Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Law

This chapter seeks to analyze the changing meaning of ‘peace’ under an early colonial regime which was perpetually at war. ‘Peace’ in early colonial South Asia no longer meant the absence of conflict, but rather a period when problems of war assumed an urgent significance. From paying soldier’s arrears incurred during military conflicts to disciplining them in times when the Company state was not formally at war—‘peace’ was no longer the opposite of war. Rather it was the fleeting opportunity to re-tool the apparatus of colonial war-making. Conquest did not occur in a legal vacuum. This chapter analyses debates about military law and its significance for the early colonial regime’s claims to sovereign authority. Jurisdictional jockeying between competing sources of law went well beyond the need to maintain military discipline. Examining these debates opens up an unexplored world in which we can understand important questions relating to the territoriality of early colonial rule, the legal personality of the Company state and efforts to compare Britain’s garrisoning of Ireland with the organization of coercive force in South Asia.

Epilogue

The early colonial order gave way to a recognizably extractive and coercive colonial rule which stretched across the long nineteenth century. Scholarly debates about the overlap between the late colonial and postcolonial polities in twentieth century South Asia have generally not traced the antecedents of an institutional structure of governance that commits scarce resources and political will in expensive projects of military aggrandizement. The disdain for civilian bodies/rule, placing military spending beyond the purview of public debate, unchecked executive authority in war-making, violent assertion of sovereign authority, aggressively defined borders, special bodies of law and zones of exception where civil rule and liberties are declared to be inapplicable—owe much to the deep structures of early colonial rule.

Creating an Early Colonial Order

This book explains the origins of colonial rule and its dependence on large-scale military violence in eighteenth-century South Asia. By the final quarter of the long eighteenth century, war-making was not incidental to the elaboration of an infrastructure of extractive domination. The changing capacity of the early colonial regime to organize conquest with increasing efficiency was originative of a complex of laws, ideas, conception of sovereign authority, bureaucratic innovations enmeshed in a political economy of conquest that formed a distinctive early colonial order for South Asia. Colonialism—familiar to historians of the British Raj as coercive authoritarian domination—did not emerge fully formed in early nineteenth-century South Asia. Colonial conquest raised a series of important questions which are at the heart of this book: How was territory to be conquered? How was conquest to be explained and understood? How was the weight assigned to the military in colonial societies justified as an ideology of rule? In answering these questions this early colonial order cast a long shadow across the colonial and the postcolonial periods.

Comparison of Forms and Concepts of Confrontation against Monarch Power in Ancient China and in Medieval Western Europe

Monarchy existed in both ancient China and the Middle-ages Western Europe. It is an inevitable phenomenon of power dynamics for the above two that other societal groups would rise to confront the sovereign authority of the monarch. However, because of the differences in the historical environment between ancient China and the West, the form of the antagonism toward the power of the monarchy and the political concepts embodied therein are naturally quite distinct. In ancient China, resistance against imperial power, both in form and concept, can be roughly divided into “revolution” and “admonishment,” while the political concepts of the Middle-ages Western Europe legally reserved reasonable channels for those opposing the power of the monarchy.

Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the reasons for Locke’s and Rousseau’s turn against absolutist congruence theory and toward a defense of authoritarian families in liberal states. They saw that the absolutists had failed to adequately grapple with the power of public opinion to undermine the sovereign authority that was supposed to control it, and they understood the enormous influence of opinion over our ideas and its potential to foreclose intellectual freedom. To defend that freedom for adults, they leaned on the family and its domestic education of children as a buttress and counterinfluence against the power of fashion and opinion. Recognizing this pedagogical role of personal authority in the foundations of liberalism may help us to resolve our own inability to find a place for the basic but private experience of personal authority, which, however much we wish it away, remains central to forming liberal public life

Borders, Citizenship, and the Local: Everyday Life in Three Districts of West Bengal

