sovereignty revisited - thomas b hansen and finn stepputat

ANRV287-AN35-16 ARI 13 August 2006 7:22

Sovereignty RevisitedThomas Blom Hansen1 and Finn Stepputat2

1Department of Anthropology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut06520-8277; email: [email protected] Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen DK-1401, Denmark;email: [email protected]

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2006. 35:295–315

First published online as a Review inAdvance on June 7, 2006

The Annual Review of Anthropology isonline at anthro.annualreviews.org

This article’s doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123317

Copyright c© 2006 by Annual Reviews.All rights reserved

0084-6570/06/1021-0295$20.00

Key Words

political anthropology, violence, kingship, authority, body,government

AbstractSovereignty has returned as a central concern in anthropology. Thisreinvention seeks to explore de facto sovereignty, i.e., the ability tokill, punish, and discipline with impunity. The central propositionis a call to abandon sovereignty as an ontological ground of powerand order in favor of a view of sovereignty as a tentative and al-ways emergent form of authority grounded in violence. After a briefaccount of why the classical work on kingship failed to provide anadequate matrix for understanding the political imaginations of aworld after colonialism, three theses on sovereignty—modern andpremodern—are developed. We argue that although effective legalsovereignty is always an unattainable ideal, it is particularly tenuousin many postcolonial societies where sovereign power historicallywas distributed among many forms of local authority. The last sec-tion discusses the rich new field of studies of informal sovereign-ties: vigilante groups, strongmen, insurgents, and illegal networks.Finally, the relationship between market forces, outsourcing, andnew configurations of sovereign power are explored.

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NGO:nongovernmentalorganizations

INTRODUCTION

The current reevaluation of the meanings ofsovereignty—critically informed by the workof Giorgio Agamben—resonates in profoundways with an intensified global crisis of thenation-state as the main vehicle of sovereignpower.

Transnational corporations, the “soft”global network power of nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs) and Internet commu-nities, as well as the proliferation of ethnicconflicts in the post–Cold War age seemed toundermine the naturalness of the idea of na-tional sovereignty in the 1990s. The aftermathof 9/11 made it clear that national sovereignty,war, and security regimes still remained thehard kernel of modern states. It was also clear,however, that the new threat to the estab-lished world order would come from forcesthat were difficult to conceptualize—highlymobile, evanescent, and resolutely global net-works, akin to what Deleuze & Guattari (1987[1980]) call “nomadic war machines,” rhi-zomes of force ( puissance) that leave institu-tionalized power ( pouvoir) highly vulnerable.There is no clearer example of the paradoxesof sovereignty in the twenty-first century thanIraq since the United States–led invasion in2003. Here, multiple, fragile, and contestedcenters of military might, welfare, and ethno-religious and local loyalties claim sovereigntyover people and land—both legal sovereigntyas in the legitimate right to govern and defacto sovereignty as the right over life (to pro-tect or to kill with impunity).

Recent work on sovereignty addresses, andmaybe transcends, two long-standing theo-retical impasses in anthropology: the declineof political anthropology with its emphasison kingship, sacrifice, and ritual in “primi-tive” societies. This once influential strandin anthropological debates was so steeped inan ahistorical mode of analysis that it all butdisappeared with the emergence of historicalanthropology and the many critiques of colo-nialism since the 1980s. The subsequent rein-vention of the anthropology of the political

and the state in the 1990s has been heavilyindebted to Foucault’s attempt to cut off theKing’s head in the social sciences (Foucault1980) and to develop a nonessentialist on-tology of power beyond notions of originsand centers or the continuity of culturalforms.

The triumph of a Foucauldian view ofpower has in many ways created an impasseof its own. If power is dispersed throughoutsociety, in institutions, disciplines, and ritualsof self-making, how do we, for instance, ac-count for the proliferation of legal discoursepremised on the widespread popular idea ofthe state as a center of society, a central leg-islator, and an adjudicator? How do we un-derstand popular mythologies of power, cor-ruption, secrecy, and evil as emanating fromcertain centers, people, or hidden domains?How do we interpret how violence destroyssocial ties but also produces informal author-ity? How can we understand war as a totalizinglogic of life and society, as Foucault himselfpointed out in the late 1970s (2003)?

The return to sovereignty, often viaAgamben’s writings on banished life (homosacer), desymbolized and “bare,” as the in-cluded outside upon which a community ora society constitutes itself and its moral or-der (Agamben 1998), promises a new andfruitful focalization—maybe another strate-gic reductionism—of ongoing debates on thenature of power and violence.

In the following, we offer an interpreta-tion of what has prompted this revisiting ofsovereignty as a central concern in anthropol-ogy; what possibilities this move has offered;and which new fields of inquiry it promisesto open. This revisiting differs from the pastendeavors in anthropology, and from the de-bates on sovereignty in political science andhistory, in two important respects: It is, inthe main, oriented toward exploring de factosovereignty, i.e., the ability to kill, punish,and discipline with impunity wherever it isfound and practiced, rather than sovereigntygrounded in formal ideologies of rule andlegality. This does not preclude studies of

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legal practices or state practices but may helpto reorient such studies away from the law astext, or the courtroom spectacle, toward ex-ploring more quotidian notions of justice, of“legal consciousness,” and of punishment asthey occur in everyday life. The key move wepropose is to abandon sovereignty as an onto-logical ground of power and order, expressedin law or in enduring ideas of legitimate rule,in favor of a view of sovereignty as a tenta-tive and always emergent form of authoritygrounded in violence that is performed anddesigned to generate loyalty, fear, and legiti-macy from the neighborhood to the summitof the state.

The second difference is the focus on thebody as the site of, and object of, sovereignpower. Agamben’s work has made it possi-ble to understand that it is not only the Kingwho has two bodies, a natural body and a po-litical body as in medieval political theology(Kantorowicz 1957). This duality is a general-ized condition in modern societies where thecitizen has an included body, a body that hasitself (habeas corpus) and an array of rights byvirtue of its inclusion into the political com-munity, and simultaneously a biological body,a life that can be stripped of symbolizationand humanity and reduced to “bare life” bydecree or bio-political fiat. This is, Agambenshows, the nature of modern sovereign powerof which the camp, designed for extermina-tion, waiting, or infinite detention, is the mostpoignant expression (see Fiskesjo 2003). Thelarger point is of course that the body is al-ways the site of performance of sovereignpower, which becomes most visible in states ofwar, extreme conditions, fragmentation, andmarginality. Sovereign power can be fruit-fully regarded as the central, if often unac-knowledged, underside of modern and lib-eral forms of highly codified and regulated(self) government (Agamben 2005, Hindess2005).

