The necessary indeterminacy of self‐determination: Politics,law and conflict in the Horn of Africa

This article frames a themed collection on Nationalism and Self‐determination in the Horn of Africa. It demonstrates how the praxis of self‐determination in the Horn of Africa has contributed to normative developments. On the basis of case studies of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan/South Sudan this article argues that nationalism and self‐determination have had different meanings in the political cultures across the different countries and have changed over time. We contend that such indeterminacy is unavoidable and should be welcomed. Nationalism is driven by historical circumstances that are contingent and often transitory. Self‐determination claims based on such nationalism are equally contingent and transitory. When the principle of self‐determination gets translated into concrete legal entitlements (for instance, a referendum on independence), it tends to solve one problem only by creating others. Instead, the pursuit and realization of self‐determination require constant political processes.     

Offshoreness, Globalization and Sovereignty: A Postmodern Geo-Political Economy?

Processes of globalization rework sovereignty as the ordering principle of the international political economy, creating new geographies of power. Such a reworking is most apparent offshore, a site where sovereignty is unbundled. The principle of sovereignty is maintained in the offshore financial centres' legal sovereignty but relinquished in terms of their fiscal powers. This unbundling articulates the state system and the capitalist economy. Such an unbundling is possible because sovereignty is based upon property rights. Changes in the practices and understandings of property rights change the meaning of sovereignty, altering the principle of differentiation which shapes the international political economy. In this way, the paradoxical marginality and centrality of offshoreness to the dynamics of the international political economy is explained.     

Self‐determination and a shattered star: Statehood and national identity in the Somali Horn of Africa

This article explores the articulation—in different forms, at different periods, and by different actors—of ‘national self‐determination’ in Somalia and across the Somali‐speaking regions of the Horn of Africa. It explores how this concept can be understood in the context of protracted political fragmentation in Somalia—considering unresolved debates over the ideological foundations of state reconstruction, disagreements about the suitability of federalism, aspirations for the recognition of an independent Republic of Somaliland, and the distinctive trajectory of the Somali Regional State in Ethiopia. Taking a comparative, cross‐border and wide‐angled historical approach, the article argues that ideas of an ethno‐linguistically, culturally and religiously defined Somali ‘nation’ continue to coexist (and be reproduced, updated and used) within an environment of extreme political fragmentation and across multiple ‘state’ boundaries. This argument is made through comparative analysis of contemporary examples of the performance of Somali state and nationalist identities within and beyond the region and the distinctive transnational Somali‐language media environment within which these ideas circulate and compete.     

Sovereignty from ‘ground zero’: Power through performance in independent South Sudan

Through a reading of the South Sudanese independence ceremony as a ritual of statehood, I show how state actors in South Sudan declared and performed their claim to sovereignty in the face of extraordinary challenge. Central to their performance was their rendering of a national chronotope and their assertion of what I call rebel sovereignty: their articulation of themselves as both saviours from oppression and legitimate wielders of state power. State actors' equal appeal to local antipathy to centralised power and international norms of statehood, as well as their performative redefinition of international undermining as partnership, demonstrates the necessity of contemporary sovereign performance to define both the content and context of extant political realities. More broadly, the ritual demonstrates the performative basis of sovereignty and the increasing necessity of sovereign aspirants to acknowledge the impossibility of sovereign control and redefine challenges and critiques of this power as they assert it.     

Democracy and Conflict in Post-apartheid Southern Africa: Dilemmas of Social Change in Small States

The article examines the process of political change in the small southern African kingdoms of Lesotho and Swaziland. After an overview of the post-colonial political and economic history of the two states, the author analyses the pressures for, and resistance to, political liberalization and shows how moves in this direction have failed to assauge internal conflict, and indeed, have in some respects exacerbated such conflict. The intervention of outside actors in the attempt to resolve conflict poses a danger to the fragile national sovereignty of these states.     

There is Something of One (God): Lacan and Political Theology

Abstract

For both Lacan and Badiou, Plato's Parmenides is a primary locus for the question of the One. Moreover, for both Lacan and Badiou, the One ultimately takes on political valence, as key to the problematics of representation and the discursive conditions of collectivity. However, unlike Badiou, Lacan's exploration of the question of One also passes through theology— through what I am calling "something of One God"— and I want to argue that it is only by bringing the One into explicit relationship with those monotheistic issues that we can fully understand its implications for analytic discourse and political life. Lacan's thinking on the "something of One" takes a necessary swerve back through a theological problematic, and in the process articulates the terms of a political theology, an essential conjunction of political and religious understandings of sovereignty, subjectivity and collectivity.     

