jacqueline stevens

About Me

Associate Professor, Law and Society Program, University of California at Santa Barbara. My first book *Reproducing the State* (Princeton, 1999) shows how affiliations we think are natural, including nationality, ethnicity, race, and sex roles, come from laws that establish kinship rules for purposes of membership in a political society. I recently finished a second book *States without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals* and it will be published in the fall, 2009 by Columbia University Press. This book shows how people organize to systematically kill others on a mass-scale for only a handful of causes: those based on intergenerational attachments produced by the state and those based on religion. The paradox is that these are affiliations instantiated out of fears of mortality--as people establish rules to ensure they are part of ongoing communities of memory. What would life look like with laws that were consistent with our condition of mortality? As we analyze the irrationality of present policies based on antiquated ideas about birthright (for nationality as well as inheritance), what are trajectories for eliminating these?

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States without Nations