We are, in other words, charting andadvocating an ethnographic approach tosovereignty in practice. This may turn out to

be every bit as destabilizing to formal and le-gal notions of sovereignty as ethnography hasbeen with respect to the idea of religion, thestate, and the market.

We start with a brief and critical accountof why the political anthropology inspiredby Frazer, Hocart, and Evans-Pritchard pro-duced many striking insights but failed to pro-vide an adequate matrix for understanding thepolitical imaginations of a world after colo-nialism. We also offer a brief assessment ofhow various assumptions about sovereigntypersisted, if rarely in an enunciated form, inmuch of the influential work on colonialismand its legacies. The anthropology of colo-nialism has demonstrated that the anxieties ofcolonial rule were centered on its body pol-itics, the imprinting of rule on the bodies ofnatives, and the protection of white bodies:the fears of miscegenation, the performance ofEuropean dignity, the presentation of the Eu-ropean family and domesticity, the taming anddisciplining of immoral practices, etc. We alsosuggest that through the lens of sovereignty inpractice, colonial rule appears less hegemonicand effective than in its self-presentations inofficial texts and plans. A key feature of thecolonial world was that different kinds andregisters of sovereignty coexisted and over-lapped. Most modern states claim effective le-gal sovereignty over a territory and its popula-tion in the name of the nation and the popularwill. Although this is always an unattainableideal, it is particularly tenuous in many post-colonial societies in which sovereign powerwas historically fragmented and distributedamong many, mostly informal but effective,forms of local authority.

The last section provides a discussion ofthe rich new field of studies of informalsovereignties such as vigilante groups, strong-men, insurgents, and illegal networks. We alsoaddress, albeit in a more tentative form, morerecent work exploring the relationship be-tween market forces, privatization, outsourc-ing, and the new configuration of sovereignpower it produces in the present.

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CORPUS MYSTICUM: ONKINGSHIP AND ENDURINGCULTURAL FORMS

By and large, anthropologists have under-stood political authority, often studied un-der the rubric of kingship, in two differ-ent ways: either as embedded in the widerstructures of production, kinship, and clanor as a distinct and centralizing institution,reproduced through public ritual, constitut-ing a symbolic center of society. The for-mer is commonly associated with work onsegmentary and acephalous polities with rel-atively low levels of functional and institu-tional differentiation. In such societies, “thelaw” does not have an existence separatefrom procedures or injunctions outside theethos of everyday life: “[T]he basis of lawis force,” writes Evans-Pritchard and contin-ues, “the club and the spear are sanctionsof rights” (Evans-Pritchard 1969 [1940], p.169). The functionalist thrust of this tradi-tion posited a fundamental consonance be-tween political symbols and rituals and themeanings and sentiments they evoked amongsubjects. “An African ruler,” Evans-Pritchard& Fortes write in their introduction to theclassical collection African Political Systems, “isnot to his people merely a person who canenforce his will on them. He is . . . the embod-iment of their essential values. . . . His creden-tials are mystical and are derived from antiq-uity” (Evans-Pritchard & Fortes 1940). Thereis no history in this perspective, only inces-sant feuds and conflicts that nonetheless fol-low intricate rules and patterns that in the endensure the permanence and indivisibility ofthe realm or the community (Evans-Pritchard1969 [1940], pp. 142–47; see also Barth 1959,Fortes 1945, Gulliver 1963).

This is ultimately a Durkheimian view ofthe integrative mechanisms in “primitive” so-cieties, a view of political authority as ex-pressing a deep and collective political willand sovereignty. Gluckman writes on the hi-erarchically organized Zulu Kingdom withits powerful chiefs and aristocracy: “There-

fore, despite the apparent autocracy of kingsand chiefs, ultimately, sovereignty in the Stateresided in the people” (Gluckman 1940). Inthis tradition, the body of the king is identicalto the body of the people, the body-politic,and “political behavior” hardly exists as a dis-tinct practice. Schapera (1969) suggests thatthe influence of colonial administration andmissionaries accorded more law-making au-thority to the chiefs and thus opened a riftbetween the force of the law, backed by themodern state, and the legitimacy of a moreconsensual custom/tradition. In a Melanesiancontext, Sahlins’ distinction between the chiefand the big man (Sahlins 1963) referred to thedifference between societies hierarchically or-ganized around a powerful chiefly or royalinstitution (see Valeri 1985, Thomas 1994)and the more unstable character of politicalauthority in acephalous societies (see Sillitoe1978, Godelier & Strathern 1991).

The second view of political authority setsit apart from the moral frameworks of ordi-nary life, either as chiefly or royal power. Al-though indebted to the countless examples ofthe mythical origin of kings in Frazer’s TheGolden Bough (Frazer 1959), Hocart’s writingson kingship have exerted considerable, if notalways acknowledged, influence on many an-thropologists. Hocart was resolutely compar-ative, and often quite evolutionist, in his focuson the process of centralization of societiesaround the royal institution. He drew an anal-ogy between human society and the evolutionof the body. In lower forms of life, each unitof the body is relatively self-contained and in-dependent, whereas mammals are incrediblycentralized organisms where the head (and thebrain) is the indispensable center of every-thing. In the place of segmentary organizationof societies grows centralized and function-ally specialized systems of rule and control.Thus, centralized and functionally special-ized systems of rule and control supersede thesegmentary organization of societies (Hocart1936, pp. 38–39).