Borders have been considered essential to understanding the self and the other, with identities on either side established through functions of exclusion and inclusion. These processes, initially considered to be the preserve of the state as exercised through its policies of border management, also exist in tandem or in an asynchronous manner at the local level. Constituted of processes of identification and networks of interdependences, localized construals of the borderland and subsequently positioned engagements, comes to shape notions of accessibility and restriction as well as perceptions of the “other”. These engagements are not always reflective of statist positions on the border which are often uniform in the conceptualization of its capacity to contain. They subsequently come to reflect the variations of divergent historical and locational realities. There is a need to further extend the analysis of borderlands beyond statist framings as passive recipients of policy as well as recognize the critical positioning of local adaptive processes as antithetical to state demarcations of territoriality and sovereign authority. Based on a survey of three districts in the state of West Bengal, India, this study posits an analysis of the multiple perceptions both within and outside of statist framings of borderland identity and territoriality, which color its inhabitants’ understanding of the border and perceptions surrounding and interactions with the communities that lie beyond it.

Learning from Tribal Leadership and the Anchor Forest Concept for Implementing Cross-Boundary Forest Management

In response to the increasing scale of wildfire and forest health challenges in the West, the Intertribal Timber Council, a nonprofit consortium of American Indian Tribes and Alaska Native corporations, proposed creating “Anchor Forests,” where a Tribe would convene neighboring landowners to collectively manage the landscape across property boundaries. This concept has sparked conversation but has not been fully implemented. Amid shifts toward both collaborative decision making and Tribal partnerships on federal forestlands, we asked, “why did the Anchor Forest concept emerge, and what can the field of forest governance learn from its development?” Through qualitative analysis of documents and interviews, we show how Anchor Forests could expand spatial-temporal scales of forest management. We highlight how Tribal leadership could overcome past governance barriers through their sovereign authority and long-term forestry expertise and knowledge. We describe how this concept could function as a tool to enact change within rigid forest-management institutions. Study Implications Scholars and practitioners can learn from Anchor Forests as an example of a cross-boundary forest-governance framework that emphasizes long-term investment and relationships to land as exemplified by Tribal forest management. The Anchor Forest concept also provides a structure in which Tribes are leaders and conveners rather than stakeholders or participants. To achieve broad goals of landscape resilience and forest health, governance structures must be deliberately designed to mobilize Tribal knowledge and stewardship practices through uplifting, rather than undermining, Tribal sovereignty. The Anchor Forest concept offers key considerations to serve as a starting place for partnerships to emerge in their own contexts.

Rousseau’s Silent Assemblies

This chapter examines the centrality of popular assemblies to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of popular sovereignty by taking seriously the role they play in “maintaining sovereign authority,” which can only be done by sustaining or reenacting the source of that authority: the living body of the people themselves. Rousseau’s sovereign assemblies are often taken to be the clearest expression of his investment in what Jacques Derrida called a “metaphysics of presence.” Even as Rousseau’s sovereign assemblies provide the foundation of collective self-rule, however, the occasion through which the people’s will is expressed as law, they also serve an underappreciated ritual function, giving reenacted form and continuity to the very people whose will is expressed through them. The assembly form is the necessary—and necessarily hidden—supplement from which the people’s seemingly unmediated will is derived. The sovereign assembly is at once the source of the people’s collective autonomy, and the heteronomic support which provides its ongoing conditions of possibility.

Contracting for Criminal Investigation

This chapter explores efforts to fight corruption and impunity by sharing sovereign authority over domestic criminal investigation. It focuses on the UN International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), the pioneering venture in this domain, and shows how a confluence of political factors led the Guatemalan government to agree in 2007 to outsource authority over certain complex criminal investigations to UN personnel. CICIG was then able to earn strong public and international legitimacy through its performance. Nevertheless, a backlash within some circles of the Guatemalan political elite eventually led to CICIG’s closure in 2019, leaving its legacy of reform in peril.

Imposing a Mixed Tribunal

This chapter discusses the troubled effort to create, design, and manage a hybrid judicial process in Lebanon after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. It shows how that country’s profound domestic divisions rendered the government unable to issue a clear delegation of sovereign authority. The UN Security Council therefore imposed a hybrid tribunal on Lebanon, and its legitimacy has been challenged from the start. Without strong domestic cooperation, the tribunal has been highly constrained, unable to apprehend suspects or conduct extensive outreach in the country. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon thus epitomizes the dangers of a fragile political foundation for shared sovereignty.