Unsettling sovereignty: Violence,myths and the politics of history in the Ethiopian Somali metropolis

An increasingly consolidated anthropological scholarship has moved from a legal notion of sovereignty towards an analysis of its violent enactment. Yet, it has paid insufficient attention to the ways in which the idea of sovereignty forms and operates in localized political struggles. Taking seriously Bonilla’s (2017) call for the “unsettling” of sovereignty, this article scrutinizes how ideas of legitimate rule have formed around myths of violence in the capital of the Ethiopian Somali region. It uses ethnographic material to examine the politics of history around material constructions through which myths of violence are entangled with the city's landscape of memory. It reveals sovereignty in the process of formation, becoming culturally and materially grounded in the myths of violence of an emerging Somali nation within the ethnic federal Ethiopian state. This article argues that past claims to sovereignty continue to affect the politics of history, with profound consequences for ongoing nation-state building projects and the corresponding territorial imaginations. It thus highlights the inherently fragile nature of ideas of state sovereignty in the frontier metropolis. On this basis, it contributes to a geographically differentiated anthropology of sovereignty and to an understanding of its co-constitution through violence in the frontier and myths in the metropolis.     

Transnational environmentalism and entanglements of sovereignty: The tiger campaign across the Himalayas

In the spring of 2006, Tibetans in China set fire to more than a million dollars worth of otter, leopard and tiger pelts. The numerous bonfires were a response to the 14th Dalai Lama's statement, made at the Kalachakra Initiation Ceremony in India, that Tibetans should cease wearing such pelts. The Chinese state interpreted this as an act of loyalty to the Dalai Lama and this evidence of multiple overlapping sovereignties as a threat to its exclusive territorial sovereignty. An effort to clarify this space invited a sovereign invocation of the exception, as salaried employees were forced to wear endangered animal pelts, violating Chinese national law. A conjunctural analysis of the Dalai Lama's speech and the subsequent burnings demonstrates that contrary to prevailing narratives, transnational environmental advocacy played a key role. The conjuncture in which these events took place was shaped by multiple competing entanglements of Chinese, Indian, and Tibetan sovereignties with nature protection and transnational activism. Two distinct assemblages, shaped by power relations and the politics of sovereignty, formed around protecting the tiger across the Himalayas, with dramatically different effects. The case shows that far from post-sovereign environmental governance, nature and sovereignty remain inextricably entangled, and illustrates how multiple modes to construct and defend state sovereignty come into conflict with each other.     

Witchcraft,Statecraft, Mancraft: On the Demonological Foundations of Sovereignty

ABSTRACT

Questions of sovereignty remain central to political theology, yet the role played by demonology in sovereignty’s construction has yet to be closely examined. This article addresses this omission by exploring the relation between the phantasmatic figures of the “sovereign” and the “witch” in the work of Jean Bodin (1530–96). Early modern concepts of “witchcraft” and its prosecution have a constitutive relation to (theo)political sovereignty, modern gender relations, and the birth of the nation-state. Reading Bodin’s work on witchcraft alongside those on sovereignty, tolerance, and the household, I argue that the demonological witch forms a self-consolidating other at the foundation of modern constructions of sovereignty, tolerance, and the (cishetero)normative family – an excess or absence that reinforces and destabilizes gendered, sexual, political, juridical, and religious hierarchies that continue to influence the present. In doing so, I demonstrate that sovereignty rests on a demonological foundation.     

Free Christian Speech: Plundering Foucault

Abstract

This article explores the meaning of free speech through an analysis of Michael Foucault's lectures on parrhesia in order to show how questions of freedom are bound up with questions of truth. The activity of speaking freely is a function of truth-telling rather than merely subject to regulative principles that underwrite claims of sovereignty. The Christian proclamation of the gospel extends Foucault's insights into a theological register and supplies a foil for considering some of the shortcomings of his constructive proposal. By surveying parrhesia in the New Testament, together with some attendant political implications, this article attempts to explain the political transformation enacted by those who bear witness to the gospel without sovereign benefits. The freedom of such speech, it is asserted, is irrespective of these benefits.     

De facto,displaced, tacit: The sovereign articulations of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile

Based on ethnographic research on exiled Tibetan political institutions and practices in India, this paper investigates sovereignty in exile. The Tibetan Government-in-Exile (TGiE) remains internationally unrecognised and lacks de jure sovereignty over territory in both Tibet and in exile. However, this exiled administration claims legitimacy as the official representative of the Tibetan population, performs a number of state-like functions in relation to its diasporic ‘citizenry’ and attempts to make its voice heard within the international community. Rejecting arguments that such entities should be viewed merely as discrepant forms of political practice, this paper asserts that the state, sovereignty, and territory can be conceptually disentangled, opening up the theoretical possibility of entities other than territorial states claiming sovereignty. In teasing apart and problematising constituent elements of sovereignty, this paper focuses on three aspects of the TGiE's articulations of sovereignty: its claims to and production of legitimacy, authority and de facto sovereignty; its displaced sovereignty and strategies of territorial governance over non-contiguous spaces in exile; and the mediation of its ambiguous relationship with the host state India through practices of tacit sovereignty.     

