Doctoral Dissertation Research: Beyond Developmentalism: State Institutions, Private Lives, and the Production of Singapore Citizens

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project asks the question: how do states construct and maintain legitimacy? The legitimacy of a nation-state depends upon its efficacy in producing citizens who see their participation in the economy, politics and the community in general, as in their best interests as individuals and as a collective national body. The proposed dissertation takes up the case of Singapore to address these issues. Singapore is a nation-state that is peculiar in several ways: it is not strictly authoritarian but certainly not democratic; it has a seemingly docile citizenry that nonetheless participates actively in the state's numerous economic and social projects; and its orientation toward "modernity" does not stop the state from formulating policies encouraging college-educated women to have more babies. One is led to ask the following questions: up close, what does Singapore's rule look like? How is rule organized if it is obviously not a democracy, but also not an authoritarian regime? Under what conditions has this rule been constructed and under what conditions has it been sustained? What does the type of rule actually mean for those being ruled over, and how are they participating in it? By analyzing three sets of institutions--housing, reproduction, and marriage--this project aims to address these questions. The research will be carried out along three lines: (1) a close textual analysis of key social policies, (2) interviews with citizens who negotiate these policies, and (3) by juxtaposing the cases of Singapore and Malaysia. This dissertation aims to deepen and complicate existing understandings of how developing states come to have stable rule and produce citizen subjects who find meaning in their participation in the state's imagery of "development." The project's contribution to sociology will be to gain more holistic views of state rule, integrate understandings about what states do in the economic realm with what they do in socio-politico-cultural realms, examine principles of social division such as, gender and ethnicity and the roles they play in "producing citizens" who understand and find meaningful their participation in the state's national project of development.