"The foundation of a state is that it is able to monopolize the use of violence," Ong said, citing the German sociologist Max Weber.
Hoping to expedite the foundation of a state school for the blind, Johnson began a correspondence with newly-inaugurated Governor William E. Stevenson (who assured Johnson of his "sympathy and support" for the school).
Indeed, Ali Khamenei's act of reckless partisanship has called into question the very foundation of a state based on absolute religious rule on one hand and vestiges of public accountability for the acts undertaken in the name of Islam, on the other.
For more than a year, Israel engaged in peace negotiations with Mr. Abbas aimed at laying the foundations of a Palestinian state.
Today, Jericho, a Fatah stronghold, is the hub of the authority's Western-backed efforts to rebuild and train the Palestinian security forces, one of the foundations of a future state.
Unfortunately, it is not because he is promoting a synthesis of democracy, modernity and Islam, but because he is loudly bashing Israel over its occupation and praising Hamas instead of the more responsible Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which is actually building the foundations of a Palestinian state.
But Indonesia is now embarking on something more systematic: it is laying the foundations of a welfare state.Last October Indonesia's parliament passed a law pledging to provide health insurance to all of the country's 240m citizens from January 1st 2014.
The effort by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to build the institutional foundations of a Palestinian state from the ground up — replacing the corrupt, jerry-built structure that Yasir Arafat created and Israel destroyed — is actually making progress.
From 1935 the first Labour government laid the foundations of a welfare state in which the interests of preschool aged children were subsumed within policies to provide safety nets for families and the priorities of infant and maternal health.
Further complicating the picture is the rise of the new Qaeda franchise, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which has established footholds across northern and eastern Syria with the intention to lay the foundations of an Islamic state.
