Reconfiguring Sovereignty in Foucauldian Genealogies of Power: The Case of English Master and Servant Law and the Dispersion and the Exercise of Sovereignty in the Modern Age

This paper is a critique and partial reconfiguration of the Foucauldian genealogy of sovereignty. Sovereignty is largely conceptualized as the antithesis of governmentality and disciplinary power in the modern age; presented as a negative case as a juridical and centralized power of interdiction and containment in the classical age. I argue that we can genealogically examine how sovereignty in the modern age underwent transformation and dispersion. My empirical focus is on how master and servant law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with the development and transformations of local courts, led to the increasingly dispersal of sovereign power as it as practiced in specific industrial sites and regions.     

In the sovereign machine: sovereignty,governmentality, automaticity

Abstract

This essay explores a series of sovereign ‘machines’ – slaves, puppets, automata – in political theory from Benjamin to Agamben. It is now well-documented that the philosophical question of ‘the machine’ – of whether a complex system requires a human operator or whether it can function autonomously – is also a crucial political question that haunts every discussion of sovereignty from Hobbes onwards. However, my wager in what follows is that this machine is not just a metaphor for a metaphysical situation – whether it be rationality (Hobbes), bureaucratization (Weber), neutralization (Schmitt), historicism (Benjamin) or governmentality (Foucault) – but a material phenomenon that carries transformative political promise and threat. To summarize the argument of this essay, I contend that ‘sovereign machines’ like slavery (Aristotle, Hegel, Kojève, Agamben), puppets, automata or clockwork (Descartes, Hobbes, Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida), lens, optics and mirrors (Hobbes, Kantorowicz, Benjamin, Lacan, Foucault) and so on do not merely reflect but change our understanding of the causal relationship between sovereignty and governmentality, decision and norm, exception and rule. If the self-appointed task of the modern political theorist has so often been to obtain or regain sovereignty of, or over, the machine – to jam its gears – I seek to expose what the later Derrida calls the ‘machine’ of sovereignty itself. In conclusion, I argue that political theory’s attempt to reveal or retroactively invent the sovereign person at the heart of the machine only ends up revealing the sovereign machine at the heart of the person. What – if anything – is really inside the machine of sovereignty?     

ENTERTAINING TORTURE,EMBODYING LAW

Torture appears as an image: once, of sovereign power, more recently, of acts performed on people not even defined as prisoners. It served to instruct, now it serves to entertain, as image and spectacle. Law's entertaining of torture both enables the spectacles seen (and not seen) since Abu Ghraib, and intersects with wider cultural practices, especially in cinema and television. Torture has been a form of entertainment as much as it has been a subject of revulsion. Recent justifications of torture have sought cinematic backing. The US Justice Department torture memos, and the scandals of Abu Ghraib and beyond, link attitudes towards torture with a culture of entertainment and spectacle, up to the point at which the law comes to entertain torture. At stake in both spectacle and actual practices is a form of corporeal sovereignty: the wholeness of the sovereign against the brokenness of any body that would threaten such wholeness. This paper explores these intersections, along with the logic of a sovereign disregard for the body, through readings of the torture memos, First Blood, and the investigations into prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq.     

Quand l'expertise se heurte au pouvoir souverain : la nation américaine face à la prolifération nucléaire, 1945-1953

After the Second World War, the applications of nuclear science raise a crucial threat to international security as far as their civil applications can be turned into military devices. Debates about nuclear proliferation offer a fruitful site to analyze the production of an expertise in bio-security. This paper analyzes in particular how experts have envisioned the role of nation-states and sovereign power in relation to policies aimed at ensuring the security of populations against the risk of nuclear annihilation. It explores what conceptions of sovereignty different experts constructed; what disciplines (political science, natural science, law) were mobilized in this debate; what strategies of institutionalization American experts followed; what publics were targeted by these experts (officials, think tanks, academic publics, media). Experts' conceptions of threats and insurances as well as the institutional paths they build to access policy circles explain which of the experts' policies diffused among policy circles. This approach, which focuses on the production of ideas rather than on the diffusion of administrative norms, complements neo-institutionalist studies of the internationalization of scientific modes of regulation.     