Drawing on examples from Fiji, SouthAsia, Africa, and Europe, Hocart’s central


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propositions are that kingship originates inritual; that kings are people endowed with,and entrusted with, special powers of sym-bolic representation and of moral transgres-sion; and that kings carry the burden of im-purities of a community in his body. The kingis thus both divine and impure, and the realmof kingly behavior is constitutively differentfrom that of his subjects. Kings are indispens-able, both benevolent and dangerous (Hocart1936). These insights have spawned debateson the differences between royal sovereigntyand ritual purity in South Asia (e.g., In-den 1978, Raheja 1988, Dirks 1987, Quigley1993); on notions of the generalized duality ofroyal power (Sahlins 1985, Scubla 2002); onthe place of sacrifice and scapegoats in pro-ducing the sacred (Girard 1977); and on di-vine kingship, ritual murder, and the king asscapegoat (de Heusch 1982, Simonse 1991).

These two streams of work on political au-thority reflect two models of sovereignty—sovereignty as intrinsic to the commu-nity/people or as extrinsic—an alien andpotentially threatening force that ensures re-newal but also needs to be ritually domesti-cated. In philosophical terms, it correspondsto the distinction between Durkheim, Herder,and Rousseau on one side, and Hobbes,Hocart, and Schmitt on the other. Yet, mat-ters are not so simple. Hobbes’ famous idea of“the State of Warre” as the origin of sovereignpower [Hobbes (1651) 1996] seems to bewidely accepted in the anthropology of “prim-itive” or nonmodern kingship. This state ofwar is seen as an ongoing practice or tensionthat reproduces society, say among the Nueror Zulus; an ever-present threat that has tobe warded off through the labor of balanceand ritual perfection in Bali (Geertz 1980);a potential that can be preempted throughconstant exchange and gift giving, as Sahlins(1974) pointed out in his perceptive essay onMauss’ Essai sur le don; or a memory of con-quest and foundational violence that is ritu-ally enacted as in Bloch’s study of kingship ineighteenth-century Madagascar, a study thatcreatively attempts to combine the two mod-

els of sovereignty mentioned above (Bloch1987).

Yet, for most anthropologists, it is imper-ative to show that a Hobbesian and Hegelianteleology of state formation does not applyto “primitive societies.” A permanent state ofwar, or threat of war, may be a powerful im-pulse in consolidating and reproducing so-cieties and the authority of kings, but theseconditions necessarily produce neither a mod-ern state nor a semblance of a covenant. Thework of Clastres is particularly interesting inthis respect. In his work on the Guayani inParaguay, he rejects the evolutionist view thatthe many dispersed and highly mobile soci-eties in the region have been unable to developmore complex forms of organization. Thesesocieties—organized as relatively egalitarianand acephalous bands of mobile warriors—were organized, argues Clastres (1989), in ex-actly such a way as to prevent them from os-sifying and becoming settled and hierarchicalstructures. Permanent warfare and the con-stant elections and dismissals of war chiefsaimed to prevent any submission to the var-ious forms of sovereign power that have ex-isted in the region from pre-Columbian timesto the contemporary state forms. In his ef-forts to reject a Euro-centric teleology of stateformation and to account for such societiesin their own terms, Clastres tended nonethe-less to embrace Rousseau, another Europeanthinker, and his idealization of the purityand equality of savage society (Clastres 1989[1974]).

FROM KINGSHIP TO MODERNFORMS OF POWER

How useful has this substantial body of workon kingship been in subsequent work on whatin the 1960s became known as “new states” inthe postcolonial world? The answer is that ithas been surprisingly absent, as if the concep-tual gulf posited between the traditional andthe modern became quite accurately appliedto the distinction between colonizer and colo-nized, Western and Eastern/African, modern


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modalities of power versus traditional regis-ters. In a recent meditation on how anthro-pology was forced to adjust itself and be moresensitive to history and to the new tumultuousworld of postcolonial states and their polities,Geertz (2004) suggests that anthropologistshave been so beholden to an idea of the ho-mogenous nation-state as the essential form ofmodern power that they have failed to under-stand actual states “against the background ofthe sort of society in which it is embedded—the confusion that surrounds it, the confusionit confronts, the confusion it causes, the con-fusion it responds to” (p. 580). Geertz callsfor an understanding of states and sovereign-ties as cultural constructs but not necessar-ily as entities whose nature and practices canbe derived from, or reduced to, any culturallogic. To push the point further, it was histo-rians and a few distinguished anthropologistsof Latin America and the Caribbean (Wolf1982, Mintz 1985) who, in their interrogationof colonial history, began to blur these distinc-tions and pointed toward a more complex andnecessarily globally entangled history of theformation of states and sovereignties, as wediscuss below.

There were some, if relatively rare, at-tempts to project “traditional” cultural log-ics of authority and sovereignty onto modern,postcolonial forms of state and political au-thority. Some of these studies have demon-strated that cultural holism and the concomi-tant assumptions about ideological cohesionand shared cultural meanings throughout asociety—whether of a Boasian/Herderian orDurkheimian/Rousseauian provenance—areineffective as analytical templates for analyz-ing modern societies and polities. For all itsperceptive analysis of royal ritual and symbols,Combs-Schilling’s (1989) work on Moroccankingship has little to tell us about how royalsovereignty and ritual actually connects andcombines with modern forms of governancein Morocco. Kapferer’s (1988) attempt to ex-plain ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka by projectingideas of corporate religious identity onto en-tire groups, i.e., to equate the religious body of

Buddhism with the political body of the state,appear unduly totalizing and curiously insen-sitive to the intricacies of actual politics andmodern government in the country (Kapferer1988). Other attempts have been more felic-itous, such as Apter on Nigeria (Apter 1992),Burghart on Nepal (Burghart 1990) and An-derson on Indonesia (Anderson 1990), but thework on premodern kingship has generallybeen sitting uncomfortably with much of therecent anthropology of nationalism, power,and the state.

The inability of anthropologists to under-stand “primitive societies” as historical forma-tions is a main reason for this impasse, andthe singular focus on symbolic forms and co-hesion is another. However, a third reasonhas been a poor and undifferentiated under-standing of the specificity of modern formsof power, and more particularly the forms ofsovereignty that developed around the colo-nial encounter. Hutchinson’s ethnography ofthe Nuer (Hutchinson 1996) is exemplaryin its attention to the salient forces of war,weapons, and the presence of the state in con-temporary Nuer life, and thus is an unusuallywell-crafted corrective to the rarefied time-lessness in which much older anthropologicalwork was set.

