Since the 1970s anthropology has shifted to viewing cultural boundaries and practices as

Political anthropology is a subdiscipline of social and cultural anthropology concerned with the comparative, fieldwork-based study of politics and the political. Between the 1940s and the 1970s it was a central area, especially of social anthropology in Europe. In that period political anthropology moved from an interest in structure to accounts of process, but with a growing tendency towards formalism and typologizing. Political anthropology itself slipped out of fashion in the 1970s, but political topics like power, resistance, nationalism, and the state have returned to the anthropological agenda in the 1980s and 1990s.

Anthropology and the Definition of Politics

Political anthropology is a subfield of sociocultural anthropology, but like anthropology as a whole, it remains immune to precise delimitation. The core of political anthropology is the comparative, fieldwork-based examination of politics in a broad range of historical, social, and cultural settings. Today, it is common to see political anthropologists combine ethnographic work with history. Some analyze the symbolic forms and practices of a specific state bureaucracy, others a form of political activism, and yet others the perpetration of terror or torture, or the political effects associated with the everyday and ritual construction of a particular collective memory. The field of political anthropology has been, and continues to be, extensive, diverse, and shifting.

Anthropologists have defined politics in different ways, depending on their general theoretical–analytical interests and research questions. A typical anthropological point of departure today states that politics, or the political, must not be treated as a separate domain or field, but must be investigated as articulation between power relations, cultural processes, and historical trajectories. As one contemporary anthropologist, Steven Gregory, put it in his Black Corona (1998, p. 13), “For my purposes, politics refers to a diverse range of social practices through which people negotiate power relations. The practice of politics involves both the production and exercise of social relationships and the cultural construction of social meanings that support or undermine those relationships.” The work that founded and gave shape to the classic, British structural-functionalist anthropology of politics in the 1940s and 1950s, African Political Systems edited by Meyer Fortes and Edward Evans-Pritchard, viewed a society's political organization as those structures or relations that maintain “social order within a territorial framework, by the organized exercise of coercive authority through the use, or the possibility of use, of physical force” (1940, p. xiv).

In the 1950s and 1960s, anthropologists gradually moved away from the more rigid structural-functionalist views, and many came under the influence of versions of action theory and interactionism. The reformulated political anthropology that emerged during these two decades saw politics in formal terms: political anthropology examines comparatively ‘political behavior’ – typically defined as (1) the search for power or influence and (2) a human constant, a universal aspect of societies.

In a remarkable study, Society against the State (1977 [1974]), the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres criticized all traditional political anthropology for having universalized a particular (Western) notion of political power, or politics, a notion that identifies political power with coercion or violence: “the kinship is closer than seems apparent between Nietzsche, Max Weber (state power as the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence), and contemporary” anthropology, he wrote (p. 4). What, Clastres asked, do we do with Amerindian societies in which “if there is something completely alien to an Indian, it is the idea of giving an order or having to obey” – in other words, societies where political life functions as a process ‘beyond hierarchical subordination’ and totally ‘beyond coercion and violence’ (p. 5). Are these societies not only without ‘a state’ but also without ‘politics’? Or is there something wrong with a particular way of thinking about the nature of political power? Clastres replied that a genuinely cross-cultural political anthropology needs a wide and open definition of politics: “all societies, whether archaic or not, are political, even if the political is expressed in many voices, even if their meaning is not immediately decipherable; and even if one has to solve the riddle of a ‘powerless’ power” (p. 14).

One year before Clastres published his book, Talad Asad launched a pathbreaking critique of structural-functionalist anthropology, and of the mainstream anthropological project more generally, in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973). Asad's study and similar efforts helped partly to launch and partly to strengthen anthropologists' interest in colonial and postcolonial studies, and in history. Today, most in the discipline consider the issue of how to define politics in terms of a certain history: the notion of ‘the political’ appeared in Western Europe after the Reformation, alongside the modern concepts of the state and democracy. The geographical and historical origin of the discourse of politics did not, however, preclude its being exported to the rest of the world. The anthropology of politics must therefore study varying, historically and culturally constituted definitions of the political – in brief, whatever the actors (leaders and masses, states and nongovernmental organizations) across the globe consider politics to be.

