Sovereignty in a Minor Key

Theories of sovereignty in the twentieth century are generally based on a teleological “out-of-Europe” narrative where the modern, centralized nation-state form gradually spread across the world to be the foundation of the international order. In this article, the author reflects on how the conceptualization of sovereignty may change if one begins a global account of modern sovereignty not from the heart of Western Europe but from the complex arrangements of “distributed sovereignty” that emerged in the Indian Ocean and other colonized territories from the eighteenth century onward. These arrangements were organized as multiple layers of dependency and provisional domination, captured well by Eric Beverley's term minor sovereignty. Thinking through sovereignty in a minor key allows us to see sovereignty less as a foundation of states and societies and more as a performative category, emerging in a dialectic between promises of order, prosperity, and law, and the realities of violent domination and occupation.

Constituent Power from Cultural Practice: Implications from the Malheur Wildlife Refuge Occupation

Sovereignty as cultural practice can explain the possibility of the people as the subject of constituent power. I transpose Panu Minkkinen’s division of theories of sovereignty onto the cultural plane: ‘Acephalous’ sovereign self-knowledge is not only productive of the framework for a legal constitution, but subjectivises ‘autocephalous’ sovereignty – the people as the subject of constituent power – that can then act on the ‘heterocephalous’ stage of politics. Through a case study of the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, I consider sovereignty’s relationship with land – juxtaposing it with neoliberalism and anti-statism, which threaten to undo the people as a subject of constituent power – and complicate this reading by placing it in the context of post-colonial America. I conclude that sovereignty not only remains a powerful counterforce to neoliberal, anti-democratic projects, but that alliances with the state to construct the people as the subject of constituent power can serve this purpose. At the same time, the post-colonial context undermines these alliances as an emancipatory force.

Archiwa martwego bliźniego. Żydzi, muzułmanie i dwa ciała wroga

The article analyses recent works by Giorgio Agamben and Eric Santner, who have interpreted Carl Schmitt’s ideas in the context of left-wing political theology. The article traces how the figure of the undead Muslim recurs in the various philosophers and theologians referred to by these two authors. In this way, it shows how contemporary messianic thinkers unknowingly mourned their ‘dead neighbours’, traumatic irritants from which a messianic pearl was born. In order for this pearl to glow with a miraculous light (as Agamben and Santner would wish it to), modern thinking must engage in an act of neighbour-love, whereby it embraces the untimely, undead excarnations (disembodiments) of a history of typological damage. Otherwise, these traumatised and traumatising neighbours remain undead, driven by critical theories of sovereignty.

Diverse Citizenship? Food Sovereignty and the Power of Acting Otherwise

This contribution discusses two different but interlinked fields of research: political theories of sovereignty and citizenship, as well as conceptualizations of emerging alternative food movements. In drawing on James Tully’s practiced-based understanding of ‘diverse citizenship’, as well as on other selected theories of postmodern political thought, it focuses on the contested political nature of the food sovereignty movement, specifically with regard to the dynamics and actions that have brought it into being. In doing so, it conceives of citizenship as materializing on the basis of multi-faceted practices of ‘acting otherwise’, which stands in sharp contrast to a conceptualization of citizenship as an institutionalized status, as it is understood in the liberal tradition. In order to deepen and to sharpen this alternative approach, this contribution additionally draws on Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, which, despite its rather apolitical character, makes it possible to conceive of political practices as emergent and situational phenomena that are closely connected to the quotidian practices of everyday life. The combination of these perspectives bears great potential for theoretical discussions on alternative food movements as well as for their empirical investigation, since it puts emphasis on the way how practitioners and advocates for food sovereignty disclose themselves in multifaceted struggles over the imposition and the challenging of the rules of social living together.

Behind the Mask of the State

The Conclusion draws out the implications of the analysis for theories of sovereignty and state formation. The focus is on state ritual, bureaucratic and documentary practices that produce the illusion of ordinary, mundane rule, the mechanisms by which the delusional nature of state activity is rendered unremarkable, and the processes that undermine the effectiveness of these mechanisms. Central to the analysis is the notion of sacropolitics, a form of sovereignty that is based not on the management of life (biopolitics) or on the subjugation of life to death (necropolitics) but rather on the animation of life. Sacropolitics seeks to bring to life dead, dying or moribund social formations. It calls upon the entire population to engage in public performances of mass sacrifice, which are intended to help create new life worlds that can redeem poor countries from the profane state into which they have fallen.

Introduction: Rethinking Blackness and Indigeneity in the Light of Settler Colonial Theory

Racial analytics in the field, particularly those associated with theories of sovereignty and settler colonialism, have tended to obscure the common ground of Afro-descendant and Indigenous experience, such as land dispossession, political marginalization, and a shared desire for sovereignty and self-determination. In the wake of this analytic divide, even less attention is given to how blackness specifically structures or delimits Indigenous life, as blackness and indigeneity are often taken to be competing identities that cannot exist within the same individuals and communities without friction. This volume seeks to take the next step in pushing forward our theoretical conversations about blackness and indigeneity. Rather than assuming that anti-Black racism, as well as that directed against Indigenous people, are problems of the past or irrelevant to contemporary Indigenous political status, this volume engages with both critical race theory and settler colonial theory to explore how blackness intersects with Indigenous sovereignty, authority, identity, and lived experience.