Chronotopes in the scopic regime of sovereignty

The foundations of law are embedded in a cultural imaginary. The exercise of sovereignty by governments today, and how we as citizens relate to it and are constituted by it, is intimately connected to the modes and discourses through which we experience it on a daily basis. To demonstrate this argument, the first two sections address iconic images by two Australians who are among the greatest photo-journalists of the twentieth century – Frank Hurley in World War I and Damien Parer in World War II. The essay then proceed to considers contemporary and global images of sovereign violence. A comparison, not just in terms of what is represented but how, will help us articulate three different ‘scopic regimes’ of war, power, and subjectivity. In particular, we will see that the images organise differing relationships between experience and time. As Mikhail Bakhtin argued in his pioneering work on the novel, these ‘chronotopes,’ by giving aesthetic form to different orientations to time and the temporal, express and indeed constitute different forms of subjectivity. The argument is advanced in this essay by shifting our attention to visual forms and to legal subjectivity.     

Predatory Care: The Imperial Hunt in Mughal and British India

Taking the hunt as both metaphor of rule and political practice, this paper compares the predatory exercises of two imperial formations in India: the late British Raj and the sixteenth-century Mughal empire. The British pursuit of man-eaters confronted feline terror with sovereign might, securing the bodies and hearts of resistant subjects through spectacles of responsible force. The Mughal hunt, on the other hand, took unruly nobles and chieftains as the objects of its fearful care, winning their obedient submission through the exercise of a predatory sovereignty. Both instances of 'predatory care' shed light on the troubling intimacy of biopolitical cultivation and sovereign violence.     

International law and human rights: trends concerning international migrants and refugees

Not with standing human rights linkages, migrants and refugees are often on the periphery of effective international protection. State sovereignty and self-regarding notions of community are used to deny or dilute substantive and procedural guarantees. Recently, even non- discrimination as a fundamental principle has been questioned, as has the system of refugee protection. This article located both migrants and refugees squarely within the human rights context, contrasting both inalienable rights with the demands of sovereignty, and juxtaposing the 2 in a context of existing and developing international standards. Migration and refugee flows will go on, and the developed world, in particular, must address the consequences - legal, humanitarian, socioeconomic, and cultural. Racism and institutional denials of basic rights daily challenge the common interest. This article shows how the law must evolve, responding coherently to contemporary problems, if the structure of rights and freedoms is to be maintained.     

Sexy and sovereign? Aboriginal models hit the ‘multicultural mainstream’

Long argued by post-colonial scholarship, Indigenous sexualities have been variously cast as pathological and abject, or fetishized and exotiziced. In the Australian context, Aboriginal sexualities have never been granted a normalized, agentic visibility in the white Australian imaginary. Since the 1990s, however, there has been an increase of ‘sexy’ Aboriginal ‘stars’ in the Australian media. This newfound visibility invites fresh questions about race, beauty, appropriation and resistance, most particularly in ways that centres Aboriginal narratives: What does it mean to be visible and ‘mainstreamed’ in a media that ‘values diversity’, whilst denying sovereignty for Indigenous people? This question is significant in the Australian context, but also has relevance for rethinking race, sexuality and media representations in colonial contexts internationally. The paper explores this newfound exposure through the voices of two Australian Aboriginal women, Samantha Harris and Magnolia Maymaru. These women have come to national and international fame as celebrated models in a fashion industry priding itself on becoming more inclusive and multicultural. It focuses on their responses to journalists over the course of their careers, as well as how the stories construct beauty and Aboriginality. I draw on Indigenous feminist scholars, particularly the work of Irene Watson, who foreground the subject of sovereignty and remind us that discourses of multiculturalism have a charged meaning for Indigenous people. I also draw on the insights of Elizabeth Povinelli who considers how sexuality intersects with discourses of empire, and how Indigenous people employ ‘creative engagements’ with liberal multiculturalism. Positioning sovereignty and multiculturalism side by side, I reflect on how Samantha and Magnolia enact a sovereign sexuality, and what this might look like. Rather than fix colonial alterity or reproduce multicultural ‘inclusions’, their narratives skirt, sidestep and ‘dance’ with the discourses constructing their lives, attending to race while transcending its colonial limits.     