Much of anthropology has juxtaposed athick description of the practices and sym-bolic forms of the exotic other and a thin,ahistorical, if not bland, symbolic repre-sentation of the West—as if, say, the na-ture of modern sovereignty could be under-stood through a reading of Hobbes. Theresult has been a formulaic reproductionof a distinction between a homogenizedrealm of modern/Western/capitalist conceptsof power and government and another deep,rich, and heterogeneous realm of the tra-ditional/primitive/uncolonized/authentic no-tions of power and agency. This work hasbeen useful for rhetorical clarity but detri-mental to a nuanced understanding of ourcontemporary world. Abeles’ otherwise excel-lent analysis of Mitterand’s presidential prac-tices and performances through a prism of


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royal ritual aiming at symbolic integration ofsociety is a relatively rare attempt to dissolvethis analytical boundary. Abeles focuses exclu-sively on ritual form and myth created by andaround Mitterrand to show that modern po-litical forms, like traditional ones, are deeplyinfused with religious imagery and sentiment.Yet, Abeles has little to say about the forms ofsovereign power and modern government—invested in the nation and the state—thatmade Mitterand’s performance both possibleand credible (Abeles 1988). In the absence ofa conceptualization of the deep importanceof spectacle and performance in modern pol-itics (see for example Wedeen 1999), Abeles’sanalysis gets no further than pointing out ananalogy.

The challenge seems to engage in a dou-ble movement: on the one hand to developa deeper, more historically attuned and the-oretically sophisticated understanding of thenature of modern sovereignty, including howit developed and morphed in the colonialencounter, and on the other hand, to chartand understand the de facto configurations ofsovereignty both within and beyond the mod-ern state and its constitutive idea of the ruleof territory and people through a formal lan-guage of law, which by the mid-twentieth cen-tury had become the dominant horizon forpolitical authority and imagination across theworld.

Before engaging the question of colonialsovereignty, let us briefly sketch an outline ofa stronger and more universal understandingof sovereignty, which we developed in moredetail elsewhere (Hansen & Stepputat 2005).Let us summarize it in three theses:

1. The duality inherent in royal powerand its promise to conjoin opposites—celeritas versus gravitas (Sahlins 1985),wild and fecund versus dry and contem-plative (Bloch), or the natural and fal-lible body of the king versus the corpusmysticum, the transcendent body-politic(Kantorowicz 1957)—is also at the heartof modern sovereignty. Here it takes

the form of the tension between thesovereign in its ideal and transcendentform (nation, state, the people), whichamounts to “empty places” that nevercan be fully represented (Lefort 1988),and their always transient and imper-fect embodiment in a specific leader,party, movement, or institution. The es-says in Bornemann’s recent (2004) col-lection on the “the death of the father”all address the failure of embodiment ofthe national community in a supremeleader. Modern sovereign power hasboth sublime and profane dimensions,and both modern and premodern politi-cal communities have two bodies: a fullyhuman included into political-culturallife, and another biological body, poten-tially stripped of dignity and desymbol-ized as “bare life” (Agamben).

2. The origin of sovereign power is the“state of exception”—the suspension ofrules and conventions creating a con-ceptual and ethical zero-point fromwhere the law, the norms, and the po-litical order can be constituted. Thisexception can be legal (see Schmitt1985 [1922]), ethical (Agamben 2005), aHobbesian “State of Warre,” or myth-ical origin of royalty. Yet, sovereignpower is fundamentally premised on thecapacity and the will to decide on lifeand death, the capacity to visit exces-sive violence on those declared enemiesor on undesirables. Sovereignty is in-trinsically linked to life as a biologicalforce and to the body, either to the willto take life or to the willingness to dis-regard one’s body and one’s own life(Bataille 1991). The emaciated body ofthe hunger striker (Aretxaga 2001) orthe blood of the jihadist martyr (Devji2005) remains a powerful weapon inwhat Mbembe calls modern “necropol-itics” (Mbembe 2003).

3. In spite of these fundamental con-tinuities between archaic/premodernsovereignty and modern sovereignty,


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the latter is marked by an unprece-dented desire to become not merely alegal or symbolic reign but a compre-hensive, effective, and totalizing form ofdetailed government of territories andtheir populations. Many of the disci-plines of modern institutions, the tech-nologies of government, and the tech-nologies of the self characteristic ofmodern societies did indeed aim at cre-ating an ostensibly depoliticized gov-ernment in the name of scientific ra-tionality and improvement of the lifeof citizens and populations (Burchellet al. 1991). These new bio-politicalregimes reconfigured rather than su-perseded sovereignty as a mode ofpower. Modern disciplines are drivenby a powerful idea of defending, pu-rifying, and protecting the new lo-cus of sovereignty—society, the nation,the people, and/or the community—often defined in ethnic and racial terms(Foucault 2003). Modern techniques ofgovernment thus made possible muchmore exhaustive, ambitious, and effec-tive forms of sovereignty, culminatingin ethnic cleansing, in such systematicexterminations as the Holocaust, theinvention of a new doctrine of massextermination of populations in colo-nial wars (Hull 2005), in mass in-ternments, mass incarcerations of “an-tisocial elements,” etc. Whereas JeanBodin in the sixteenth century ad-vised monarchs to reserve the “marksof sovereignty” exclusively for them-selves (Bodin 1992 [1588]), the regimeof modern sovereignty and its mirrorimage, the sovereign community, havemade bodily marks, pigmentation, lan-guage, and dress the markers that de-cide whether a person is included inthe polis/community as a political body(Balibar 2002) or whether a body merelycounts as biological life subjected to thewhims of the executive.