Building Bridges of Memory: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Cultural Politics of Maternal Memories

In this article, I explore the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo as a site through which social memories are transmitted and connected to the realities of Argentina’s present. The conjuncture or disjuncture between people’s direct and individual memories of the past, their memory of the society’s collective past, and the “official” history can be used as a prism for seeing how power, and resistance, work through and reinforce a complex political economy. By giving testimony and re‐contextualizing the events of the dictatorship, the Mothers have been able to challenge the historical narratives of the state and construct competing ones. Furthermore, the present‐day activism and goals of the Mothers, as individuals and as a collective, are based on political commitments that have arisen in great part out of maternal relationships and maternal memories. Their maternal memories have led to a re‐signification of neoliberalism as a type of structural violence.     

Political Globalisation and the Politics of International Non-governmental Organisations: The Case of Village Democracy in China

Although there is a body of research regarding the development of village self-governance in China, there is only limited research regarding the activity of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in relation to this development. The paper fills this gap through an analysis of the activities and effects of the village self-governance programs of three American-based NGOs: the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Carter Center and the Ford Foundation. These NGOs have assisted in the implementation of a number of reforms to village self-governance in China. NGO involvement in village democracy in China exemplifies a process of 'political globalisation' that involves the intermingling of layers of power and interests at the national and international levels. The paper concludes that, through this process of political globalisation, rural political reforms in China are both promoted and exploited by national and international political actors.     

The Development Impact of NGO Activities in the Red Sea Province of Sudan: A Critique

This article examines the results of, and the prospects for, the declared shift of NGOs from relief operations to development activities in the Red Sea Province of eastern Sudan. Statistical and qualitative information contained in the reports of NGOs themselves provides the main data source on which the analysis is based. Although NGOs have been successful in conducting massive relief operations in the area, the article asserts that they have not yet and are not expected to achieve any tangible results on the development front. The main reason for this is the apparent misconception of development on the part of the NGOs as an isolated, localized activity which they can perform; another is the NGOs' failure to recognize the difference in the methods, means and prerequisites necessary for relief and for development; a third is the failure of NGOs to equip local institutions to absorb and/or sustain any achieved ‘development’, since most NGOs operate in complete isolation from governmental and traditional Beja institutions.     

How losers can turn into winners in disputatious public policy: a heuristic for prospective herestheticians

The study of heresthetic is a quest to explain how potential political losers might become winners. Local Government amalgamation is invariably a controversial and hotly contested political decision. It thus represents the ideal context to locate a pedagogical discussion regarding how clever herestheticians might act to bring about unlikely political success. Specifically, we extend the heresthetic literature by drawing attention to the costs (opportunity, contingency and legacy costs) inherent to various strategies, the need to carefully evaluate the heresthetic potential of different dimensions according to which amalgamations might be argued, and the importance of ensuring that the rhetorical seasoning is appropriate. This leads us to propose a heuristic that we argue has the potential to turn losers into winners on the vexed matter of local government amalgamations. We conclude by considering the implications of our heuristic for both prospective herestheticians in other public policy areas and for the wider heresthetic research agenda.     

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.     

Environmental Justice and American Indian Tribal Sovereignty: Case Study of a Land–Use Conflict in Skull Valley, Utah

This paper examines environmental justice in the context of questions of American–Indian tribal sovereignty through an analysis of a land–use dispute over the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians' decision to host a high–level radioactive waste facility on their reservation in Tooele County, Utah. The case study entails a far more intricate story than that presented in the majority of existing literature, which is dominated by analytical frameworks of environmental racism and distributive environmental justice. By elucidating the historical geography of Skull Valley and politics of tribal sovereignty, I argue that a prolonged process of historical colonialism has produced a landscape of injustice in which the tribe's choices have been structurally limited. The historical colonialism, intertwining with the capitalist political economy, has geopolitically isolated the tribe to suffer procedural environmental injustice. At the same time, the tribe has struggled to pursue self–determination through the retention of sovereignty and Goshute identity in the arenas of tribal environmental management and the environmental–justice movement. Conflict over the definition and practice of tribal sovereignty at different geographical scales reveals the social, historical, and political–economic complexity of environmental justice.     