The use of the term ‘political anthropology’ was widespread in anthropology in the 1960s and early 1970s. Subsequently, it came to be used far less, indeed to be less fashionable, even among those in the discipline who evidently studied political phenomena. In 2002, an authoritative, instructive reader was published under the title The Anthropology of Politics (Vincent, 2002).

Rethinking Anthropology, Rethinking Big Manship

Typology building and developmental theorizing, common in early to mid-twentieth century sociocultural anthropology (and political anthropology particularly), treated cultures as objectively identifiable, historically stable, socially boundable units of comparison. Over the past 30 or 40 years, however, a widespread theoretical reorientation in sociocultural anthropology from (as Clifford Geertz put it in his well-known 1983 essay, ‘Blurred genres’) a ‘laws and instances ideal of explanation’ modeled on the natural sciences ‘toward a cases and interpretations’ ideal drawn from the humanities undermined the very idea of bounded, stable, objective cultural units in favor of situated, reflexive accounts of cultural process more amenable to mutual critical translation than to positivist comparative analysis.

On the whole, Melanesian anthropology has not only reflected but also spearheaded these transformations in comparativism and the ‘culture’ concept (e.g., Roy Wagner's 1975 Invention of Culture). In this new staging, big manship has moved out of the analytical limelight, although not out of sight. Hardly relics, big men are everyday facts of life in the rural and urban communities and the provincial and national governments of twenty-first century Melanesia. The shifting array of contradictory values, beliefs, and rhetorics about big men are equally contemporary. They constitute postcolonial transformations of what Sahlins (1963) referred to as the ‘Melanesian contradiction’: the already delicate ethicopolitical balance that successful leaders had to maintain between reciprocity and exploitative self-advancement in rural communities a generation ago, now made orders of magnitude more difficult by its articulation with market logics and the politics of nation making.

During the 1990s, investigations into big manship became absorbed into a wide variety of academic, policy-oriented, and community-based projects concerned to understand and intervene in the ‘emergent forms of life’ (in the sense Michael Fischer developed in his 1999 Annual Review essay by that name) characterizing contemporary Melanesian experience. It therefore makes little sense to separate the anthropology of big men from these other literatures. Nevertheless, while these projects do not identify themselves with the ‘anthropology of big men’ as such, they do still acknowledge portions of that foundational literature as historical grounding for a remarkably wide range of freshly conceptualized research foci, including gender relations and ‘engendered’ violence, socioeconomic transformations (e.g., emergent class relations and the social and environmental impacts of globalization and extractive industries), and the dilemmas of governance. The following paragraphs sample these themes.

Melanesian gender studies have long directed attention to divergent and conflictual perspectives and relations within communities. While ‘sexual antagonism’ was a well-developed theme by the 1970s, the past two decades' work historicizes regional experience and sets it in a global context (e.g., Jolly and Stewart, 2012). It renders the male-centered (and certainly male leader-centered) typification of whole cultures analytically unusable and big manship a decidedly qualified value (e.g., Lederman, 1986b, 1990, 1991; Godelier and Strathern, 1991). This research has attended to gender ideologies and gendered practices as grounds for making sense of conflicts between and among men and women, particularly in relation to emergent forms of female political and economic action and leadership, like the ‘Wok Meri’ movement in the Eastern Highlands (Sexton, 1990) and Kulka women's club intervention in a tribal war in the western Nebilyer Valley (Rumsey and Merlan, 1991). These gendered engagements are transforming local ideas about ‘maleness’ that long underpinned big manship and associated ideas about collective social forms (e.g., male initiation ‘cults’).

In recent years, anthropologists have also encountered mirror images of the big man that deploy its metaphoric value for new ends. For example, describing local perspectives on the past generation's social transformations among Dano speakers in the upper Asaro valley of PNG – which foreground increased crime and economic inequality – Thomas Strong (http://anthropology.nuim.ie/research/why-are-men-papua-new-guinea-highlands-shrinking-0) writes, “People point to men's bodies as further evidence of social decay – they claim that the present generation of men are smaller, weaker, and more fragile than the ancestors” and seek to reinvent both themselves and their culture by various means (including evangelical churches and commercial enterprises).