Not Quite an Insider—A Scottish Perspective on a Future Coronation

Abstract

Post devolution, Scotland is ‘a bit different’, but how does that relate to a coronation? A Scottish sense of exclusion from the English establishment's assumptions of UK dominance might be a way into developing forms that are more widely inclusive. In this article, two distinctively Scottish models—of sovereignty and of being a national church—are offered as bases for exploring the shape of a coronation that tries to express who we all are. The theological understanding of sovereignty which was a key contribution from the churches to the debate on devolution sees the sovereignty of God entrusted to the community of the realm, and entrusted by that community to whatever institutions they deem appropriate; this might be a starting point for planning a coronation. The self-understanding of the Church of Scotland as a national church cherishing its independence from state control and with less ‘stake’ in the monarchy might prompt a different church-state relationship to be expressed in a coronation.     

Extracting sovereignty: Capital, territory, and gold mining in Tanzania

In contemporary discussions of “resource nationalism,” sovereignty is often imagined as the exclusive control of national states over internal resources in opposition to external foreign capital. In this paper, we seek to draw attention to the specifically national territorial forms of sovereignty that - rather than hindering the flow of capital - become constitutive to the accumulation of resource wealth by states and capital alike. Drawing from political geographical theorizations of sovereignty, we argue that resource sovereignty cannot be territorially circumscribed within national space and institutionally circumscribed within the state apparatus. Rather, sovereignty must be understood in relational terms to take into account the global geography of non-state actors that shape access to and control over natural resources. Specifically, we engage national-scale state sovereignty over subterranean mineral resources in the form of legal property regimes and examine the mutually constitutive set of interdependencies between mining capital and landlord states in the accumulation of resource wealth. Using Tanzania as a case study, we argue that national-scale ownership of subterranean mineral resources has been critical to attracting global flows of mining capital from colonial to contemporary times. We first examine the history of the colonial state in Tanganyika to illustrate how land and mineral rights were adjudicated through the power of the colonial state with the hopes of attracting foreign capital investment in the mining sector. We then examine contemporary efforts on the part of the independent United Republic of Tanzania to again enact legislation meant to attract foreign mining companies - and the consequences for local populations living near sites of extraction.     

Graduated sovereignty and global governance gaps: Special economic zones and the illicit trade in tobacco products

Illicit trade in tobacco products has been a significant problem globally for many years. It allows cigarettes to be sold far below their legal price and thus contributes to higher consumption, morbidity and mortality, and deprives state treasuries of a substantial amount of revenue. This article identifies special economic zones (SEZs), particularly free trade zones, as a key conduit for this illicit trade. The development of SEZs as weak points in the global governance architecture is explained with reference to the concept of ‘graduated sovereignty’, whereby the uniform management of territory by modern states has given way to a more spatially selective form of territorial governance, in which some slices of territory are more fully integrated into the world economy than others via various forms of differential regulation. Attempts to comprehensively (re)regulate SEZs, in the face of growing evidence of the dysfunctionalities that they can engender, have so far been unsuccessful. It is concluded that the neo-liberal global economy has facilitated a regulatory ‘race to the bottom’, a problem that can only ultimately be overcome by international negotiation and agreement.     

The Struggle for La Sierra: Sovereignty,property, and rights in the San Luis Valley

In 2002 the Colorado Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent in Lobato v. Taylor by awarding Hispano heirs to the Mexican-era Sangre de Cristo Land Grant renewed access rights to that grant's former communal land for grazing, timber, and firewood. Placing Lobato in historical context, this paper examines the contingent emergence of sovereignty and private property in the San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado through acts of violence, land loss, and dispossession. The paper argues that sovereignty and property, as forms of boundary drawing, are unfinished and contested projects rather than abstract, achieved universals. U.S. sovereignty in the San Luis Valley has emerged contingently through the iteration of private property, as struggles over resource access have produced sovereign effects. Such a perspective makes visible how Lobato has reiterated private property rights and U.S. sovereignty in ways that create new exclusions, even as the case returns access rights to the commons.     

