Browsing by Subject "Sovereignty"

Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.

This dissertation investigates the relation between the formation of "Blackness" and the Western tradition of sovereignty through the works of late twentieth century Black Radical theorists. I most specifically examine the work of Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka, Frantz Fanon, and Huey P. Newton in order to delineate a shift within Black Radicalism which, due to an intense de-linking of Black nationalism from the concept of territorial sovereignty throughout the 1960s and early 1970s led to the formation of a new subjectivity ("Blackness") oriented against and beyond the Western tradition of political sovereignty as a whole.

This dissertation begins by outlining the parameters of the concept of sovereignty as well as its relation to conquest, coloniality, and racialization more generally. I then examine the formation of Black Power as an expression of anti-colonial sentiments present within the United States and uncover there the influence of W.E.B. DuBois' concept of double-consciousness. I then further examine the concept of Black Power through the work of Amiri Baraka and his notion of "Blackness" as the proximity to "home." Each of these expositions of Black Power are undertaken in order to better understand the era of Black Power and its relation to both Black nationalism and the Western tradition of sovereignty.

Next, I turn to the work of Frantz Fanon, whom I claim prepares the way for the idea of "Blackness" as an ontological resistance beyond, not only the territorial imperative, but also the logic of sovereignty more generally. This notion of "Blackness" as an antidote to sovereign logic present within the work of Fanon allows me to turn to the work of Huey P. Newton in order to demonstrate his conceptualization of "Blackness" as an antagonistic subjectivity within a fully globalized society whose onset he had theorized and which he termed "empire." I conclude by drawing on each of the above theorists as well as the work of Angela Davis in order to build a retrospective summary of this alternative lineage of the Black Radical Tradition and its importance for the conceptualization of resistances to and life beyond our contemporary society.

Paradoxically, Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as an imagined community occupying a territory at once bounded and sovereign became commonplace around the same time that prominent global novelists were beginning to reject the obligation to reproduce that fantasy. I consider two generations of novelists who do so in the late twentieth century. J.M. Coetzee articulates the failure of sovereign boundaries in the postcolony and the changing nature of the relationship between the citizen-subject and the state, while Sebald considers the possibility that a new form of non-hierarchical community might come into being amid the European ruins of the Second World War. For both authors, such projects rely on an acknowledgment of the limitations, disappearance, or outright absence of the nation-state, despite its purported centrality in modern life. More recent Anglophone novelists, by contrast, feel obliged to think with and within the infrastructure of global capitalism, paying particular attention to individuals who have been either empowered or dispossessed by global flows of resources, people, and information. Teju Cole, Indra Sinha, and Colson Whitehead are among these writers who can indeed sketch and animate the community to come, and they do so in forms predicated on the extinction of anything like the individual citizen-subject in favor of new heterogeneous and often radically antisocial forms of community. These novels offer their variously damaged (former) individuals as protagonists who militantly oppose the partitioning of society into friends and enemies, since such distinctions ultimately encourage the classification of groups according to metaphysical categories of good and evil. The common purpose of these protagonists is instead to negate the negativity of that very opposition in the hope that anything else—some intelligent form of life—might grow.