This theme of ‘troubled masculinities’ – in the comprehensive sense that Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi develops in her chapter, “Troubled masculinities and gender violence in Melanesia” (in Jolly and Stewart, 2012) – is by now reasonably well developed in anthropological writing on gender and contributes to a contemporary cross-disciplinary interest in the dark side of economic and political change.

Complementary work dissects incipient class relations as Melanesians situate themselves relative to a roiling global economy (e.g., Gewertz and Errington, 1999) and analyzes struggles over the meaning and value of ‘environmental resources’ – struggles that mutually implicate transnational and local social agents and frames of reference (West, 2006). Big men have long brokered or actively invited these entanglements, particularly the articulation of gift- and market-oriented projects. While early writers interpreted customary big man activities through a capitalist lens (recall Section Political Typologies and Developmental Puzzles), ethnography of the 1990s and 2000s developed subtle understandings of the moral valences of ‘gift’ and ‘market’ as distinct, often opposed, kinds of relations even as their mutual entanglements have ramified.

These subtleties echo in ambivalent and contradictory commentary about the ethics of big men in everyday talk, popular media, and policy discourse. Because customary exchange relations are as much political as economic, references to ‘big men’ become convenient concretizations of otherwise abstract arguments about both development challenges and governance dilemmas (Sullivan, 2005; see also Section Anthropology of Big Manship in a Wider Field below).

For example, Highland PNG peoples have personified the state itself as a ‘big man,’ an idiom that collapses the scale distinction between ‘local’ and ‘national’ in order to insist on a relationship of equivalence and mutual responsibility between them (Clark, 1992; compare Joseph Ketan's 2004 book, The Name Must Not Go Down: Political Competition and State-Society Relations in Mt Hagen). Observations like Clark's make evident the salience of idealized references to ‘big men’ as political rhetoric. Such references can therefore be productive ethnographic foci for understanding the stakes for Melanesians as the wealth-mediated but community-centered competition (that is, competition premised on a wealth ‘commons’) with which big manship has customarily been associated confronts – however ambivalently, unevenly, and contingently – structural inequalities associated with neoliberal development (that is, premised on private property and individualist constructs of interests) in the context of ineffectual or absent state regulation.

Similarly, Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi's (1997) instructive case study of the life and times of Ruge Angiva – a “self-proclaimed ‘last Big Man’” of southern Madang Province – reads as a contemporary morality tale about the incompatibilities of traditional big manship and Western style capitalist interests, particularly their respective valuations of community and kin loyalties. Related tensions were evident in Tim Sharp's fieldwork on large-scale betel nut traders based in Mt Hagen. Despite the impressive geographical and financial scale of their enterprises, Sharp (2013) reports that relations among traders recall the interplay of cooperation and competition characteristic of clansmen and big men (see also Mosko, 2013). On the other hand, in a 2012 University of St Andrews dissertation, The Pattern Changes Changes: Gambling Value in Papua New Guinea, Anthony Pickles charts the rise of new forms of exchange relations and renown associated with slot machine gambling, which favor “big shots” (see also, e.g., Pickles, 2013). The latter term – which Keir Martin's provocatively titled 2010 article, ‘The death of the big men,’ analyzes as a linguistic index of the emergence of a new category of unambiguously problematic political elite – is defined in explicit counterpoint to ‘big men’ of the sort Zimmer-Tamakoshi describes.

2 The Study of Factionalism

The study of factions and factionalism developed slowly, shadowing theoretical shifts in the social sciences. Although Linton (1936) long ago suggested that factions presented an interesting but unexplored field, little was done until the 1950s. Political anthropology until then was dominated by the functionalist paradigm elaborated in African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940). This viewed politics as maintaining order through consensus, harmony, and balanced opposition. The political groups on which functionalists focused were enduring units, corporate groups. Conflict, if examined, was viewed as reinforcing the social structure. Loosely structured, temporary coalitions such as factions patently did fit into this conception of politics. The theoretical hegemony of Africanist political anthropologists began to be challenged in the 1950s. Not surprisingly, Raymond Firth, given his interest in individual choice, had for some time been uncomfortable with the functionalist paradigm. He and colleagues, who had observed factionalism in Indian communities, were the first to examine factionalism theoretically (Firth 1957). They treated factions as informal counterparts of more formal political formations whose members were recruited according to structurally diverse principles. They also noted that factions tended to become activated on specific occasions and not as regularly recurring features. Other studies of factions and factionalism swiftly followed (Siegel and Beals 1960, Boissevain 1964, 1974, Nicholas 1965, Bailey 1969, Thoden van Velzen 1973, Bujra 1973, Alavi 1973). Most employed a transactionalist perspective, viewing political activity as an arena in which entrepreneurs transact personal relations for political and economic gain. The study of factionalism culminated in the late 1970s with the volume edited by Silverman and Salisbury (1977). This is still considered the definitive work on the subject. Following its publication and the demise of functionalist social science—in which transactionalists played a significant role—academic debate moved on to puzzles related to symbolic, cognitive, and discursive approaches to politics. Factions and factionalism have become accepted concepts whose characteristics are no longer debated. They are also proving useful to related disciplines (see Brumfiel and Fox 1994).

