to historical changes in Western society and culture and to current trends in political science.

We argue that poststructuralism is distinctive in its opposition to analyses that treat politics as derivative of forces that are explicitly or implicitly non-political. Poststructuralists argue that ‘the political’ is the dimension of social existence in which social relations are constituted and contested and as such a cause and not merely an effect of social phenomena. We regard the state as an outcome of political activities as well as a contribution to them and this is because, as we will see, poststructuralism interprets the state not as a ‘thing’ but as a practice or ensemble of practices. In explicating this view we shall consider, not uncritically, some varieties of poststructur­alist theory and analysis: the discourse theory developed by Laclau and Mouffe, critical theories of international relations and Foucauldian approaches to ‘governmentality’.

More on the topic This chapter explores and evaluates poststructuralist approaches to the political theory and analysis of the state.:

1. No concept is more central to political discourse and political analysis than that of the state.
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3. The so-called ‘new institutionalism’ is a relatively recent addition to the pantheon of theories of the state and, like some of the other perspectives considered in this volume, it is by no means only a theory of the state
4. The growth of political theory
5. Like Henry Higgins who, through his work changed the object of his studies into something other than what it was, the purpose of the Marxist theory of the state is not just to understand the capitalist state but to aid in its destruction. (Wolfe 1974: 131)
6. Chapter 3 (What's Marxist about) Marxist State Theory?
7. Why do Marxists need a theory of the state?
8. Recent developments in state theory
9. From the perspective of political theory, the history of international law may be seen as a significant and underexplored aspect of a broader phenomenon:
10. A genealogy of the state in Marxist theory
11. CHAPTER 3 Beyond National Policymaking: Conceptions of Myth in Interpretive Policy Analysis and Their Value for IR
12. Contingency: is a theory of the state possible?
13. Governance, the state and political power
14. The idea of the state of nature was a fundamental way for early modern thinkers to make sense of the emergence of the political.[875]
15. Chapter 7 Green Theory
16. Contemporary elitist approaches
17. CHAPTER 6 The Political Reconstitution of Canadian Federalism
18. Three approaches and some ontological assumptions
19. As we saw, the man who really ‘‘invented” the state was Thomas Hobbes. From his time up to the present, one of its most important functions - as of all previous forms of political organization - had been to wage war against others of its kind.
20. The History of Political Thought in the African Political Present