scholarly journals Modular sovereignty and infrastructural power: The elusive materiality of international statebuilding

2021 ◽  
pp. 096701062110519
Author(s):  
Jutta Bakonyi
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chains ◽  
Modular Forms ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Mobile Form ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
International Airport ◽  
Frontier Zone ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
International Statebuilding ◽  
Infrastructural Power

This article uses the example of the Mogadishu International Airport zone and takes a spatio-temporal lens to explore how (sovereign) power unfolds in international interventions that aim at building a sovereign state. I show that the Mogadishu International Airport zone emerges as an elastic frontier zone that contradicts the sovereign imaginary intervenors aim to project and undermines many of the taken-for-granted boundaries that states tend to produce. The Mogadishu International Airport and similar zones emphasize the centrality of logistics and circulation in interventions, but also point towards their temporal and liminal character. Modularity became the material answer to the demand to secure circulation while adapting to the rapid rhythm and short timeframes of statebuilding. Modular designs enable the constant adaptation of the intervention terrain, allow intervenors to deny their power and imprint and facilitate the commercialization of supply chains and intervention materials. Sovereign power that operates through such zones becomes modular itself. It is exercised as an adaptable, in parts exchangeable, and highly mobile form of power that operates through crises and emergencies. The spaces and materials created by modular forms of sovereign power remain elusive, but nonetheless stratify experiences of power and security.

Believe in the Border, or, How to Make Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century Maghrib

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 83-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brock Cutler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Levels Of Abstraction ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Territorial Claims ◽  
Frontier Zone ◽  
Environmental Relations

The Algerian-Tunisian frontier zone was much contested in the late nineteenth century, defying the logic of modernity that sought to establish territoriality. This modernity appeared only through an imbrication of raids, warfare, environmental shifts, and competing territorial claims. The violence of the territorial process, the changing geography of sovereignty, and uncertain frontier delimitation: these and other elements challenge the image of modernity arising in a fixed territory according to a linear chronology. This article argues that modernity in the Maghrib, seen through the lens of territory, is a temporally and spatially variable process: “modern” sovereign power existed only at certain levels of abstraction and within certain environmental relations. To consider modernity in the Maghrib, we will have to see how claims of sovereignty and the process of territorialization were understood by actors operating on local, regional, and imperial scales.

The Sovereign State v Foucault: Law and Disciplinary Power

2000 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole Smith
Keyword(s):  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Case Law ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
And Control ◽  
Foucauldian Analysis

A Foucauldian analysis of discourse and power relations suggests that law and the juridical field have lost their pre-eminent role in government via the delegated exercise of sovereign power. According to Foucault, the government of a population is achieved through the wide dispersal of technologies of power which are relatively invisible and which function in discursive sites and practices throughout the social fabric. Expert knowledge occupies a privileged position in government and its essentially discretionary and norm-governed judgements infiltrate and colonise previous sites of power. This paper sets out to challenge a Foucauldian view that principled law has ceded its power and authority to the disciplinary sciences and their expert practitioners. It argues, with particular reference to case law on sterilisation and caesarean sections, that law and the juridical field operate to manipulate and control expert knowledge to their own ends. In so doing, law continually exercises and re-affirms its power as part of the sovereign state. Far from acting, as Foucault suggests, to provide a legitimating gloss on the subversive operations of technologies of power, law turns the tables and itself operates a form of surveillance over the norm-governed exercise of expert knowledge.

scholarly journals MATERIAL ENTANGLEMENTS OF COMMUNITY SURVEILLANCE & INFRASTRUCTURAL POWER

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren E. Bridges
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chains ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Digital Systems ◽  
Supply Chain Network ◽  
Private Institutions ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Discursive Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Infrastructural Power

Through the case study of Amazon Ring's cameras, this paper explores the deepening material and discursive alliance between public and private institutions in the building of digital infrastructures that support the development of community surveillance. The analysis reveals a complex supply-chain network entangled with histories of settler-colonialism, racialization and gendered inequities. Bolstered by developments in cloud computing, concealing the human and nonhuman supply-chains, these systems are never detached from material inputs; rather, they are embedded in vast infrastructural systems and complex transnational supply chains powered by logics of extraction, circulation and accumulation of capital. I argue that Amazon Ring cameras are an articulation of “infrastructural power” defined by Laleh Khalili (2018: 915) as an assemblage of “practices, discourses, physical fixtures, laws and procedures” with the aim of (re)producing capitalist relations. Through a material and discursive analysis, this paper aims to draw into the light the complex human and non-human entanglements that constitute community surveillance networks in order to move towards an infrastructural critique so that we may more effectively evaluate the social costs of digital systems that can never be detached from their material and human creators.

scholarly journals Borgerkrig fra Athen til Auschwitz:

2015 ◽  
pp. 37-54
Author(s):  
Mikkel Flohr
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Western History ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
Starting Point

The starting point of this article is the concept of civil war in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer-series. In spite of its relative obscurity, Agamben insists that civil war is the fundamental political structure, which has characterized all of Western history since Ancient Greece. As such it constitutes a privileged vantage point from whence it is possible to discern the limitations of his political thought. These limitations originate in his deployment of Carl Schmitt’s state of exception, which serves to include civil war in the sovereign order – this entails that classical modes of political contestation and conflict e.g. revolution, are always already internal to the sovereign state, and can therefore only serve to reaffirm it. The state of exception thus produces an inherent incapacity to think or move beyond the sovereign state. Agamben subsequently attempts to challenge the state of exception albeit with varying degrees of success. This suggest the necessity of taking exception to the exception and explode the conceptual coupling of civil war and sovereign power, in order to create a space where it is possible to think political contestation within or beyond the works of Agamben.

Speaking Back to Sovereign Power

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 474-477
Author(s):  
Timothy Raeymaekers
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Resource Extraction ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Natural Resource Extraction ◽  
Short Commentary ◽  
Long Time ◽  
External Forces

Abstract In this short commentary, I will reflect on the contributions of this special section from an Africanist perspective, which shows both similarities and differences with the South Asian experiences. For a long time, the dogma has been that African states do not wield full sovereign power over their citizens. Because most colonial states did not make any effort to extend administrative presence much beyond urban populations as well as a few sites of natural resource extraction, it is argued, their ability to control and administer territories and populations consequently remained largely irrelevant to the modern conception of sovereignty in Africa. In this short commentary I will try to place Africanist scholarship in comparative perspective by elaborating on postcolonial sovereignties and the way in which these remain nested in both historical and contemporary global formations. Starting from the failed states paradigm, I will dedicate some space to the so-called extraversion argument, or the idea that African sovereignties are predominantly exerted through external forces. I will elaborate finally on more recent work by some anthropologists and historians who focus their attention on how sovereign state institutions actually work in practice.

scholarly journals Effect of agrochemicals on spatio-temporal changes in soil agrochemical properties and yield of broccoli

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalya Vladimirivna Gopp ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Organic Phosphorus ◽  
Total Content ◽  
Temporal Changes ◽  
Soil Horizon ◽  
Mineral Fertilizers ◽  
Mineral Fertilization ◽  
Mobile Form ◽  
Calcium And Magnesium ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Gray Soil

The aim of the study. The aim of the study was to examine the effect of agrochemicals (mineral and organo-mineral fertilizers, plant growth regulators and ameliorants) on the spatio-temporal changes in the properties of agro-gray soil and broccoli yield using a cartographic approach. Methodology. The field experiment was conducted in 2016 at the site located near the Bykovo village in the south-east of West Siberia (54°58 '02.8" N; 83°5'21.45" E, Novosibirsk region). The objects of the study were the agro-gray soil (Luvic Retic Greyzemic Phaeozem (Siltic, Aric)) and the medium-ripe broccoli cabbage variety "Linda". The experiment scheme included the following treatments: (1) Control (without fertilizers), (2) Background (N100P60K160), (3) Background + succinic acid, (4) Background + dolomite, (5) Background + mulch, (6) Organo- mineral fertilizer "Criall". Soil samples were analyzed for the content of organic carbon, nitrates, total, mineral and organic phosphorus, as well as its mobile form; exchangeable potassium, calcium and magnesium, and pH. The dried samples of broccoli inflorescences were analyzed forthe total content of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium and magnesium.Main results. After applying agrochemicals and harvesting broccoli, the variation coefficients of рН, mobile phosphorus, potassium and calcium increased by two or more times. The use of agrochemicals increased the yield and improved the nutritional value of broccoli inflorescences. The treatments with mineral fertilization(2, 3, 4 and 5) the treatment 2 (Background N100P60K160) provided the greatest return. The application of the studied agrochemicals resulted in the negative (acidification, binding of phosphorus, calcium and magnesium) and positive (increase in the content of elements) effects. The immobilization of nutrients (phosphorus, calcium, magnesium) in poorly soluble soil compounds and the respective decrease in the content of the elements’ mobile forms did not have a negative effect on the elemental composition of broccoli inflorescences. Thus, chemical immobilization, leading to the fixation of nutrients in the upper soil horizon, prevents their leaching by melt- and rainwater into the lower horizons.

scholarly journals Spatio-Temporal Economic Properties of Multi-Product Supply Chains

2022 ◽  
pp. 107666
Author(s):  
Philip A. Tominac ◽  
Weiqi Zhang ◽  
Victor M. Zavala
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chains ◽  
Spatio Temporal

scholarly journals Militarised violence in the service of state-imposed emergencies over Palestine and Kenya