Ethnobotanies of refusal: Methodologies in respecting plant(ed)-human resistance

Elaborating on conversational exchanges with a Brazilian shaman about biopiracy and interweaving scholarly literature from the ontological and ‘botanical’ turn, the author examines the disciplinary as well as the political ramifications of plant healers and practitioners – particularly indigenous ones – going largely uncited in plant-centred discussions. In Brazil, indigenous claims for territory and political sovereignty gain traction when they are linked to cultural patrimony. Highlighting ayahuasca as an example of the way that certain plants and people can be involved in collaborative survival, the author demonstrates the entwined semiotic-material stakes of the botanical turn within claims for traditional knowledge and territory. Her analysis frames possible ethnobotanies and methodologies of refusal in respecting plant(ed)-human resistance.     

The Rich,the Powerful and the Endangered: Conservation Elites,Networks and the Dominican Republic

Abstract: This paper explores conservation as an elite process in the Dominican Republic. It begins by showing how conservation at a global level is an elite process, driven by a small powerful elite. Looking at the Dominican Republic, it demonstrates how the extraordinary levels of protection have been achieved by a small network of well connected individuals, who have been able to shape conservation as they like, while limiting the involvement by the large international conservation NGOs who are considered so dominant throughout Latin America. Despite this, conservation both globally and in the Dominican Republic is shown to share similar political structures and the same lack of critique of capitalism or its environmental impacts.     

The gender dimension of the agrarian transition: women,men and livelihood diversification in two peri-urban farming communities in the Philippines

Based on parallel field research conducted in two peri-urban villages in the cities of Naga and Valencia, the Philippines, this article deploys gender analysis to understand livelihood diversification in the context of agrarian change. In analyzing the role of state organizations and NGOs in (re)producing gender differences, hierarchies, roles and identities within agrarian settings, it brings poststructuralist and postcolonial theory into conversation with political economy to explore how gender is at stake in daily livelihood struggles. Specifically, attention is drawn to how structural constraints and institutional discourses still render livelihood diversification a gendered project, and how state and other development organizations are continuing to perpetuate gender inequalities and reinscribe normative gender discourses, particularly around masculinities and women's reproductive roles, in agrarian communities.     

Islamisation and politics in Sudan

Sudan achieved an Islamic revolution recently without violence. Through a ‘creeping’ revolution that started in the 1970s, Islamic fundamentalists have consolidated their power through wealth and systematic control of the civil service, the economy, the judiciary and the armed forces. The fact that the major political parties in northern Sudan, except the Communist Party, have been affiliated to religious sects does not mean all Muslims support the Sharia. Fundamentalists comprise 20% of Sudan's Muslim population, but they are richer, better organised and more highly motivated. The implementation of the Sharia has been accompanied by the entrenchment of dictatorial rule, a weakening of institutions, the erosion of civil liberties, the aggravation of the civil war in southern Sudan and an ever‐worsening economic malaise. The revolution has also caused apprehension in Washington and some African and Arab states, but there is as yet no evidence that Sudan poses a direct threat to its neighbours.     

Mobile sovereignty: The case of ‘boat people’ in Australia

State sovereignty, in terms of the organisation and expression of political authority by nation states, is traditionally interpreted as a political container that is being weakened by increasing human and non-human mobilities. However recent research indicates that states are themselves becoming more mobile as executive bodies move and sovereign spaces are tactically reduced and expanded to intercept and control global mobilities. While challenging dichotomous notions of mobility and sovereignty, such research frames the movements of governments, territory and sovereign agents as the tactics of already established states. This paper builds on extant research by drawing on both a mobile ontology and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty to examine how mobilities constitute modern state sovereignty. To do so I examine Australian sovereignty and the related material and symbolic exclusion of asylum seekers arriving by boat. My analysis finds that mobilities, in terms of material movements and their representation, are essential to the construction of Australian sovereignty and the position of maritime asylum seekers as its outsider and limit identity. Through their mobile interception and management, and their representation as mobile ‘others’, maritime asylum seekers are used to create sovereign borders between specific types of movement; between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (im)mobilities. I argue that this form of state sovereignty is disarticulated from space and follows populations who construct territories as being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the Australian state as they move.     