A false dichotomy? The binationalism debate and the future of divided Jerusalem

Divided cities within contested states are a category in their own right, in that their division is driven by issues of national sovereignty as well as ethnic, religious and linguistic cleavages. Reconstituting them as integrated urban spaces, therefore, requires policy shifts on many levels—local, municipal and state—but too often these are hampered by fears of loss of sovereignty and external domination. The case of Jerusalem in the Palestinian‐Israeli conflict is a prime example of how national sovereignty issues can be seen as having an impact upon urban divisions. One option that is proposed for the resolution of this conflict, which has generated intense debate on both sides, is that of a binational Israeli‐Palestinian state. This article argues that there is a false dichotomy concerning the competing benefits of binational and two‐state models in the Palestinian‐Israeli conflict. It contends, on the one hand, that the binational model comprises many forms, some of which are more confederal in structure. On the other hand, for the two state model to function effectively a high degree of interstate coordination is required which brings it close to some forms of confederalism. The article examines the discussions on divided Jerusalem to explore this argument and highlights the degree of interstate coordination that is required if any of the plans being put forward for the future of the city are to work. It concludes by relating the Jerusalem example to the wider issue of divided cities in contested states.     

What makes sovereignty a relative concept? Empirical approaches to international society

Sovereignty takes on many forms today. Legalistic and absolute conditions of sovereignty have dominated in theoretical reasoning and its practical applications whereas empirical attributes of statehood and relative sovereignty conceptualisations have generally been neglected. Yet, the quantification of empirical sovereignty would give us a few ways to compare and contrast the different degrees of internal and external sovereignty and demonstrate the ‘differences of being sovereign’ among internationally recognised states, de facto states, autonomous regions, dependent territories and governments-in-exile. All these entities display their internal and external attributes of sovereignty, which results in power (efficiency of governance) or symbols (representation of ideas). This paper highlights the need to pay more attention to the empirical aspects of sovereignty – it has to be complemented with the facts on the ground – and shows how to operationalise the relative concept of sovereignty. Ignoring the empirical aspects of sovereignty, or spurning the time-honoured requirement of recognition, is bound to lead to the emergence of failed states.     

The coloniality of disaster: Race,empire, and the temporal logics of emergency in Puerto Rico,USA

This essay uses the case of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to discuss “the coloniality of disaster”: how catastrophic events like hurricanes, earthquakes, but also other forms political and economic crisis deepen the fault lines of long-existing racial and colonial histories. It argues that disaster capitalism needs to be understood as a form of racio-colonial capitalism and that this in turn requires us to question our understandings of both “resilience” and “recovery.” The article focuses on the “wait of disaster” as a temporal logic of state subjugation and on how Puerto Ricans responded to state abandonment through modes of autogestión, or autonomous organizing. It concludes that while resiliency can be coopted in service of a neoliberal recovery, it can also be the site for gestating new forms of sovereignty and new visions of postcolonial recovery.     

Free speech,toleration and equal respect: the Bolt affair in context

It is a rare moment when free speech becomes a potent political issue within the Australian polity. But the Andrew Bolt affair, the Abbott government's subsequent move to repeal §18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth), and its ultimate abandonment of this reform, is one of those moments. This article seeks to place these political events in a broader political and philosophical context, investigating how the conflicts and tensions to which these events gave rise can be understood in terms of competing perspectives within a wider liberal tradition, producing rival imperatives centred on free speech and equal respect. The differing priorities which these competing liberal perspectives placed on free speech and equal respect give rise to two very different conceptions of toleration, and its application within liberal democracies.     

二战后日美之间的冲绳行政权归还交涉

二战后日本政府一直致力于收复冲绳主权。经过日本历届政府多年的努力,到佐藤政权时期日本终于成功地收回了冲绳施政权,并实现了＂撤出核武器和本土一样＂的归还目标。但日本收回的是对冲绳的行政管理权,美军在冲绳不仅依然保有其军事基地,而且还拥有相当的军事行动自由。为此,日美还专门签订一份保障美军行动自由的秘密协定。冲绳问题的解决对于日美两国来说是一次外交上的双赢。它不仅成功解决了二战后日美之间的领土问题,而且成功实现了日美关系的转换。从此日美关系从日本对美依附走向了日美相互依存。     

LEVIATHAN AND KRAKEN: STATES,CORPORATIONS, AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

In our politico-philosophical bestiary, no monster has historically been more prominent than the Leviathan, the whale of the Book of Job, transformed by Hobbes, which has long been ubiquitous as a metaphor or as a signifier in all intellectual traditions touching upon the political. Like the state itself, we argue, the Leviathan has played an outsized role in the way we theorize and imagine relations of sovereignty in the world. This essay seeks to add a new hermeneutical creature to the bestiary: the Kraken. Said to be huge and to lurk in Norway's icy waters, the Kraken first emerged in the accounts of natural philosophers in the eighteenth century, at the very moment when political economy was becoming the premier science of governance in Europe. Leviathan is an emblem of a kind of state that no longer exists and has never existed, and it remains our most potent emblem of the state's reification, a relentlessly compelling figure that has long blinded historians to alternate sovereignties within, across, and outside the physical territories of states. From stateless financial capital to multinational corporations acting like states on the world stage, such forms of sovereignty are an essential feature of the global politics we are now living. These forms are not new, nor is their emblem: the Kraken.     