COLONIAL POWER,GOVERNMENTALITY, ANDMODERN SOVEREIGNTY

The colonial world was not a stage whereupona fully formed cultural idea of “realist” West-ern sovereignty clashed with, and superseded,other forms of ritual or sacred sovereignty.The colonies became the site where Europeanpowers tested and developed their techniquesof government. It was here that the notionof the natural sovereignty, and the right torule, of the “civilized,” Christian, white na-tions emerged over several centuries (Pagden1995). The colonial world was therefore a twi-light zone of multiple, indeterminate configu-rations of power and authority. It was in part azone of exception and lawlessness (Thomson1989), allowing for unrestrained violence andexploitation, in part a realm believed to beruled by excessive despotism that at times wasemulated in order to indigenize colonial rule(Cohn 1983, Apter 1999) and at other timesthat served as an imaginary canvas on whichliberal arguments of the necessity of rights andthe rule of law in the West could be made(Grosrichard 1998). This peculiar articulationof different registers of sovereign power inthe colonial world is fundamentally impor-tant to any understanding of the character ofpostcolonial states and political formations inpostcolonial societies.

Colonial domination developed slowly,tentatively, and unevenly. Most of the earlycolonial enterprises in Asia and Africa werefrom the outset in the hands of private tradingcompanies, privateers, and semiofficial armiesand naval forces. Although acting in accor-dance with a royal charter, or in the nameof their sovereign, they were in reality forcesin their own right. Accountability, risk tak-ing, and also the prudence of military ac-tions and civil administration by these com-panies were often hotly debated in Britainand the Netherlands in the eighteenth cen-tury (see Sen 2002). At the center of thesedebates was the question of which standardsof government and punishment should apply


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to the colonial world: those of “civilized men”or those of the native rulers? The colonyconstituted a zone of exception in a doublesense: both as not being directly under thesovereign power of the Crown or the repub-lic and as being “beyond the pale,” an alienworld whose populations were not accordedfull humanity or membership of a commu-nity of civilized men entitled to habeas corpusand other rights of the subjects of Europeanpowers. As a result, colonial sovereignty wasgenerally marked by an excess of violence andmuch harsher forms of punishment than wereadministered in the European world at thetime (for a general argument along these lines,see Arendt 1968; for South Asia, see Chan-davarkar 1998, Hussain 2003).

In India, for example, the local jurispru-dence and forms of punishment administeredby local princes and courts were generally seenas both ineffective and inconsistent (Cohn1983). The East India Company decided toerect public gallows and open new prisonsacross the colony. The frequent use of cap-ital punishment intended to create an all-important aura of fortitude and rigor thatremained a cornerstone of British rule in In-dia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The protracted campaigns against the infa-mous Thuggees in central India in the 1840swere indeed part of a general effort at disar-mament of Indian society. But they also hadperformative functions designed to demon-strate the British ability and will to both ruleand reform with a firm hand (van Woerkens2002). Similar considerations applied to colo-nial Malaya where the native Islamic courtswere seen as too inconsistent to provide acoherent structure of justice and civil order.Only after a thorough reconstruction and cod-ification that introduced more rigorous pun-ishments were these local courts allowed toplay an integral, if minor, role in the over-all administration of justice in Malaya (Peletz2002). Similar rationalizations took place withthe formation of personal law codes across In-dia. Codification and systematization of localjurisprudence subsequently became the cor-

nerstone of the institutionalization of legalpluralism in most of colonial Africa in thetwentieth century (Moore 1978, Gluckman1965, Chanock 1998).

In the Dutch Indies and in French In-dochina, colonial governments were facedwith an ever-growing population of “mixedrace.” Causing not merely a problem ofclassification and appropriateness, these pop-ulations were regarded as a potential threat tothe moral cohesion of the Dutch and Frenchsettlers. Those in power also feared that themixing of races undermined the stature andprestige of the colonial masters in the eyes ofthe natives. The systematic encouragementof emigration of white women to the colonialworld at the end of the nineteenth centuryaimed at strengthening the racial communityof colonists which, in tune with the dom-inance of scientific racism at the time, wasseen as the very basis of colonial sovereignty(Stoler 2002).

Until the end of the nineteenth century,colonial enterprises in Africa were mainly ofa simple and extractive nature, first based onthe slave trade and later on extraction of min-erals and timber. As in Asia, but employingmuch more random and excessive violence,these enterprises were mainly private andonly loosely associated with European statesthrough royal charters (Coquery-Vidrovitch1977, Sen 1998). This “private indirect gov-ernment” (Mbembe 2001) operated in what,in every sense of the word, was a state ofexception—in areas outside the control of anystate and using methods and levels of vio-lence that would have been unacceptable inmost others parts of the world. If Leopold’sCongo is the most widely known example(Ewans 2002), the massacres at Maji-Maji andthe crushing of the Herero revolt in SouthWest Africa and the massacres in Rhodesia in1899 are other cases in point. The slave tradewas sanctioned and encouraged by Europeanstates, but the actual operations were run al-most entirely by private companies. Thesecompanies operated with near-complete im-punity, attacking some existing states and


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kingdoms on the Atlantic coast, collaboratingwith others, and in the process transformingthese states into predatory slave economieswreaking terror and disorder upon popu-lations deep into the interior (Meillassoux1991). As has been characteristic of state for-mation in much of the world, these entre-pots, privateers, and maverick entrepreneursbecame included into the colonial states or be-came their enemies as bandits or pirates, whenthese began to firm up in the latter half of thenineteenth century (Gallant 1999). Similar os-cillation between inclusion and assertion ofautonomy applied to many of the mission sta-tions across Africa. While spearheading a civ-ilizing mission and thus supporting the over-all goals of colonial rule, missions in outlyingareas were very often in conflict with the colo-nial administration over issues of punishmentand harsh rule of their flocks (Comaroff &Comaroff 1991).

Even as modern forms of government wereimported and implemented in the colonialterritories, their effects were always unevenand extraordinarily dispersed. Many differ-ent forms of sovereignty coexisted within thecolonial territories. The colonies were nevergoverned as intensely and with the same devo-tion to registering and monitoring its subjectsas was the case in Europe—not even in set-tler colonies such as Kenya and South Africa.Substantial parts of the colonized populationslived under native rule—chiefs, rajas, localregents—which enforced brutal labor and pe-nal regimes under the supervision of the colo-nial state. In much of Africa, a major part ofthe rural population lived under such regimes(Mamdani 1996); in India, about one-third ofthe territory and population in the subconti-nent lived under indirect rule until 1947, andin Malaya, most of the rural Malay popula-tion was governed by the Malay aristocracythroughout the colonial period.