Scaling up Civil Society: Donor Money,NGOs and the Pastoralist Land Rights Movement in Tanzania

Tanzania's pastoralist land rights movement began with local resistance to the alienation of traditional grazing lands in Maasai and Barabaig communities. While these community–based social movements were conducted through institutions and relationships that local people knew and understood, they were not co–ordinated in a comprehensive fashion and their initial effectiveness was limited. With the advent of liberalization in the mid–1980s, they began to gain institutional legitimacy through the registration of pastoralist Non–Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Registered NGOs provided community leaders with a formal mechanism for co–ordinating local land movements and for advocating for land rights at the international level. The connections of pastoralist NGOs to disenfranchised communities, and their incorporation of traditional cultural institutions into modern institutional structures, resonated with the desires of international donors to support civil society and to create an effective public sphere in Tanzania, making these NGOs an attractive focus for donor funding. In spite of their good intentions, however, donors frequently overlooked the institutional impacts of their assistance on the pastoralist land rights movement and the formation of civil society in pastoralist communities. NGO leaders have become less accountable to their constituent communities, and the movement itself has lost momentum as its energies have been diverted into activities that can be justified in donor funding reports. A political movement geared towards specific outcomes has been transformed into group of apolitical institutions geared toward the process of donor funding cycles.     

East Timor and the new humanitarian interventionism

The fate of East Timor provides a barometer for how far the normative structure of international society has been transformed since the end of the Cold War. In 1975, the East Timorese were abandoned by a Western bloc that placed accommodating the Indonesian invasion of the island before the protection of human rights. Twenty‐five years later, it was the protection of the civilian population on the island that loomed large in the calculations of these same states. Australia, which had sacrificed the rights of the people of East Timor on the altar of good relations with Indonesia, found itself leading an intervention force that challenged the old certainties of its ‘Jakarta first’ policy. The article charts the interplay of domestic and international factors that made this normative transformation possible. The authors examine the political and economic factors that led to the agreement in May 1999 between Portugal, Indonesia and the UN to hold a referendum on the future political status of East Timor. A key question is whether the international community should have done more to assure the security of the ballot process. The authors argue that while more could have been done by Australia, the United States and officials in the UN Secretariat to place this issue on the Security Council's agenda, it is highly unlikely that the international community would have proved capable of mobilizing the political will necessary to coerce Indonesia into accepting a peacekeeping force. The second part of the article looks at how the outbreak of the violence in early September 1999 fundamentally changed these political assumptions. The authors argue that it became politically possible to employ coercion against Indonesian sovereignty in a context in which the Habibie government was viewed as having failed to exercise sovereignty with responsibility. By focusing on the economic and military sanctions employed by Western states, the pressures exerted by the international financial institutions and the intense diplomatic activity at the UN and in Jakarta, the authors show how Indonesian political and military leaders were prevailed upon to accept an international force. At the same time, Australian reporting of the atrocities and how this prompted the Howard government to an intervention that challenged traditional conceptionsof Australia's vital interests, is considered. The conclusion reflects on how thiscase supports the claim that traditional notions of sovereignty are increasinglyconstrained by norms of humanitarian responsibility.     

Performing refugeeness in the Czech Republic: gendered depoliticisation through NGO assistance

The article examines the gender micropolitics of non-governmental assistance to refugees in the Czech Republic – a post-socialist society which is becoming a country of immigration. It critically examines relations of power between refugees and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These NGOs act as mediators between refugees and the state, media, wider public and academic production of knowledge. It is argued that despite the important roles they play in securing refugees' access to rights, their assistance is often perceived as problematic by refugees. The article analyses these relations in a wider context of the institutions of the refugee system where the state has increasing power in defining the conditions under which NGO assistance to refugees is provided. The study is based on qualitative research among recognised refugees from the former Soviet Union living in the Czech Republic and local NGOs assisting them with integration into society. I demonstrate how particular forms of assistance and public representation depoliticise refugees in a sense of fostering rather than challenging unequal power relations that lock refugees in a position of clients lacking political means of influencing their place in a receiving society. This is done by conceptualising ‘a refugee’ as a performative identity that is being produced and enacted in feminised NGO spaces. The analysis highlights refugees' critical reflections on their position in the relations of assistance.