This thesis offers an analysis of the Venetian empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from a new perspective. In the past many historians tended to view the empire as the construction of the merchant elites in Venice itself as they sought to aggrandize and control territories in northern Italy, the Adriatic, and the eastern Mediterranean. Still other scholars have interpreted these efforts at expansion and control in terms of colonialism. Yet, these attempts generally fail to unpack the geopolitical complexities of Venice’s varied subject populations, while casting them as passive bystanders, if not victims. Focusing on the Adriatic – which included most of the dominions of the Venetian Stato da mar – this work breaks away from center-periphery analyses and the colonializing models of the past, and argues that Venetian imperial sovereignty was established through the interactions of local populations with the metropole. Ultimately, I argue, the Venetian empire was made by this very interaction. Petitions, the legal medium through which subjects established a direct contact with the sovereign authority, are central to this study. With their requests and grievances, the petitioners not only expressed their political agency, but also provided the inputs that set in motion the Venetian state machine. The textual analysis of these petitions – informed by a variety of interpretative tools borrowed from cultural anthropology, legal sociology and linguistics – reveals that the imperial discourse of power between sovereign and subjects, although asymmetrical, was a dialectical one. The study of the rhetorical structures and tropes of the petitions shows that the relationship was articulated according to the cultural paradigms of Mediterranean honor and grace. The idiom of honor appears to be the common ground, the shared values that allowed the communication between sovereign and subjects, and it is perceptible at every level of the interaction, gendering hierarchies at both the micro and macro level. The two case studies that emerge from painstaking research in Italian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Greek archives make apparent how the diverse interests and experiences of the subjects determined the juridical particularism through which Venice expressed its sovereignty. More specifically, the first study, centered in the island of Corfu, shows how local tensions between old élite groups and newcomers became an imperial concern for the Venetian government. The Corfiot parties, the Venetian representatives and the sovereign bodies of the Republic engaged in legal rituals in which each party knew the role they played and anticipated the other’s response, reshaping accordingly their mutual interaction. The second case study further problematizes the imperial dimension, moving to the Ottoman-Venetian frontier between Albania, Montenegro and Dalmatia. This microhistorical analysis explores the life of a cultural broker of Kotor, on which Venice relied to manage the region and the relationship with neighboring population and Ottoman authorities. Following the ways in which he developed his communication with Venice, this second study emphasizes how the model of Mediterranean honor not only defined the strategies of the subjects, but also undergirded the behavior of the Venetian institutions towards petitions, establishing and justifying both hierarchical order and reciprocity. The picture of the Venetian empire that emerges is one (almost) literally made by a myriad of particular interests that required to be checked and measured, and that needed the interventions of the Venetian governing bodies to be legitimized. In other words, the Republic, exercising sovereignty through its jurisdiction, depended upon the proactive role of the subjects who constantly provided inputs that demanded to be addressed. Thus, Venice needed a continuous frenetic exchange within its empire, in order to reaffirm its self-proclaimed image of Serenissima, the Most Serene Republic.

This dissertation focuses on raiding and sovereignty in the Central African Republic's (CAR) northeastern borderlands, on the margins of Darfur. A vast literature on social evolution has assumed the inevitability of centralization. But these borderlands show that centralization does not always occur. Never claimed by any centralizing forces, the area has instead long been used as a reservoir of resources by neighboring areas' militarized entrepreneurs, who seek this forest-savanna's goods. The raiders seize resources but also govern. The dynamics of this zone, much of it a place anthropologists used to refer to as "stateless," suggest a re-thinking of the modalities of sovereignty. The dissertation proposes conceptualizing sovereignty not as a totalizing, territorialized political order but rather through its constituent governing capabilities, which may centralize or not, and can combine to create hybrid political systems. The dissertation develops this framework through analysis of three categories of men-in-arms -- road-blockers, anti-poaching militiamen, and members of rebel groups -- and their relationships with international peacebuilding initiatives. It compares roadblocks and "road cutting" (robbery) to show how they stop traffic and create flexible, personalized entitlements to profit for those who operate them. The dissertation also probes the politics of militarized conservation: in a low-level war that has lasted for twenty-five years, the European Union-funded militiamen fight deadly battles against herders and hunters. Though ostensibly fought to protect CAR's "national patrimony" (its animals and plants), this war bolsters the sovereign capabilities of a range of non-state actors and has resulted in hundreds of deaths in the last few years, many of them hidden in the bush. The dissertation then shows how CAR's recent cycle of rebellion has changed governance in rural areas. Though mobile armed groups have long operated in CAR, they used to work as road cutters and local defense forces and only recently started calling themselves "rebels" -- a move that has landed them in new roles as "governors" of populations while leaving them without the welfare largess they seek. Throughout these various raiders' projects, the idea of the all-powerful state serves as a reference point they use to qualify themselves with sovereign authorities. But their actions as rulers undermine the creation of the unitary political authority they desire and invoke. Failure to appreciate these non-centralized micropolitical processes is a main reason peacebuilding efforts (such as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) in the region have failed.

This dissertation examines Haiti's crucial role in the re-making of the Atlantic World in the early 19th century. The point of departure for this work is Haiti's Declaration of Independence in 1804 and my research explores how events in Haiti raised profound questions about revolutionary legitimacy and national sovereignty. The emergence of Haiti as an independent nation fueled unprecedented international debates about racial hierarchy, the connections between freedom and sovereignty, and the intertwining of ideological and political relationships among nations and empires. While these debates came to be resolved in part during the next two centuries, they remain alive today both for specific nations and for the international community.