Agamben’s interventions have forced manysocial scientists to rethink generally the re-lationship between sovereignty and the dis-ciplinary modalities of power explored byFoucault (for a good discussion of this, see

Cohen 2004, Das & Poole 2004). Sovereignpower exists in modern states alongside, andintertwined with, bio-political rationalitiesaiming at reproducing lives and societies asan ever-present possibility of losing one’s cit-izenship and rights and becoming reducedto a purely biological form. This insight iseven more pertinent and important in thecolonial and postcolonial world where bio-political rationalities were always predomi-nantly configured around maintaining pub-lic order and governing communities andcollectivities rather than individual subjects.Although the deployment of a Foucauldianoptic in the analysis of colonial rule hasproduced major insights (Chatterjee 1993,Mitchell 2002), it is obvious that however in-teresting and compelling it is to explore thementalities and blueprints of colonial officials,such analysis tells us relatively little about howgovernment and sovereign power was config-ured in practice and in everyday life. Colonialstates were indeed “ethnographic states” thatemployed scientific data collection and cat-egorization to generate a governable realityamenable to interventions, as Dirks noted inthe context of India (Dirks 2001) and Chaikovnoted in his analysis of both the imperial andSoviet paradigms of knowledge and rule inSiberia (Ssorin-Chaikov 2003).

These designs and intentions should notblind us, however, to the fact that the reachand efficacy of colonial states was uneven andoften severely limited. This limitation was es-pecially true of border areas in which localelites and freebooters often enjoyed effectiveautonomy (Nugent 1999, Sivaramakrishnan1999). The incompleteness, tentativeness, andfragmented nature of colonial states and theexcessive forms of violence they frequentlyvisited on their subject populations have struc-tured postcolonial states in profound ways.A fast-growing literature on the culture ofdifferent postcolonial states seeks to histori-cize specific states, to set them in their widercontext, and to get beyond universalist no-tions of state functions. Many of these studieshave sought to conceptualize and document


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the consequences of sovereignty moving awayfrom being rhetorically invested in the stateand the law to being invested in new entitiesin the postcolonial situation—the nation, thepeople, “society” as such, the national econ-omy (see for instance, Coronil 1997, Fuller& Benei 2000, Tarlo 2003, Goswami 2004).Other works have attempted in creative waysto shed light on how both elite and popu-lar ontologies of power—as something hid-den, magical, fetishised, realist, or ultimatelyviolent—intersected and clashed in everydayencounters between the postcolonial state, itssubjects, and other sovereign powers (Siegel1997, Taussig 1997, Navaro-Yashin 2002).

The fetishization of sovereign power isby no means limited to societies beyond theWest, however. This was forcefully noted bythe exiled German philosopher Ernst Cassirerin his critique of Nazism (Cassirer 1946) andexplored anthropologically in a range of re-cent publications (Verdery 1999, Meyer &Pels 2003). The historically complex and of-ten unsettled configurations of sovereignty inmany postcolonial societies—and we includeLatin America in this category—have givenrise to a complex range of informal sovereign-ties. The tentative rule and local despotisms ofthese forces often structure the lives of ordi-nary people more profoundly and effectivelythan does the distant and far-from-panopticgaze of the state. We turn now to this body ofwork.

BENEATH THE PANOPTICGAZE: INFORMAL SOVEREIGNSAND OTHER OPAQUE POWERS

As Durkheim (1933) noted, the productionof state authority, and the law as an expres-sion of its sovereignty, is dependent on theproduction of an unlawful underside of thestate. Thus, a murky, secretive underworld ofpirates, bandits, criminals, smugglers, youthgangs, drug lords, warlords, Mafiosi, traitors,terrorists, en fin of outlaws and liminal figuresseems to persist and mutate despite state lawsand powerful institutions entrusted with the

responsibility of eliminating them. The per-sistence of this underworld is true of highlydeveloped and powerful states and even morepronounced in much of the postcolonial worldin which multiple and segmented sovereign-ties was always the reality for large sections ofthe population.

Anthropologists have increasingly insistedthat this underworld and its shadow net-works cannot be understood without refer-ence to their specific relations to states andhegemonic discourses of social order (e.g.,Nordstrom 2000, Parnell & Kane 2003).They have described how illegal organizationsoften work with the “studied ignorance ortacit consent” of the authorities (Schneider& Schneider 1999), how state officials re-ceive bribes in their “dirty togetherness” withcriminals, or how they have vested interestin upholding zones of exception where ille-gal groups operate with impunity. State in-stitutions may even forge “unruly coalitions”(Verdery 1996) with illegal groups that con-trol territories or populations where the statedoes not have the capacity or will to exerciseits sovereignty. In an attempt to characterizethe wide range of illegal/state relations, Smart(1999) talked of a “continuum of persistence”of illegality, ranging from tranquil convivialityto open challenges of state sovereignty.

Historically we find examples of informalsovereignties at agricultural, highland, and seafrontiers where “military entrepreneurs” op-erated in a highly ambiguous relationship withstates in the making, such as the Lords of theMarches in Lebanon (Gilsenan 1996), mes-tizo settlers at the Northern Mexican fron-tier (Alonso 1994), or gamonales at the high-land frontiers in Peru (Poole 2004). From aworld-system perspective, Gallant (1999) ar-gues that the phenomenon is associated withprimitive accumulation and the extension andintensification of markets, with armed groupsand individuals sometimes assisting and some-times resisting central state authorities. Poole(2004) insists that the gamonales cannot beinterpreted as autonomous sovereigns oper-ating in and of themselves beyond the reach


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of the state. They helped, represented, andabused people in their area of influence whilealso representing the state and the law, as wellas the transgression of law. Thus, they per-sonified the two sides of state making: the lawand the violence on which it rests, employingboth the “law making” and the “law preserv-ing” violence, to use Benjamin’s (1978) famousdistinction.

