Tatjana Thelen is professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, and fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld University, leading the research group on "Kinship and Politics." She coedited a special issue of Focaal - Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology entitled "Social Security and Care after Socialism" (2007) and State and Kinship Entwined (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).; Larissa Vetters currently acts as research coordinator of the Law and Society Institute at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She previously worked as a lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (2011-2013). Her research focuses on processes of (external) state-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina and, more recently, on migrants encounters with the German state in the frame of administrative court cases.; Keebet von Benda-Beckmann is professor emeritus, former head of the Project Group Legal Pluralism, and currently associate of the Department of Law and Anthropology, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Recent publications include the coedited Rules of Law and Laws of Ruling: On the Governance of Law (Ashgate, 2009) and the coauthored Political and Legal Transformations of an Indonesian Polity (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

"Drawing on a rich set of case studies conducted across Europe, Stategraphy opens a new line of research in the growing field of the ethnographies of the state. Resolute to bridge the gap between cultural representations and actual practices, and attentive to the relational dimensions of street-level bureaucracies, the authors outline a comparative approach to contemporary states, which will be of interest for both anthropologists and political scientists." * Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, co-author of At the Heart of the State: The Moral Life of Institutions

• Introduction to Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State;Tatjana Thelen, Larissa Vetters, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann;Chapter 1. Contingent Statehood: Clientelism and Civic Engagement as Relational Modalities in Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina;Larissa Vetters;Chapter 2. The State, Legal Rigor, and the Poor: The Daily Practice of Welfare Control;Vincent Dubois;Chapter 3. Relationships, Practices, and Images of the Local State in Rural Russia;Rebecca Kay;Chapter 4. Acts of Assistance: Navigating the Interstices of the British State with the Help of Non-profit Legal Advisers;Alice Forbess and Deborah James;Chapter 5. Images of Care, Boundaries of the State: Volunteering and Civil Society in Czech Health Care;Rosie Read;Chapter 6. State Kinning and Kinning the State in Serbian Elder Care Programs;Tatjana Thelen, Andre Thiemann, and Duska Roth;Chapter 7. Workings of the State: Administrative Lists, European Union Food Aid, and the Local Practices of Distribution in Rural Romania;Stefan Dorondel and Mihai Popa;Chapter 8. Creating the State Locally through Welfare Provision: Two Mayors, Two Welfare Regimes in Rural Hungary;Gyongyi Schwarcz and Alexandra Szoke;Bibliography;Index