This dissertation offers a comprehensive model of contemporary nation-state sovereignty. To do so, it examines the mutually constitutive relationship between sovereignty and present-day globalization as well as the role of law and capital in creating, maintaining, and driving that relationship.

The scholarly treatment of nation-state sovereignty has been inadequate for several reasons. Older theories of sovereignty could not have foreseen the unprecedented technological advances that underlie our current system and therefore do not sufficiently explain it. More recent theories of sovereignty, in turn, tend to be too narrowly focused, such that a given model of sovereignty often only applies to that particular condition. Furthermore, the academic literatures on sovereignty and nationalism, while occasionally referencing each other, have failed to recognize that the two phenomena are parts of the same whole and therefore must be more fully integrated.

This dissertation argues that a comprehensive model of contemporary nation-state sovereignty must include two symbiotic elements. The first, referred to here as emotional sovereignty, involves subjective relationships with the state. As such, the substance of this element is unique for each group. The second element is a functional/instrumental element. It addresses ways that the sovereignty serves as an interface-mechanism with other sovereignties, like compatible nozzles attaching and linking variously-sized hoses. It likewise explains how sovereignty functions as a value-maximization mechanism. In short, a sovereignty must control its relationships with others in order to accumulate as much capital as possible in order to protect and perpetuate aspects of the domestic culture that are deemed most valuable. This functional/instrumental element, while used in distinct ways by different groups, is largely identical in form among all states.

From these multiple angles it becomes evident that nation-state sovereignty is not one single power but instead a set of powers, such that each power entails a strategic option that can be negotiated, delegated, mortgaged or surrendered. Nation-state sovereignty is therefore rendered meaningful only in connection with other nation-state sovereignties; in the contemporary situation, this means globalization. Sovereignty is, after all, an ad hoc solution to a particular set of historically and contextually emerging dilemmas; as the dilemmas have continued to change, so have the solutions. And so although people, goods, and ideas have always flowed across borders, whether geographic or cultural, the speed, nature, and extent of all such movement in the contemporary age is unprecedented. Today, all sovereignties - across the globe - are connected in diverse and manifold ways. This dissertation therefore provides a model of globalization that goes beyond the simple movement of people, goods, capital, and ideas to explain the conceptual transformations that have made today's globalization possible; the processes that drive it; and the role of the nation-state, and in particular nation-state sovereignty, as a necessary component of globalization itself.

The dissertation integrates these theories of sovereignty and globalization to show how the connections created by systems of nation-state law serve as the framework for many of the core processes of globalization, while flows of capital within and enabled by that framework fuel those processes. It shows that there are at least three important aspects of this relationship between sovereignty, globalization, law and capital: First, because of the connections of law, capital, and labor, every state is implicated in the production of every good, a phenomenon here referred to as co-production. Together with the co-consumption of those goods, co-production is the driving force behind globalization; as such, one can likewise say that nation-states co-produce globalization itself through the legal regulation of the movement of capital and individuals. Second, nation-states remain the central structural machinery of globalization. Third, globalization is not uniform. To be sure, the effects of globalization have transformed every culture on the planet and capitalism has been the vehicle for doing so. But just as not all cultures are the same, all capitalisms are not the same either. No model of sovereignty and globalization is therefore complete without a mechanism for accounting for differences in culture and capitalism.

The research that is the foundation for this dissertation was undertaken primarily in the South Pacific region, focusing on Cook Islanders in the Cook Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. Methods included participant observation, legal and documentary research, as well as informal and semi-structured interviews.

The goal of this dissertation is to inquire into how states balance economic motivations and security concerns when pursuing sovereignty at borders. More precisely, the dissertation examines tradeoffs between interdependence sovereignty -control over transborder flows--and Westphalian sovereignty defined as exclusion of external actors from states' authoritative space. Focusing on control over cross-border human mobility as the issue area, I put forward the securitized interdependence framework as a theory that encompasses economic and security logics of policy-making. Because migration control rests at the nexus of economic/material and geopolitical/military dimensions of state security, it provides an ideal testing ground for observing the interaction of economic and security motives. The theoretical framework draws on the literature on complex interdependence and the logic of the trading state to postulate empirically verifiable propositions on migration control policies.