Turning to the issue of informalsovereignty in the present, we find thatthe use of illegal and often violent practicesby local strongmen, staunch bureaucrats,vivid politicians, businessmen or vigilantes iswidespread. As they operate with impunitywithin their “jurisdictions” they become alaw unto themselves, in a sense representing alegacy of colonial indirect government. Thequestion is what the sources and attributes ofinformal sovereignty are, and whether suchpractices may be meaningfully character-ized as sovereign practices being exercisedwithin, beside, or against formally sovereignstates?

Hobsbawm’s (1969) social bandits consti-tute a celebrated ideal type of outlaws whobase their quasi-legitimate rule on the per-ceptions of state law as being unenforcedor immoral, unjust, arbitrary or in otherways out of tune with reality. In some as-pects, Mafiosi, gangs and, other “violent en-trepreneurs” (Blok 1974) have fulfilled vi-tal state functions such as the provision ofsecurity, credits, and conflict mediation. Inpostcolonial and postsocialist states, arbi-trary laws and bureaucratic procedures thatincrease unnecessarily the transaction costsof exchange and production have served toexplain the extension of protection racketsand criminal organizations that control, butalso enable the working of transport systems,trade, and other sectors using patronage andpredatory practices. However, as Schneider &Schneider (1999) warned us, this functionalistview comes very close to the self-perceptionsof these predatory organizations.

While effectively challenging the state’smonopoly of violence, these organizations are

engaging in sovereign practices themselves,as argued for example by Humphrey (2004)in her analysis of transport entrepreneurs inpostsocialist Ulan-Ude. Drawing heavily onAgamben’s insights, she identifies “localizedforms of sovereignty” that are “nested” within“higher sovereignties” but nevertheless “re-tain a domain within which control over lifeand death is operational” (p. 420). In the early1990s mafia-like organizations took over con-trol of transportation after a period of vio-lent accumulation and boundary marking, butthe structure stabilized and gave room for“ways of life” of taxi entrepreneurs. As longas they paid their tributes to the organizationthey could even experience a certain “joie devivre” (p. 434). However, they do not haverights within the system and risk being ex-cluded or just abandoned without access tourban survival. As the system works, its dy-namics are generated more by the rationalesof the way of life and the fear of abandon-ment than by the fear of violent repression andexclusion.

Similar fragmented systems of authorityare found all over the postcolonial worldwhere local strongmen occupy strategic po-sitions between state institutions and thepopulation. One such example is found inmetropolitan squatter areas and slum cities,where proper land titling never has been un-dertaken and where access to entitlements iscontingent on having a well-connected patronwho can channel claims and applications (e.g.,Parnell 2003). In many cases, such local slum-lords, strongmen, and quasi-legal networkshave been de facto sovereigns from colonialtimes. They have at times been tamed and in-corporated into governmental structures andhave at other times been nodes of oppositionto the state (Adelkhah 2000, Hansen 2001,Plissart & de Boeck 2006).

Such persons command discretionarypowers deciding when to punish illegalitiesand when to make the customary exceptionfrom the law. The figure of the criminal isoften faceless or assumes a spectral and yetenormously powerful form as reported by


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Siegel (1998) from Jakarta. In other cases, thecriminal figure can be well known and highlyvisible, operating between the zones of ille-gality and legality, deploying rumors of hisviolent past or connections to powerful andhidden underworld forces to style himself asa heroic protector of communities and com-mon people. Not only are such figures centralto the regulation and adjudication of every-day life, but police departments, civic ad-ministrations, and political parties must alsorely on them to govern and regulate life inslums and popular neighborhoods (Hansen2005).

The interpretation of de facto sovereigntyas being related to the exercise of violence withimpunity resonates with numerous ethno-graphic descriptions of ruthless men (seldomwomen) of force, particular individuals orgroups with the reputation of being unpre-dictably, arbitrarily, and excessively violent. AsGilsenan (1996) notes, “at the extreme suchmen were said to show a sovereign pleasure inviolating others by deed or word arbitrarily,gratuitously, ‘just like that’ without any reasonbut their own personal will and pleasure” (pp.xi–xii). The apparently immanent attributes ofsuch individuals, Gilsenan argues, were cru-cial and personalized elements of people’s ex-perience of power at the Lebanese frontier.The narratives of these men’s force and vi-olence depicted the foundational violence ofthe current social order and contributed to theconstitution of social relations of contest anddomination.

Such narratives of ruthless and violent in-dividuals and organizations develop aroundkey performances of sacrifice or heroism at theexpense of “savages” or outcasts at the fron-tiers, the violent suppression of rivals, or thedepuration of traitors from within the politi-cal or moral community in question (McCoy1999, Jensen 2005). Similar to nationalist nar-ratives, they may be analyzed as constitutiveof solidarity and identity in the Durkheimianvein or as being nurtured by the anxieties ofcontamination, impurity, and blurred identi-ties (Appadurai 1998).

Another strand of analysis focuses on therole of secrecy and magic in narratives ofinvincibility and unrestrained “wild” power.Leaders have often been associated with am-biguous, occult forces that may harm aswell as benefit others (e.g., West 2005), butthe mastery of occult forces is seen as notonly reinforcing but also subverting exist-ing power structures (Geschiere 1997). Thus,guerrilla forces in Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone,and Liberia were seen as having access to thepower of spirits (Lan 1985, Richards 1996,Ellis 1999); today, vigilantes in Nigeria aredescribed in popular discourse as magicallyempowered superheroes who can mobilizesymbolic registers of the unknown and super-natural (Smith 2004); in Caracas the spirits ofrenown dead criminals are seen to posses thebodies of the living in a spirit cult (Ferrandiz2004); and as Taussig (1991) famously showedin the case of the rubber economy at thePutomayo River, narratives of the supernat-ural powers of the Indians inspired acts of ex-cessive violence in the “space of terror” mir-roring and appropriating these powers for themen at the frontier.

As commonly noted, imaginations of oc-cult forces seem to be particularly salient incontexts of rapid change in which power rela-tions are unclear or incomprehensible, suchas the current phase of globalization andmodernization (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999).Whereas these forces lie beyond the jurisdic-tion and powers of state institutions, commu-nal or popular bodies engaging in everydaypolicing—by default or through outsourcingarrangements—will often have to deal withrumors of witchcraft and sorcery.