The Study of Factionalism

The study of factions and factionalism developed slowly, shadowing theoretical shifts in the social sciences. Although Linton (1936) long ago suggested that factions presented an interesting but unexplored field, little was done until the 1950s. Political anthropology until then was dominated by the functionalist paradigm elaborated in African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1940). This viewed politics as maintaining order through consensus, harmony, and balanced opposition. The political groups on which functionalists focused were enduring units, corporate groups. Conflict, if examined, was viewed as reinforcing the social structure. Loosely structured, temporary coalitions such as factions patently did fit into this conception of politics. The theoretical hegemony of Africanist political anthropologists began to be challenged in the 1950s. Not surprisingly, Raymond Firth, given his interest in individual choice, had for some time been uncomfortable with the functionalist paradigm. He and colleagues, who had observed factionalism in Indian communities, were the first to examine factionalism theoretically (Firth, 1957). They treated factions as informal counterparts of more formal political formations whose members were recruited according to structurally diverse principles. They also noted that factions tended to become activated on specific occasions and not as regularly recurring features. Other studies of factions and factionalism swiftly followed (Siegel and Beals, 1960; Boissevain, 1964, 1974; Nicholas, 1965; Bailey, 1969; Thoden van Velzen, 1973; Bujra, 1973; Alavi, 1973). Most employed a transactionalist perspective, viewing political activity as an arena in which entrepreneurs transact personal relations for political and economic gain. The study of factionalism culminated in the late 1970s with the volume edited by Silverman and Salisbury (1977). This is still considered the definitive work on the subject. Following its publication and the demise of functionalist social science – in which trans- actionalists played a significant role – academic debate moved on to puzzles related to symbolic, cognitive, and discursive approaches to politics. Factions and factionalism have become accepted concepts whose characteristics are no longer debated. They are also proving useful to related disciplines (see Brumfiel and Fox, 1994).

Future Directions

The anthropology of human rights is now well established as a distinct area of research and source of anthropological theory. Institutionally, scholars and graduate students who work in the anthropology of human rights commonly, but not exclusively, come from the ranks of legal and political anthropology. Because human rights has become an increasingly pervasive mode of contemporary world-making, anthropologists encounter traces of this influence across a wide range of cultural practices, political movements, and moral projects.

This is not to say, however, that the status of human rights is uncontested – quite the contrary. As the liminal period of the post-Cold War gives way to cultural re-differentiation, the establishment of new hierarchies, and the narrowing of spaces of political and social experimentation, human rights will continue to jostle with alternative forms of moral praxis and collective- and self-constitution. While the postwar project of human rights matures through its translation into mundane, even banal, processes of constitutional reform, good governance, and neoliberal economic restructuring, its potential for catalyzing radical transformation and moral upheaval will likely diminish. The anthropology of human rights will become less the study of a political and moral discourse during a time of often giddy transition and seemingly limitless possibility, and more the study of an established contemporary secular universalism among a host of competitors.

Professional Organizations

There are a variety of professional associations that provide an academic and professional home for law and society research and researchers. Among them are the American Psychology-Law Society, the Society for Empirical Legal Studies, the American Law and Economics Association, the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, and the flagship law and society organization, the Law and Society Association (LSA). LSA was founded in 1964 and currently has approximately 1600 members, an annual conference, journal (The Law and Society Review), and newsletter. However, law and society research may appear in a variety of journals, including the Australian Journal of Law and Society, the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, the International Journal of the Sociology of Law, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, the Journal of Law and Society, the Journal of Law and Policy, the Journal of Law and Social Inquiry, the Journal of Social and Legal Studies, the Journal of Law and Human Behavior, and Law and Contemporary Problems, among others (Freidrichs, 2012).

