Introduction / Christian Krohn-Hansen and Knut G. Nustad. -- Sovereignty, the spatial politics of security, and gender : looking north and south from the US-Mexico border / Ana M. Alonso. -- Chiefs and bureaucrats in the making of empire : a drama from the Transkei, South Africa, October 1880 / Clifton Crais. -- State formation through development in post-apartheid South Africa / Knut G. Nustad. -- Negotiated dictatorship : the building of the Trujillo State in the southwestern Dominican Republic / Christian Krohn-Hansen. -- The materiality of state effects : an ethnography of a road in the Peruvian Andes / Penelope Harvey. -- Contradictory notions of the state : returned refugees in Guatemala / Kristi Anne Stölen. -- Counting on state subjects : state formation and citizenship in twentieth-century Mexico / Helga Baitenmann. -- "A speech that the entire ministry may stand for" : on generating state voice / Iver B. Neumann. -- "Better safe than sorry" : legislating assisted conception in Norway / Marit Melhuus. -- The state of the state in Europe, or, "What is the European Union that anthropologists should be mindful of it"? / Cris Shore.