Particularly in postcolonial or postsocialiststates, we find the phenomenon of “nested”or “outsourced” (Buur 2005) sovereignty.Whether the effect of an inherently limitedcapacity for law enforcement or the con-scious definition of zones and times of ex-ception where state law is suspended forpractical purposes, we find state officials ortheir substitutes engaging in de facto exer-cise of sovereign practices in the interstices


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of laws and formal procedures, between thereal and the legal. “Free-fire zones” or “zonesof transgression,” for example, are found atinternational borders and metropolitan ar-eas where paramilitary groups or semiprivatedeath squads engage in cleansing opera-tions beyond formal accountability (Scheper-Hughes 1992). As several authors suggest,the excessively violent practices commonlyused in authoritarian states such as Brazil andNigeria are being reproduced by vigilantesand clandestine security organizations in for-mally democratic states (Linger 2003).

The past decade of simultaneous state de-cay and democratic reforms of security andjustice sectors in the wake of armed conflicts insome areas has turned the attention of anthro-pologists toward issues of everyday security,community policing, communal and popularjustice, and private security companies (e.g.,Ruteere & Pommerolle 2003, Gore & Pratten2003, Buur & Jensen 2004). Studies suggesta wide range of relationships from tight con-trol and regulation to complete autonomy thatgoes much beyond a simple state-society di-vide. Furthermore we may see the outsourcingof everyday policing less as a sign of weaknessof the state than as a way of incorporatingsegments and zones where state sovereigntynever was effective, and where low-cost formsof policing poor neighborhoods are devel-oped. But the new (or rather re-emerging)policies of outsourcing sovereignty are alsoa sign of the increasing importance of mar-ket forces in regard to practices of informal aswell as formal sovereignty.

CONCESSIONS, FIRMS, ANDTHE SOVEREIGNTY OF THEMARKET

The trading company, the concession, and theroyal charter were the main vehicles for earlycolonial expansion. Later, privately owned en-terprises were of equal importance in the con-solidation and administration of the colonies.In the Caribbean, the planter soon emergedas the preeminent symbol and daily adminis-

trator of colonial economy and terror. On theplantations and estates from the Caribbean toSri Lanka, Fiji, and Malaya, the planter wasthe crucial node in the colonial administra-tion: the sovereign of his land who either lit-erally owned the bodies of his labor force orheld workers in such tight control and wieldedsuch influence in the colony that colonial of-ficials rarely found it opportune, neither po-litically nor economically, to intervene or toprotect slaves or indentured laborers (Mintz1989).

This de facto outsourcing of colonialsovereignty had deep and enduring effects inareas dominated by European settlers or plan-tation economies. Populations were kept sep-arated along ethnic and racial lines, and eco-nomic power continued to be held by verysmall elites controlling vast tracts of land andvast pools of labor. This historical predica-ment laid the ground for a range of differentconflicts—from violent oppression in Haiti(Trouillot 1995) to the isolation and vulner-ability of the “estate Tamils” in Sri Lanka (seeDaniel 1996) and the deep racial and culturaldivides of present day Fiji (Kelly & Kaplan2001), to mention a few examples.

The emergence of “special economiczones” devoted to labor-intensive productionor tourism across Asia in the 1970s and 1980srepresented in some ways a return of the con-cession in a new form, and an outsourcing, ormaybe “grading,” of sovereignty (Ong 1999).The difference was, however, that these zonesand their interaction with the rest of soci-ety were often controlled rather effectively bythe states in which they were located. Somestates, particularly in Africa, were unable tocontrol mining, oil, and timber companies,and the proliferating development and NGOsector, mainly because many states were al-ready parceled out and their resources effec-tively privatized by military elites and leadingmembers of the political elite (Bayart et al.1999). In Zimbabwe, the theme of sovereigntyhas dominated campaigns against white set-tlers seen as alien and exploitative and as rem-nants of the colonial regime. The plundering


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of the state by the political elite and thetakeover of private white-owned farms by warveterans and youth brigades still loyal to Mu-gabe have explicitly been organized as asser-tions of popular sovereignty—the protectionand communal retaking of the ancestral landfrom the private control of the settlers (Worby2003, Moore 2005).

Because the nation-state is no longerthe privileged locus of sovereignty—alwaysdoubtful in much of the postcolonial world—sovereignties are found in multiple and lay-ered forms around the world. Outsourcing ofvital infrastructural services and security oper-ations to major corporations, and an almost-religious belief in the self-regulating forcesof the market, is at the heart of America’snew imperial adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq,and elsewhere (Harvey 2005). In the ageof the great concessions Western rulers be-lieved that military and trading entrepreneurswould ultimately serve the interests and con-solidate the sovereignty of the king or statethat had certified and encouraged their pur-suit of private accumulation. Similarly, to-day substantial tasks—from protecting theGreen Zone in Baghdad to overseeing the re-building of the Iraqi infrastructure—are out-sourced to companies based in the UnitedStates or in “friendly” nations (Klein 2004).Across the world, major development projectsfunded by developed nations in the West

and in East Asia are operated and imple-mented by private contractors and NGOs,often with multinational personnel, on be-half of sovereign nation states. Internationalagencies are tied into coordinating mecha-nisms and contracts with military agencies andprivate contractors in a rapidly developing“security-development network” (Duffield2001).

Whereas sovereign power has always de-pended on the capacity for deployment of de-cisive force, it seems that the control over ter-ritory and bodies that marked the nation-statemodel of sovereignty is now supplementedby a powerful drive to control the “legalcontract”—the modern-day concession thatempowers private companies to carry out statefunctions. It echoes Sassen’s (1996) sugges-tion that the most decisive form of citizenshipwithin states, and internationally, now belongsto firms and market forces, rather than to in-dividuals or groups of citizens. This emerg-ing and complex configuration of sovereign-ties calls not only for historical analogies butalso for new anthropological studies and criti-cal reflection on how the circulation of capital,that ubiquitous fiction we call “the market,” isan evermore powerful sovereign force: mag-ical and redemptive (Comaroff & Comaroff2000) but also unpredictable and pitiless in itspunishment of those who fail to perform orthose who fall behind.

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sovereignty revisited - thomas b hansen and finn stepputat

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