Within LSA, members can belong to a variety of collaborative research networks (CRNs), which are designed around a research area of interest to encourage international and interdisciplinary research collaboration. There are currently 44 CRNs in LSA, including CRNs on African Law and Society; Civil Justice and Disputing Behavior; Law and Health; Law and History; Lay Participation in Legal Systems; Legal Geography; Gender, Sexuality and Law; Islamic Law and Society; Teaching in Law and Society; and many others. For a full list of CRNs, descriptions, and contact information for the CRN coordinators, see www.lawandsociety.org.

Political science in South Asia was at first limited or constrained by the strength of the historiographical tradition that, till the late 1980s, occupied a major share of the studies. The frame for political science was then chiefly limited to class and political economy. In Pakistan specifically, other factors further impeded the rise of the discipline as such (military rule and authoritarian trends in civilian rule). In India, in the 1990s, the subject has grown into something very lively with its journals and associations, and is taught in the major universities. Political sociology remains one of the major focuses while political anthropology and political economy have lost some of their vigor, probably because of the failure of Marxist types of development. But the main corner in the study of Indian political science was turned in the late 1980s when major changes occurred both in the polity and the society. New dimensions, driven by the necessity to assess these changes, were then introduced: the study of communalism, the reexamination of the political system, and the state of institutions. Election studies that had already a long tradition, gained a new momentum. Traditional long-term focuses such as nonalignment and Russian politics took a back seat in favor of South-East Asian and West European studies. In Pakistan, political studies have not been as lively a subject as in India. The focus has dwelled on a few issues such as ethnicity and military-civilian rule, again mostly for structural reasons. In addition, international relations have been little explored.

Conclusion

Borders are spaces where multiple physical and symbolic struggles take place based on the selective inside-outside logic. As such, they were and still are intricately connected with intellectual and daily questions of identity, alterity and with practices of international relations and security policies. The new awareness of borders expanded from conceptions of borders as demarcated landmarks to individual and group experiences of limits and mobility. These shifts from international relations perspective to that of political anthropology have transformed border studies. Border studies evolved from understandings of solid physical borders as a nation-state and international relations matter toward recognition of fluid borders and involvement of multiple agents in them. This has deepened our understanding of the social aspect of borders and border politics.

It was assumed that globalization would have a capacity to open borders and reduce cultural barriers universally. However, cosmopolitan hopes materialized within the confines of economic globalism and the flow of information. The persistence of closed ethnoterritorial relations and identities, on the other hand, validated these visions as inadequate. The alarming increase in migrants globally, climate change–related economic shortages, and terrorist attacks have tested border politics. Borders remained a dominant characteristic of the emerging global world. Realist politics and its understanding of borders have incessantly moved toward more controlled spaces especially through technological innovations that transgress the national borders and create global borders of concrete demarcations around prosperous regions. Although the tangible impact of COVID-19 to post-pandemic borders is still to be seen, it became apparent that world-wide pandemics and climate crisis will continue to pose serious challenges to world borders and politics. Practices during the pandemic have raised more questions on biased practices that increased the pressures on economically disadvantaged regions and refugees.

Territorial and Political Borders

State borders entail a mapping out in geographic space and recognition in international law. They mark the limits of sovereignty and of state control over citizens and subjects, limits that may be upheld by force or by the threat of force. They are often highly visible physically, which has led some scholars to refer them as ‘real’ borders in contrast to borders without territorial counterparts. This can be misleading, and the materiality of state borders should not blind us to their cultural and symbolic dimensions (just as we should not assume that cultural and symbolic borders automatically have no materiality).

Apart from the Mexico–US border, state borders have not until recently been subject to systematic comparative scrutiny by anthropologists. Where they did appear in ethnographic accounts, they often figured only as a backdrop to some other line of inquiry. Prior to the 1970s, even studies of the Mexico–US border rarely included the border as a variable in the analysis. As a result, the anthropology of state borders was slow to develop.

