(Author Workshop) Hybrid Sovereignty Assemblages: From Liberal to Illiberal and Beyond

 

Author workshop, March 25, 2022, 12h – 14h30 (EST)

Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University

 

Hybrid Sovereignty Assemblages: From Liberal to Illiberal and Beyond

Convenors:

Diane Davis, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University

and Frank Müller, University of Amsterdam and Visiting Scholar at WCFIA

Contact Frank Müller for Zoom link: f.i.mueller@uva.nl

During this workshop, we wish to discuss shared and contested aspects of hybrid sovereignty assemblages, which is the conceptual focus of our planned collective submission of a special issue to the journal Territory, Politics, Governance.

While to date, literature has tended to frame analyses of sovereignty beyond the classical definition (states’ monopoly over the legitimate use of violence in a defined territory), this workshop expands newer bodies of literature to capture the increasingly territorially distributed claim to sovereignty. We will focus on both the agents that produce these claims in addition to state security agents (i.e. vigilantes, militias, and paramilitaries); and on the material practices, the objects and materialities employed in, or provided to sustain those claims. With the notion of hybrid sovereignty assemblages we allude to the observation that the at times fragmented (Davis 2014) sovereignty is permeated and reproduced by a complexity of institutional and geographic dimensions: Diverse state and non-state actors sustain the “shifting” territories of sovereignty, or “sovereignties in contention” (Sieder 2011: 168), and anthropologists call on us to study the “conflicting, overlapping, nested, and entangled claims to sovereignty” (Stepputat 2015: 132), promoting an analytical shift towards everyday encounters and acts of sovereignty.

We assume that states’ monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is rather to be seen from an empirical standpoint, and factoring-in the historically dependent and contingent interactions of various co-producers and -claimants of violence by other than state actors (Tapscott 2021). With this, we wish to detail forms of power that are not moments of governing exceptionalism, but rather are routine and endemic in a variety of contexts. In addition to revealing the materiality of these sovereignties, we wish to shed light on the socio-material conditions that sustain these claims to sovereignty and the ways that such conditions contribute to “multiple and competing sovereignties” (AlSayyad and Roy 2006: 4).

Despite the preponderance of papers on the global South, we see the Special Issue as speaking to a multiplicity of contexts. This is because we underscore that the hybrid, illicit governance practices flower in a globalized word that is characterized by the transnational flows of diverse living and unanimated materials. In this context national sovereignty has become an imagination that is constantly permeated by diverse licit and illicit flows, rendering the illiberal character of governance arrangements between state and non-state actors. With this argument, we not only challenge the core assumption of liberalism that the national state is the primary agent of sovereignty, we also question the territoriality of governance that this presupposes. Covering various world regions, this SI offers a global perspective on how localized claims gain momentum in transnational hybrid governance arrangements.

The introduction to this SI will expand debates around the core concepts of sovereignty and hybrid governance on the basis of nine individual case studies employing a socio-material perspective. All contributions approach sovereignty as being assembled by authoritative (and at times, coercive) claims of various actors, including formalized institutional state actors, private enterprises, and more or less organized criminal actors. Hence this SI’s claim to focus on illiberal forms of hybrid governance arrangements: Assuming that sovereignty is not a claim which is exclusively expressed by state actors alone, but rather involves diverse arrangements with non-state actors, suggests a questioning of the legitimacy of the state’s claim to represent citizens’ rights. As territorial sovereignty is permeated by diverse and heterogeneous actors’ claims, what could be called ‘illiberal’ as well as ‘illicit’ forms of exercising authority and representing citizens’ rights are emerging.

 

Illiberal forms are those that counter or challenge basic principles referring to the division between state and civil society/market, and the forms of governance (i.e. built on an established social and political contract) that accept these as distinct. Activities that may have been considered the foundation of liberalism in the past now may be under challenge by both state and market actors. Illicit forms of governance refer to those practices that flout, challenge, or violate the laws embedded in constitutions, legislatures, and other regulations established by formal governing regimes. Informality, for its part, is a rather imprecise term used by different stakeholders to make a range of claims about the ways that rules are flaunted or transcended with acceptance by all parties involved. States, citizens, and market actors alike will tolerate “working around the edges” of expected behavior and regulatory oversight without explicitly violating the law. These three definitions will be clarified in the SI introductory essay by the editors, and will be variously addressed in individual chapters, which illustrate these particular forms in their respective case studies.

 

While various authors have furthered debates on hybrid governance, the special issue will focus explicitly on the relationships between formalized actors and those illicitly or informally exercising authoritative control over flows, people and territories, assessing the socio-material conditions under which this occurs and theorizing its implications for, what we call, sovereignty assemblages (i.e. the extent to which there exist multiple, competing, or overlapping forms of sovereignty).

 

The individual papers will address the context-specific, and historically contingent organization of sovereignties, with a particular focus on uses of violence, which historically has been the means deployed by states to cement their sovereignty. Each contributor will offer their own historically embedded comparative perspective on the following questions:

 

1. To what extend do non-state actors claim to use violence authoritatively? Do such claims undermine or support the state’s claim to do so?
2. Assuming that claims to monopolize the use of force are not necessarily zero-sum, but can take mutually enhancing forms within such hybrid governance arrangements, how do states and other-than-state actors prioritize spaces, sectors of production, and (elite) populations?
3. Lastly, does the focus on the materiality of governance arrangements allow to further breakdown the still strong binaries between categories such as formal/informal and licit/illicit ?

 

 

Program

We invite all presenters to introduce their paper’s main argument in 10 minutes. Each presentation will be followed by a Q&A (10 minutes). The workshop will end with an open discussion of the SI’s main questions and concepts (20 minutes)

 

Nisha Mathew (School of Law, Mahindra University)

Between the rupee and the border: Competing sovereignties in the Arabian Sea

 

Rivke Jaffe (University of Amsterdam)

Dogs of war: More-than-human performances of sovereignty

 

Maria Tysiachniouk, Juha Kotilainen, Svetlana Tulaeva, Antonina Kulyasova (all University of Eastern Finland) and Laura Henry (Bowdoin College)

Global/local interplay of environmental actors: Creating liberal spaces in an illiberal regime in Russia

 

Massimo Bertolin (Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy) and Francesco Chiodelli (University of Turin, Italy)

The criminal exploitation of urban property development: the role of peripherality

 

Erella Grassiani (University of Amsterdam)

Teaching the World to Spy: Israeli Cybersecurity and its Anti-Democratic Effects

 

Markus Hochmüller (University of Oxford) and Annette Idler (University of Oxford/Harvard University)

The Emergence, Ecology, and Effect of Hybrid Governance at the Frontier: Approaching Multiple Sovereignties Across Porous Borders

 

Gaston Gordillo (University of British Columbia)

Hostile Terrain: On the Spatial and Affective Conditions for Revolution