Border Scans: Sovereignty,Surveillance and the Customs Service in Ghana

This article explores the relationship between surveillance techniques and the production of sovereign statehood in an effort to track the day-to-day practices through which state authority is constituted in the context of globalization. This article explicitly probes the processes through which new forms of sovereignty come into being within the life of the state. It takes as its point of departure the operations of Ghana's Customs Service, a body charged with policing the nation's frontiers and collecting the bulk of state revenue. Contrasting the work of a multinational firm contracted by the government of Ghana to carry out Customs duties and the conventional roles of Ghanaian Customs officers, this article examines the ways in which the manifold technologies of neo-liberalism (from contractual forms and modes of accountability, to the apparatuses of surveillance) redefine the capacities, authority, and imagination of both state and self, held by state agents. Here we see a sovereignty that is increasingly derived outside of the state even as the play of sovereign power is intensified and deeply diffused within it.     

Deciphering the modern Janus: societal multiplicity and nation-formation

ABSTRACT

How to theorize the nation’s Janus-like form, its simultaneous modernity and antiquity? This paper provides an original answer to this longstanding question. It argues that nations arise from the interaction of ‘societal multiplicity’ and the expansionist tendency of historical capitalism. The emergence of capitalism super-adds a modern inflection to the inherently relational process of collective identity formation by generating modern sovereignty as an abstract form of rule. Crucially however, just like its emergence, capitalism’s expansion also refracts through societal multiplicity. Non-capitalist societies are therefore pressured into ‘nationalist’ projects of emulative self-preservation in which the nation’s political form (i.e. the sovereign state) is forged before its sociological content (i.e. primitive accumulation). Thus, the original site of this process, France, produced the modular nation-form that unlike Britain’s imperial nationhood could be globalized. The paper therefore shows that IR’s premise of multiplicity may be the key to one of social sciences’ most enduring puzzles.     

Negotiating Abolition: Cape Town and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

The city of Cape Town owes its origins to its role as a refreshment station for Dutch East India Company (VOC) vessels. Yet ‘the fairest Cape’ was also a half-way station for slave ships making their way from the south-western Indian Ocean to the Americas. This article examines the role of the Cape in the slave trade from Mozambique to the Americas during the 17 years following the Act of Abolition. While the Act effectively ended the importation of slaves to the Cape, it initially had little or no impact on the movement of slave ships through Table Bay. Despite Britain's opposition to the slave trade, the frequency with which slave vessels stopped at the Cape in the first few years after the implementation of the Act almost equalled the frequency with which they had called at the port in the last years of VOC rule. It was only when Britain tightened restrictions on the trade that the number of slavers visiting Table Bay declined and then finally halted in 1824. The conflicting interests of different branches of the British state limited the suppression of the trade, particularly in wartime. But the implementation of abolition was also retarded by negotiations over the parameters of international law and by the equivocations of a slave colony and its administration. This article aims both to bring the Cape into the history of the ‘Trans-Atlantic’ slave trade and to contribute to the broader history of the legal provisions behind abolition.     

Competing Sovereignties,Contested Processes: Insights from the Venezuelan Food Sovereignty Experiment

Abstract

This article explores how ‘competing sovereignties’ are shaping the political construction of food sovereignty—broadly defined as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems'. This study was motivated by a lack of clarity on the ‘sovereignty’ of food sovereignty, as noted by numerous scholars—sovereignty for whom, and how? As there is a growing consensus that there are in fact ‘multiple sovereignties’ of food sovereignty that cut across jurisdictions and scales, there is the question of how these sovereignties are competing with each other in the attempted construction of food sovereignty. This question is becoming ever more relevant as food sovereignty is increasingly adopted into state policy at various levels, calling for state and societal actors to redefine their terms of engagement. This article explores questions of ‘competing sovereignties’ by developing an analytical framework, using the lenses of scale, geography, and institutions, and applying it to Venezuela, where for the past 15 years a food sovereignty experiment has been underway in the context of a dynamic shift in state–society relations.     

The sovereign state v Foucault: law and disciplinary power

A Foucauldian analysis of discourse and power relations suggests that law and the juridical field have lost their pre–eminent role in government via the delegated exercise of sovereign power. According to Foucault, the government of a population is achieved through the wide dispersal of technologies of power which are relatively invisible and which function in discursive sites and practices throughout the social fabric. Expert knowledge occupies a privileged position in government and its essentially discretionary and norm–governed judgements infiltrate and colonise previous sites of power. This paper sets out to challenge a Foucauldian view that principled law has ceded its power and authority to the disciplinary sciences and their expert practitioners. It argues, with particular reference to case law on sterilisation and caesarean sections, that law and the juridical field operate to manipulate and control expert knowledge to their own ends. In so doing, law continually exercises and re–affirms its power as part of the sovereign state. Far from acting, as Foucault suggests, to provide a legitimating gloss on the subversive operations of technologies of power, law turns the tables and itself operates a form of surveillance over the norm–governed exercise of expert knowledge.     

