Christoph Lundgreen (Dresden/Stanford) "Degrees of stateness: A new model for the ancient Greek world"

Leaving behind the old and still ongoing discussions about what a state actually is, the lecture starts from a governance-based approach where the dichotomy between “state” and “no state” is replaced by the notion of “state as a process“ and “degrees of stateness”. In order to reassess the dimensions of stateness in the Greek world, three different perspectives are distinguished and nine possible indicators of stateness are discussed.
Christoph Lundgreen is a Lecturer/Associate Professor in the Department of Ancient History at the Dresden University of Technology, where he received his PhD in 2009.  He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford Department of Classics. His current research culminates in a book (Stuttgart 2014) on the dimensions of statehood in the Greek world and investigates the continuing relevance of historical debates surrounding the formation and definition of the state, from Homeric times to Early Modern Europe.