Sovereignty Revisited
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ANRV287-AN35-16 ARI 13 August 2006 7:22 Sovereignty Revisited Thomas Blom Hansen1 and Finn Stepputat2 1Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8277; email: [email protected] 2Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen DK-1401, Denmark; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2006. 35:295–315 Key Words First published online as a Review in political anthropology, violence, kingship, authority, body, Advance on June 7, 2006 government The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at anthro.annualreviews.org Abstract This article’s doi: Sovereignty has returned as a central concern in anthropology. This 10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123317 reinvention seeks to explore de facto sovereignty, i.e., the ability to Copyright c 2006 by Annual Reviews. kill, punish, and discipline with impunity. The central proposition All rights reserved is a call to abandon sovereignty as an ontological ground of power 0084-6570/06/1021-0295$20.00 and order in favor of a view of sovereignty as a tentative and al- Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2006.35:295-315. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org ways emergent form of authority grounded in violence. After a brief account of why the classical work on kingship failed to provide an adequate matrix for understanding the political imaginations of a world after colonialism, three theses on sovereignty—modern and premodern—are developed. We argue that although effective legal Access provided by Stanford University - Main Campus Robert Crown Law Library on 11/12/20. For personal use only. sovereignty is always an unattainable ideal, it is particularly tenuous in many postcolonial societies where sovereign power historically was distributed among many forms of local authority. The last sec- tion discusses the rich new field of studies of informal sovereign- ties: vigilante groups, strongmen, insurgents, and illegal networks. Finally, the relationship between market forces, outsourcing, and new configurations of sovereign power are explored. 295 ANRV287-AN35-16 ARI 13 August 2006 7:22 INTRODUCTION and the state in the 1990s has been heavily indebted to Foucault’s attempt to cut off the The current reevaluation of the meanings of King’s head in the social sciences (Foucault NGO: sovereignty—critically informed by the work 1980) and to develop a nonessentialist on- nongovernmental of Giorgio Agamben—resonates in profound tology of power beyond notions of origins organizations ways with an intensified global crisis of the and centers or the continuity of cultural nation-state as the main vehicle of sovereign forms. power. The triumph of a Foucauldian view of Transnational corporations, the “soft” power has in many ways created an impasse global network power of nongovernmental of its own. If power is dispersed throughout organizations (NGOs) and Internet commu- society, in institutions, disciplines, and rituals nities, as well as the proliferation of ethnic of self-making, how do we, for instance, ac- conflicts in the post–Cold War age seemed to count for the proliferation of legal discourse undermine the naturalness of the idea of na- premised on the widespread popular idea of tional sovereignty in the 1990s. The aftermath the state as a center of society, a central leg- of 9/11 made it clear that national sovereignty, islator, and an adjudicator? How do we un- war, and security regimes still remained the derstand popular mythologies of power, cor- hard kernel of modern states. It was also clear, ruption, secrecy, and evil as emanating from however, that the new threat to the estab- certain centers, people, or hidden domains? lished world order would come from forces How do we interpret how violence destroys that were difficult to conceptualize—highly social ties but also produces informal author- mobile, evanescent, and resolutely global net- ity? How can we understand war as a totalizing works, akin to what Deleuze & Guattari (1987 logic of life and society, as Foucault himself [1980]) call “nomadic war machines,” rhi- pointed out in the late 1970s (2003)? zomes of force ( puissance) that leave institu- The return to sovereignty, often via tionalized power ( pouvoir) highly vulnerable. Agamben’s writings on banished life ( There is no clearer example of the paradoxes homo ), desymbolized and “bare,” as the in- of sovereignty in the twenty-first century than sacer cluded outside upon which a community or Iraq since the United States–led invasion in a society constitutes itself and its moral or- 2003. Here, multiple, fragile, and contested der (Agamben 1998), promises a new and centers of military might, welfare, and ethno- fruitful focalization—maybe another strate- religious and local loyalties claim sovereignty gic reductionism—of ongoing debates on the over people and land—both legal sovereignty nature of power and violence. as in the legitimate right to govern and de In the following, we offer an interpreta- facto sovereignty as the right over life (to pro- tion of what has prompted this revisiting of tect or to kill with impunity). Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2006.35:295-315. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org sovereignty as a central concern in anthropol- Recent work on sovereignty addresses, and ogy; what possibilities this move has offered; maybe transcends, two long-standing theo- and which new fields of inquiry it promises retical impasses in anthropology: the decline to open. This revisiting differs from the past of political anthropology with its emphasis endeavors in anthropology, and from the de- on kingship, sacrifice, and ritual in “primi- Access provided by Stanford University - Main Campus Robert Crown Law Library on 11/12/20. For personal use only. bates on sovereignty in political science and tive” societies. This once influential strand history, in two important respects: It is, in in anthropological debates was so steeped in the main, oriented toward exploring de facto an ahistorical mode of analysis that it all but sovereignty, i.e., the ability to kill, punish, disappeared with the emergence of historical and discipline with impunity wherever it is anthropology and the many critiques of colo- found and practiced, rather than sovereignty nialism since the 1980s. The subsequent rein- grounded in formal ideologies of rule and vention of the anthropology of the political legality. This does not preclude studies of 296 Hansen · Stepputat ANRV287-AN35-16 ARI 13 August 2006 7:22 legal practices or state practices but may help be every bit as destabilizing to formal and le- to reorient such studies away from the law as gal notions of sovereignty as ethnography has text, or the courtroom spectacle, toward ex- been with respect to the idea of religion, the ploring more quotidian notions of justice, of state, and the market. “legal consciousness,” and of punishment as We start with a brief and critical account they occur in everyday life. The key move we of why the political anthropology inspired propose is to abandon sovereignty as an onto- by Frazer, Hocart, and Evans-Pritchard pro- logical ground of power and order, expressed duced many striking insights but failed to pro- in law or in enduring ideas of legitimate rule, vide an adequate matrix for understanding the in favor of a view of sovereignty as a tenta- political imaginations of a world after colo- tive and always emergent form of authority nialism. We also offer a brief assessment of grounded in violence that is performed and how various assumptions about sovereignty designed to generate loyalty, fear, and legiti- persisted, if rarely in an enunciated form, in macy from the neighborhood to the summit much of the influential work on colonialism of the state. and its legacies. The anthropology of colo- The second difference is the focus on the nialism has demonstrated that the anxieties of body as the site of, and object of, sovereign colonial rule were centered on its body pol- power. Agamben’s work has made it possi- itics, the imprinting of rule on the bodies of ble to understand that it is not only the King natives, and the protection of white bodies: who has two bodies, a natural body and a po- the fears of miscegenation, the performance of litical body as in medieval political theology European dignity, the presentation of the Eu- (Kantorowicz 1957). This duality is a general- ropean family and domesticity, the taming and ized condition in modern societies where the disciplining of immoral practices, etc. We also citizen has an included body, a body that has suggest that through the lens of sovereignty in itself (habeas corpus) and an array of rights by practice, colonial rule appears less hegemonic virtue of its inclusion into the political com- and effective than in its self-presentations in munity, and simultaneously a biological body, official texts and plans. A key feature of the a life that can be stripped of symbolization colonial world was that different kinds and and humanity and reduced to “bare life” by registers of sovereignty coexisted and over- decree or bio-political fiat. This is, Agamben lapped. Most modern states claim effective le- shows, the nature of modern sovereign power gal sovereignty over a territory and its popula- of which the camp, designed for extermina- tion in the name of the nation and the popular tion, waiting, or infinite detention, is the most will. Although this is always an unattainable poignant expression (see Fiskesjo¨ 2003). The ideal, it is particularly tenuous in many post- larger point is of course that the body is al- colonial societies in which sovereign power Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2006.35:295-315. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org ways the site of performance of sovereign was historically fragmented and distributed power, which becomes most visible in states of among many, mostly informal but effective, war, extreme conditions, fragmentation, and forms of local authority. marginality.