A fledgling ‘school’ of anthropological border studies briefly emerged at the University of Manchester, UK, in the 1960s, but subsequently fizzled out. During this period, several books appeared specifically with borders in their titles; each influenced by Max Gluckman who was Departmental Chair at that time (e.g., Cohen, 1965; Harris, 1972). Taken together, they began something that took another 20 years to bear fruit. But though these books did not problematize, the state borders near which their authors did research, and though they did not cross-refer to one another, they nevertheless identified some common themes in the political anthropology of borders which laid a solid foundation for contemporary anthropological analyses of nations and states. They pointed out, for instance, how proximity to a state border can intensify local conflicts, which can easily escalate into conflicts over nationality, a threat which only cross-cutting linkages (of kinship, common residence, and shared social and economic interests) help to keep in check. Understanding these borders thus requires local ethnographic knowledge, and not just the knowledge of state-level institutions and international relations, a fine-tuned sensitivity that is alert to cultural meanings and practice that remains central to the anthropology of borders today.

The value of localized studies for understanding how cultural landscapes are superimposed across social and political divides was first systematically developed by Cole and Wolf (1974) whose field site in the Italian Tyrol was specifically chosen because its successive historical partitioning allowed them to explore the transformation of local political loyalties in relation to nation-building. What particularly interested Cole and Wolf about the South Tyrol was the durability of a cultural frontier long after the political borders of state and empire had shifted. National boundaries had clearly survived the demise of state borders, and remained important in everyday life. Despite their similarities, the two villages studied had followed a different political and cultural course since World War I. Villagers minimized these ideological and cultural differences in public encounters, but in private quickly resorted to ethnic stereotypes to explain the actions of the others. Cole and Wolf thus reiterate Barth’s (1969) observation that ethnic boundaries may be maintained despite relations across them. Their major contribution, however, was in demonstrating the need to combine the study of local and extralocal influences to understand and explain this process.

Here, then, is an example of where ethnic boundaries result from, and evolve with, the rise and demise of state borders. Each can only be understood by reference to the other. In this respect, Cole and Wolf combined symbolic border studies (see Section Social and Symbolic Borders) with a political economy perspective that situates ethnographic knowledge of local boundaries within wider historical and political processes, a novel combination that marked an important transition in the anthropology of borders and heralded the beginning of a new form of inquiry. Subsequent anthropological research on national and international borders was to draw explicitly or implicitly upon this groundbreaking work (see Donnan and Wilson, 1999, for example). Anthropologists began to use their field research at state borders as a means of widening perspectives in political anthropology to encompass the formal and informal ties between local communities and the larger polities of which they are a part. Some studied border areas as a way of examining how proximity to an international border could influence local culture or could create the conditions that shape new rural and urban communities. Others focused on the voluntary and involuntary movement of people across borders as traders, migrants, and refugees. Yet others concentrated on the symbols and meanings which encode border life. The Mexico–US border, where the issues of underdevelopment, transnationalism, and the globalization of power and capital, among other aspects of culture, increasingly concern the growing number of historically informed and wide-ranging ethnographic accounts, offers excellent examples of all of these trends (see Alvarez, 1995, 2012).

Regardless of theoretical orientation or locale, however, most of these border studies have focused on how social relations, defined in part by the state, transcend the territorial limits of the state, and, in so doing, transform the structure of the state at home and in its relations with its neighbors.

Anthropological interest in how local border developments can have an impact on national centers of power and hegemony was partly stimulated by historical analyses of localities and the construction of national identities (e.g., Sahlins, 1989). Cole and Wolf’s insistence on the need to view the anthropology of borders as historical anthropology is recalled. As the South Tyrol case so clearly shows, borders are spatial and temporal records of relationships between local communities and between states. Ethnographic explorations of the intersection of symbolic and state borders have salience beyond anthropology because of what they may reveal about the history of cultural practices and about the role of border cultures and communities in policy-making and diplomacy. This kind of research highlights the growing importance of a border perspective in political anthropology, a perspective in which the dialectical relations between border areas and their nations and states take precedence over local culture viewed with the state as a backdrop.

The next section outlines the work of some of the scholars whose innovative theorizing of the symbolic dimensions of social boundary making has provided a cornerstone to the anthropology of state borders worldwide.