explain the paragraph: many Southeast Asian states are struggling to maintain strong, traditional, national identities as part of their effort to maintain legitimacy. This task is difficult, though, as they contend with a series of social strains resulting from the processes of globalisation, including the “systemic disjunction between the local and the global” (Castells 1997, 11), which leaves all but the elite—what Reich (1991) calls the “symbolic analysts”—feeling powerless and, more importantly, without meaningful connection to their previously “imagined” national communities. Against the invisibility of power, against “the unidentified flows and secluded identities” (Castells 1997, 11) of this global network that (dis)organises their lives, individuals and communities begin to assert identities in ways which increasingly by-pass the institutions of civil society through which the state maintains hegemony.While individuals are having their identities changed for them into, say, consumers, communities are also reconstituting their identities— as environmentalists, religious fundamentalists, indigenous land-owners, smugglers etc.—to resist or to challenge the changes wrought by global forces. These responses make the state’s legitimacy projects increasingly difficult.
explain the paragraph:
many Southeast Asian states are struggling to maintain strong, traditional, national identities as part of their effort to maintain legitimacy. This task
is difficult, though, as they contend with a series of social strains resulting from
the processes of globalisation, including the “systemic disjunction between the
local and the global” (Castells 1997, 11), which leaves all but the elite—what
Reich (1991) calls the “symbolic analysts”—feeling powerless and, more importantly, without meaningful connection to their previously “imagined” national
communities. Against the invisibility of power, against “the unidentified flows and
secluded identities” (Castells 1997, 11) of this global network that (dis)organises
their lives, individuals and communities begin to assert identities in ways which
increasingly by-pass the institutions of civil society through which the state
maintains hegemony.While individuals are having their identities changed for
them into, say, consumers, communities are also reconstituting their identities—
as environmentalists, religious fundamentalists, indigenous land-owners, smugglers
etc.—to resist or to challenge the changes wrought by global forces. These responses
make the state’s legitimacy projects increasingly difficult.
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