The next meeting of the Washington History Seminar, on Monday, November 23 at 4:00 pm ET, will be devoted to Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State (Harvard University Press, 2020), by Benjamin Hopkins, George Washington University. Elisabeth Leake, University of Leeds, Geraldine Davies Lenoble, Torcuato Di Tella University, and Benjamin Johnson, Loyola University, will comment. Click here to register for the webinar or watch on the National History Center’s Facebook Page or the Wilson Center website.
[Professor Hopkins] makes a bold claim about the modern global order and the central role "frontier" spaces have made in its construction. Arguing that the "frontier" is a practice rather than a place, Hopkins theorizes that the particular way states govern such spaces – he terms it "frontier governmentality" – presents a unique constellation of power defining states and their limits. Ranging from the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands to the Arizona desert to the Argentine pampas, Hopkins presents an ambitious and provocative global history with continuing purchase today.
--Dan Ernst