The central claim of the dissertation is that human mobility is conditionally securitized and that security logics are modulated by material/economic incentives. Facing informational asymmetries vis-à-vis transnational terrorists, states rely on migration and border control strategies to screen and deter non-state threats to security. However, economic interdependence--trade and capital ties--mitigates fears over transnational terrorism by reconfiguring state preferences, bolstering the relative salience of material concerns in policy-making, tempering perceptions of threat, and creating vested interests at the domestic level.

To test the theory I have collected and compiled data on i)visa restrictions for pairs of 207 X 207 directed dyads ii)visa rejection rates for European Union and/or Schengen member countries for the period 2003-2007, and iii)asylum recognition rates for 20 select OECD recipient states for the period 1980-2007. I then use this data to test the implications of the theory by distinguishing between economic/voluntary and political/involuntary migration. Additionally, I tease out the distinct effects of two different types of security concerns over transnational terrorism: a reputational effect that considers origin country citizens' involvement in terrorism incidents worldwide and a targeted/directed impact through which states take into account past experience as targets of terrorism. To illustrate the effect of economic interdependence, I analyze trade and capital flows separately and illustrate that both types of commercial ties facilitate liberalization of controls over human mobility through direct and indirect mechanisms.

I employ a variety of statistical techniques to study the effect of economic and security concerns including several cross-sectional time series techniques, structural break and recursive residual tests for temporal change, and maximum likelihood. Furthermore, I complement my quantitative empirical analysis with an in-depth process tracing approach that traces the evolution of Turkey's migration policies in the context of Turkey's post-1980 economic liberalization. The qualitative analysis makes use of primary and secondary resources obtained from archival field work in Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey.

The dissertation demonstrates that the impact of security concerns over transnational terrorism is contingent on the type of migration policy under consideration. In particular, policies of control over involuntary/political migration are guided by humanitarian and normative motives, limiting the effect of security concerns. Furthermore, the securitization of visa policies is strongest if recipient states are directly targeted by incidents of transnational terrorism perpetrated by origin country nationals. While states take into account incidents of global terrorism ---attacks against other country nationals or territories by origin country citizens-- this channel of impact is more modest. Additionally, empirical results show that economic interdependence effectively undercuts the effect of global terrorism, driving migration control policies towards liberalization. In sum, the dissertation demonstrates that ways in which states assert interdependence sovereignty exhibit temporal and cross-sectional variation as well as functional differentiation across types of border and migration control policies.

Survival of a Perverse Nation traces the ways in which contemporary Armenian anxieties are congealing into the figure of the “homosexual.” As in other post-Soviet republics, homosexuality has increasingly become defined as the crisis of the times, and is understood by many as a destructive force linked to European encroachment. In Armenia, a growing right-wing nationalist movement since 2012 has been targeting LGBT and feminist activists. I suggest that this movement has arisen out of Armenia’s concerns regarding proper social and biological reproduction in the face of high rates of emigration of especially men in search of work. Many in the country blame this emigration on a post-Soviet oligarchy, with close ties to the government. This oligarchy, having quickly and massively privatized and liquidated industry and land during the war over the region of Nagorno-Karabagh (1990-1994) with Azerbaijan, created widespread un(der)employment. A national narrative attributing the nation’s survival of the 1915 Genocide and dispersion of its populations to strong morality preserved by institutions such as the Church and the family has now, in the post-Soviet era, ruptured into one of moral “perversion.” This dissertation is based on 15 months of ethnographic research, during which I participated in the work of two local non-governmental organizations: Public Information and Need for Knowledge, an LGBT rights organization and Women’s Resource Center, a feminist organization. I also conducted interviews with 150 households across Yerevan, the capital city, and did in-depth interviews with other activists, right-wing nationalists and journalists. Through psychoanalytic frameworks, as well as studies of kinship, I show how sovereignty – the longed for dream for Armenians over the last century – is felt to have failed because of the moral corruption of the illegitimate figures that fill Armenian seats of authority. I, thus, examine the ways in which a missing father of the household is discursively linked to the lack of strong leadership by a corrupt government, producing a prevalent feeling of moral disintegration that nationalists displace onto the “homosexual.”