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 6-37
Author(s):  
Annie Pfingst
Keyword(s):  
State Violence ◽  
The State ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
States Of Emergency ◽  
Common Practices ◽  
Archival Record ◽  
Shed Light

States of Emergency are declared against the disorder-ing of state sovereign power by acts of resistance, rebellion and revolt and are characterised by the technologies of control, containment and punishment. Through spatial, archival and visual encounters with emergency landscapes and the geographies of resistance, the essay considers the historic and contemporary operations, provisions, regulations and practices authorised under state-imposed emergencies. It does so in order firstly, to bring attention to the practices authorised through state-imposed emergencies and the currency and saliency of their ongoing effects, and secondly to re-frame the militarised violence of settlement/occupation as an integral part of state-imposed emergencies in which all that is necessary will be done to protect the sovereign state from the resistance of the colonised/occupied and to effect a return to ‘order’.   Through encounters with the archival record, and the architectures, remnants and territorial arrangements found in post-colonial Kenya and across the multiple geographies of Palestine, the essay draws out seven clusters of state imposed emergency practices and effects. The work grapples with a number of questions: what is it that a declared state of emergency performs for the state? Does a state of emergency enable particular forms of militarised violence? Are there common practices to be found across different modes of state-imposed emergencies? What is the genealogy to the states of emergency across Palestine and Kenya? Does our excavation of the practices of state-imposed emergency shed light on the ways we apprehend state violence in colonial, post-colonial and neo-colonial geographies? 

scholarly journals A Farewell to Homo Sacer? Sovereign Power and Bare Life in Agamben’s Coronavirus Commentary

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergei Prozorov
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
Normal State ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
Critical Commentary ◽  
Forms Of Life

AbstractThe article addresses Giorgio Agamben’s critical commentary on the global governance of the Covid-19 pandemic as a paradigm of his political thought. While Agamben’s comments have been criticized as exaggerated and conspiratorial, they arise from the conceptual constellation that he has developed starting from the first volume of his Homo Sacer series. At the centre of this constellation is the relation between the concepts of sovereign power and bare life, whose articulation in the figure of homo sacer Agamben traces from the Antiquity to the present. We shall demonstrate that any such articulation is impossible due to the belonging of these concepts to different planes, respectively empirical and transcendental, which Agamben brings together in a problematic fashion. His account of the sovereign state of exception collapses a plurality of empirical states of exception into a zone of indistinction between different exceptional states and the normal state and then elevates this very indistinction to the transcendental condition of intelligibility of politics as such. Conversely, the notion of bare life, originally posited as the transcendental condition of possibility of positive forms of life, is recast as an empirical figure, whose sole form is the absence of form. We conclude that this problematic articulation should be abandoned for a theory that rather highlights the non-relation between sovereign power and bare life, which conditions the possibility of resistance and transformation that remains obscure in Agamben’s thought.

E3 ubiquitin ligases

2005 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 15-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen C. Ardley ◽  
Philip A. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Protein Complexes ◽  
Loss Of Function ◽  
Direct Role ◽  
Cellular Processes ◽  
Substrate Protein ◽  
Protein Ubiquitination ◽  
C Terminus ◽  
Full Complement ◽  
Spatio Temporal ◽  
Eukaryotic Organisms

The selectivity of the ubiquitin–26 S proteasome system (UPS) for a particular substrate protein relies on the interaction between a ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme (E2, of which a cell contains relatively few) and a ubiquitin–protein ligase (E3, of which there are possibly hundreds). Post-translational modifications of the protein substrate, such as phosphorylation or hydroxylation, are often required prior to its selection. In this way, the precise spatio-temporal targeting and degradation of a given substrate can be achieved. The E3s are a large, diverse group of proteins, characterized by one of several defining motifs. These include a HECT (homologous to E6-associated protein C-terminus), RING (really interesting new gene) or U-box (a modified RING motif without the full complement of Zn2+-binding ligands) domain. Whereas HECT E3s have a direct role in catalysis during ubiquitination, RING and U-box E3s facilitate protein ubiquitination. These latter two E3 types act as adaptor-like molecules. They bring an E2 and a substrate into sufficiently close proximity to promote the substrate's ubiquitination. Although many RING-type E3s, such as MDM2 (murine double minute clone 2 oncoprotein) and c-Cbl, can apparently act alone, others are found as components of much larger multi-protein complexes, such as the anaphase-promoting complex. Taken together, these multifaceted properties and interactions enable E3s to provide a powerful, and specific, mechanism for protein clearance within all cells of eukaryotic organisms. The importance of E3s is highlighted by the number of normal cellular processes they regulate, and the number of diseases associated with their loss of function or inappropriate targeting.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document