State Power,Civic Participation and the Urban Frontier: The Politics of the Commons in Karachi

Abstract: A martial state's neoliberal policies opened the nation's frontiers to new forms of globalization. This article investigates the political process that undergirded the military and global capital's sequestration of common land in Karachi and the concomitant contestation by a key civil society organization. Using Foucault's conception of sovereignty and government as an assemblage of authority and strategies of rationalization, this paper analyses the role of state and non‐state actors and changing power configurations in a conflict that surrounded the enclosure of a common and its transformation into a securitized zone of consumption in Karachi's Civil Lines. The conflict highlights the nature of the politics of space and citizenship in Pakistan's primary metropolis.     

Articulated sovereignty: Extending Mozambican state power through the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park

Since its inception in 2001 and subsequent integration into the tri-national Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP), Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP) has been progressively transformed into a functioning wildlife park. Standing behind this transformation has been a profound expansion of Mozambican state power over and through the park. While this reinforces predictions in the early transfrontier conservation literature, it stands in tension with observations that these projects threaten state power. I address this tension by developing the concept of articulated sovereignty, which understands sovereignty as a heterogenous set of powers that are produced through often unequal interactions with other actors, including foreign or extra-territorial actors. In short, sovereignty is articulated through these interactions. I draw from this to show that the same partnerships that seem to threaten sovereignty in some respects in fact shore up the power of the Mozambican state in other respects. I focus in particular on the foreign-assistance-enabled extension of state power through the development of legal and technical capacity, park administration and infrastructure, a ranger force, and the relocation of communities beyond park borders. I additionally draw on articulated sovereignty to show that the state and territory, like sovereignty, are built through various articulations with extra-territorial partners, thus drawing into question the sovereignty-state-territory triad. I close by reflecting on the utility of articulated sovereignty beyond the realm of conservation. In short, articulated sovereignty sheds light on both the sovereignty complexities of transfrontier conservation projects like the LNP/GLTP and how sovereignty actually plays out in the world.     

Prospects for a Distinctly Scottish Planning in a Post-sovereign Age

Debates on the sovereignty of the State and the role of (sub-national) regions have moved on quickly in recent years spurred on by interest in the implications of globalization and (more recently) devolution. Reductionist perspectives on the 'death of State sovereignty' have given way to more balanced understandings that emphasize bottom-up and top-down influences upon State restructuring. Yet the impacts of a changing sovereignty upon policy areas are still largely unknown. This paper seeks to add to these debates and cast some light on potential influences upon and autonomy of the Scottish Parliament vis-à-vis land use planning. The paper argues that despite expectations of policy divergence from academics and practitioners the Scottish Parliament has taken a modest approach to land use planning which mirrors that in the rest of the UK. Yet, the reasons for this are only partly explained by the 'death of the State' theses. Significantly, there is evidence of an expectation of reduced sovereignty which has had an impact upon the anticipation of change. In addition, party political loyalty, ideology, the mechanics of the devolution settlement and the fragmented nature of sovereignty have driven the agenda for planning under the Scottish Parliament all of which point towards a further convergence.     

Muslim Political Theology Before and After Empire: Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl’s Station of Leadership (Manṣab-i Imāmat)*

ABSTRACT

This essay examines an important yet hitherto unexplored early-nineteenth century Indo-Persian work of Muslim political theology Station of Leadership (Man?ab-i Imāmat; also known as Darājāt-i Imāmat), written by the towering and contentious Sunnī thinker and political theorist from Delhi Shāh Mu?ammad Ismā?īl (d. 1831). In this hugely critical though lesser known of Ismā?īl’s texts, he sought to detail a theory and framework of ideal forms of Muslim political orders and leaders. Man?ab-i Imāmat presents a fascinating example of a text of Muslim political theology composed during a moment marked by a crisis of sovereignty as South Asia gradually yet decisively transitioned from Mughal to British rule. In this essay, through a close reading of Man?ab-i Imāmat, I aim to bring into view a vision of Muslim political thought and understanding of sovereignty that exceed and subvert the modern privileging of a territorial conception of the nation-state as the centerpiece of politics. I show that while tethered to an imperial Muslim political theology that assumed Islam’s superiority over and subsumption of other religious identities and traditions, sovereign power for Ismā?īl indexed not territorial sovereignty but the maintenance of Muslim markers of distinction in the public performance of everyday religious life.