Sovereignty has returned as a central concern in anthropology. This reinvention seeks to explore de facto sovereignty, i.e., the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity. The central proposition is a call to abandon sovereignty as an ontological ground of power and order in favor of a view of sovereignty as a tentative and always 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 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 section discusses the rich new field of studies of informal sovereignties: vigilante groups, strongmen, insurgents, and illegal networks. Finally, the relationship between market forces, outsourcing, and new configurations of sovereign power are explored.
This article contributes to the analysis of transnationalized forms of security governance in the postcolonial world by looking into the production of knowledge aimed at increasing coherence between domains of security and development in Western donor policies. The article takes an ethnographic approach to the analysis of knowledge production, using the author’s personal experience of writing a policy analysis for a donor government concerning how to ‘further improve’ the policy of ‘concerted civil–military planning and action’. This attempt to ‘study up’ and analyse upstream practices involved in transnational security governance shows the degree to which policy-related knowledge production is a negotiated, social process that involves informal practices and defensive tactics. The policy process seems to be less concerned with effects on the ground than with the problem of creating unity among the wide range of agents and institutions involved in the emerging policy field. While such an approach may have potentially destabilizing effects – both for policy narratives and for researchers’ authority – it responds to calls for reflections on the politics of representation and writing in studies of international relations.
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