Crime,in/security and mob justice: the micropolitics of sovereignty in Cameroon

Violent crime poses important challenges for quotidian concerns over security and safety by ordinary citizens in several Africa states. This is especially so in contexts where state security agents are perceived as highly corrupt and/or where African states seem unable to “protect” their citizens from violent crime. The widespread sense of anxiety over various forms of violent crime and state failure to guarantee protection for citizens generates a quest for alternative practices of safety-making that, in turn, evoke serious concerns over state power and sovereignty in Africa. Focusing on mob justice in Cameroon, this article argues that the political contextualisation of sovereignty must pay attention not only to the sovereign’s right to kill and let live, but also its responsibility to guarantee safety for those citizens it chooses to let live. The paper demonstrates that in Cameroon mob justice is an insurgent mode of social control or securitisation as well as a contextual expression of contested sovereignty directed at the state’s unwillingness or incapacity to contain dangerous forms of violent crime.     

Migrant encounters with neo-colonial masculinity: producing European sovereignty through emotions

The EU/European political community’s reaction to irregular migrants is ambivalent. On the one hand, migrants are produced as people to be pitied, rescued, and saved. On the other hand, they are feared, despised, and left to die. The article explores this ambivalence from a gender perspective and asks how sovereign masculinities are produced through emotional performances in the politics of migration control and management. It will be argued that emotions such as fear, disgust, and compassion are performed in the biopolitical security governance of irregular migration by producing a “socially abject” life as its object. This is a life that is to be killed, despised, and saved. Encounters between the irregular migrant and a European border security actor constitute a neo-colonial masculinity. During the moment of the encounter with the other’s life, sovereignty is produced through emotional performances of border security actors. The discussion concludes with illustrations of how racialized bodies and lives are produced as objects of fear, disgust, and compassion through European neo-colonial masculinity. The article speaks to the debates in the literature on masculinities in global politics, emotions and politics, and critical border studies.     

Ethics,national sovereignty and the control of immigration

"This paper examines the debate as to whether migration is a basic human right or if the claims of outsiders are superseded by the principle of national sovereignty--the moral obligation of states to do the best for their own citizens. In evaluating migration and refugees it focuses on issues of open borders, migration selectivity, the capacity of sovereign states to control entry, the claims of refugees, the relationship between sovereignty and justifiable intervention, and the role of public opinion and morals throughout migration policies."     

Sovereignty at What Scale? An Inquiry into Multiple Dimensions of Food Sovereignty

Abstract

Food sovereignty has struggled to make inroads into changing the structures and processes underlying the corporate food regime. One reason is that scale is still underspecified in the politics, strategies, and theories of food sovereignty. We suggest that much can be learned from examining the multiple dimensions of scale inherent in ongoing food sovereignty struggles. A gap exists between these in vivo experiments and the maturing academic theory of scale. The concept of ‘sovereignty’ can be opened up to reveal that movements, peoples, and communities, for example, are creating multiple sovereignties and are exercising sovereignty in more relational ways. Relational scale can aid movements and scholars to map and evaluate how spatial and temporal processes at and among various levels work to reinforce dominant agri-food systems but could also be reconfigured to support progressive alternatives. Finally, we apply relational scale to suggest practical strategies for realizing food sovereignty, using examples from the Potato Park in the Peruvian Andes.     

KILLING THE GOOSE THAT LAYS THE GOLDEN EGG: INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN HONG KONG

This article examines how the rule of law and democratic accountability have affected Hong Kong's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate in the past 20 yr. We find that democratic accountability has deteriorated substantially since the changeover of sovereignty in 1997, while the rule of law has remained strong and stable. Empirical results from autoregressive distributed lag bounds tests show a positive long-run relationship between growth and democratic accountability, and Granger causality tests reveal that democratic accountability causes the growth rate of GDP in the short run. These conclusions are robust to control for the effects of investment and the Asian financial crisis in 1997. ( JEL O18, O49, P17)