Introduction: economies of statecraft

Abstract

This section offers new insights into how economies are always shaped by political organizations that create contradictory processes. This section focuses on the state as one of the most important political systems with entries on statecraft in Sweden, the UK, Tanzania, Croatia, Slovakia, Austria, and Eastern Europe more generally. The contributions examine how states shape the economy, and therefore also society, in various ways, often through discursive practices that naturalize state power. The entries reveal how state institutions shape the economy by controlling the supply of money ánd the languages that central bankers use; how small cash grants through international development projects create international and national hierarchies between donors and recipients; by deregulating and then, after popular protest, reregulating housing markets; by developing new ways to enforce taxation by creating new types of incentives to declare taxes and through an ideology that suggests equality among citizens; by carving out new state-market relations that make ideological ground for extreme right discourse; as well as by controlling citizenship and access to resources through policies and narratives of deservingness. The entries offer important ethnographic insights into how state institutions play a crucial role in the control and distribution of resources and the formation of markets. The ethnographic approaches offer important insights into how the economies of statecraft are riddled with contradictions. The power that the state has to shape the economy, therefore, always fails to meet the expectations that are ingrained in policies and political ideologies.