AUTHOR=Birch Jennifer 

TITLE=Premodern Confederacies: Balancing Strategic Collective Action and Local Autonomy

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Political Science

VOLUME=Volume 4 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2022.807239

DOI=10.3389/fpos.2022.807239

ISSN=2673-3145

ABSTRACT=A confederacy is generally understood to be a formal, institutionalized alliance of peoples who act in mutual support to achieve common ends. While the emergence and maintenance of early and pre-modern states have received tremendous scholarly attention in the social sciences, the same cannot be said for confederations. This paper examines common features of premodern confederacies as an initial effort towards developing a body of theory aimed at exploring and explaining confederacies, leagues, and other modes of collective and regional governance. The central thesis posed is that confederacies provided a means for a diverse range of political formations to achieve collective strategic goals at a distance without sacrificing autonomy. Selected case studies ranging from northeast North America to Medieval Europe are explored to evaluate this position. The question of whether or not confederacies constitute ‘good government’ is considered and I suggest that since the objective of a confederacy is not to govern, the answer to that question depends on the nature of it’s constituent parts.