The presentation gives a panoramic view of the evolution of the concept and practice of sovereignty. It shows how the subject of sovereignty evolved from physical body to body as territory. It examines the works of Weber, Derrida, Foucault, Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben.

1. LIVING WITH/OUT SOVEREIGNTY
Mathew Kuriakose
PhD Student
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai
1

2.  The Montevideo Convention on Rights and
Duties of States of 1933
 Article 1 provides:
 “The State as a person of international law should
possess the following qualifications:
 (a) a permanent population;
 (b) a defined territory;
 (c) government; and
 (d) capacity to enter into relations with other States”
2

3.  Sovereignty refers to:
 The supreme ruler
 The supreme power in a polity
 The paramount power in a territory
 The modern territorial nation state
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4. DIFFERENT USAGES OF SOVEREIGNTY
(STEPHEN D. KRASNER (1999), SOVEREIGNTY:
ORGANIZED HYPOCRISY)
 a) International legal sovereignty
 “the practices associated with mutual recognition,
usually between territorial entities that have formal
juridical independence”
 -deals with issues of authority and legitimacy, not
control
 -recognition of territorial entities
 -the case of states in exile
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5.  b) Westphalian sovereignty (1648)
 “political organisation based on the exclusion of
external actors from authority structures within a
given territory”.
 -the principle of non-intervention or the Right to
protect/Humanitarian intervention/Just war
 -Taiwan has WS but not ILS
 -EU has ILS but limited WS
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6.  c) Domestic sovereignty
 “formal organisation of political authority within the
state and the ability of public authorities to exercise
effective control within the borders of their own
polity”.
 -the case of LTTE or Maoist India
 d) Interdependence sovereignty
 “interdependence sovereignty refers to the ability of
public authorities to regulate the flow of information,
ideas, goods, people, pollutants, or capital across
the borders of their state”
 -the effects of globalisation, MNCs
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7. THE PARADOXES OF SOVEREIGNTY
 What is happening to sovereignty?
 -Erosion of sovereignty or Evolution/Metamorphosis of
sovereignty
 What should happen to sovereignty?
 -Social life can be organised with/out sovereign authority
 -Sovereignty is a necessary evil
 What is to be done with sovereignty?
 -To enhance or restrain sovereignty
 -to enhance it internally and restrain it externally
 -globalisation reverses it by restraining internal
sovereignty and through the overreach of external
sovereignty
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8.  “shifting relations between the promotion and protection
of human rights and sovereignty can be observed in
three fields:
 (1) in the field of international organisations, States
accept that the organisations like the United Nations or
the European Union can take decisions on which they
no longer have a decisive influence;
 (2) in the field of regional and international (quasi-
)judicial institutions, States accept that individuals can
turn to these international bodies that have jurisdiction
on human rights issues; and
 (3) in the field of conflict and foreign intervention, States
tend to accept infringement on their sovereignty for the
protection of individuals from grave human rights
violations”. (Miyoshi Masahiro)
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9. THE TRAJECTORY OF SOVEREIGNTY
 ‘Two Cities’, Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
 “In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized
robbery?”
 “Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the
earthly [city] by the love of self, even to the contempt of God;
the heavenly [city] by the love of God, even to the contempt of
self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the
Lord. For the one seeks glory from men... In the one, the
princes and the nations it subdues are ruled by the love
of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one
another in love, the latter obeying, while the former take
thought for all. The one delights in its own strength,
represented in the persons of its rulers; the other says to its
God, "I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength." And therefore the
wise men of the one city, living according to man, have
sought for profit to their own bodies or souls, or both.....” 9

10.  Thomas Hobbes , The Leviathan
 State of nature, absolute sovereignty, consent of
the subject, the question of moral obligation (to
obey)
 Hobbes’ social contract- Total absence of social
coherence-the govt be sovereign-the sovereign be
absolute.
 Rousseau’s social contract- a) individuals
constituted as people b) people then establish a
government- result- citizens become and remain
sovereign
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11. SOVEREIGNTY, LAW, JUSTICE
 Max Weber (1918), Politics as Vocation
 “state is a human community that (successfully) claims the
monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a
given territory. Note that 'territory' is one of the
characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time,
the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions
or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it.
The state is considered the sole source of the 'right' to use
violence. Hence, 'politics' for us means striving to share power
or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among
states or among groups within a state
 “the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation
supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be
legitimate) violence. If the state is to exist, the dominated must
obey the authority claimed by the powers that be”
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12. WEBER ASKS “WHEN AND WHY MEN OBEY?”
 Because:
 a) the authority of the 'eternal yesterday,' i.e. of the mores sanctified
through the unimaginably ancient recognition and habitual orientation
to conform. This is 'traditional' domination exercised by the patriarch
and the patrimonial prince of yore.
 b) the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace
(charisma), the absolutely personal devotion and personal
confidence in revelation, heroism, or other qualities of individual
leadership. This is 'charismatic' domination, as exercised by the
prophet or--in the field of politics--by the elected war lord, the
plebiscitarian ruler, the great demagogue, or the political party leader.
 c) there is domination by virtue of 'legality,' by virtue of the belief in
the validity of legal statute and functional 'competence' based on
rationally created rules. In this case, obedience is expected in
discharging statutory obligations. This is domination as exercised by
the modern 'servant of the state' and by all those bearers of power
who in this respect resemble him.
 Weber’s rationalisation thesis
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13. MARX’S IDEA OF STATE
 “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a
committee for managing the common affairs of the
whole bourgeoisie”
 State as an instrument of class rule, domination
and exploitation.
 The relative autonomy school
13

14. JACQUES DERRIDA (1990) “FORCE OF LAW: THE
“MYSTICAL FOUNDATION OF AUTHORITY”
 “There are, to be sure, laws that are not enforced,
but there is no law without enforceability, and no
applicability or enforceability of the law without
force, whether this force be direct or indirect,
physical or symbolic, exterior or interior, brutal or
subtly discursive and hermeneutic, coercive or
regulative and so forth”
 “What difference is there between, on the one
hand, the force that can be just, or in any case
deemed legitimate...and on the other hand the
violence that one always deems unjust”
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15.  Derrida’s central question: what if justice is not
necessarily (the) law?
 “One obeys them (laws) not because they are just
but because they have authority”
 The origins of authority “are neither legal nor illegal
in their founding moment”.
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16. GILLES DELEUZE AND FELIX GUATTARI,
CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA
 “All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They
are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and
wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they
assign to the irrational. Yet all this presupposes codes or
axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are
not intrinsically rational either. It's like theology: everything
about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception,
incarnation. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational
-- not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed
by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation
between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium,
drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or
capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one
can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it,
and yet it is completely delirious, it's mad. It is in this sense
that we say: the rational is always the rationality of an
irrational.”
 -deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation
 Law as the rationality of the irrational 16

17. SOVEREIGNTY, LAW, EXCEPTION
 Carl Schmitt (1985). Political theology: Four
chapters on the concept of sovereignty
 “sovereign is who decides on the state of
exception”
 necessitas legem non habet (necessity has no law)
 the state of necessity, on which the exception is
founded, cannot have a juridical form.
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18. GIORGIO AGAMBEN (2005) STATE OF
EXCEPTION
 juridical measures that cannot be understood in legal
terms
 the state of exception appears as the legal form of what
cannot have legal form
 law employing exception means the suspension of law
itself
 He addresses the gap between or the “no-man’s-land
between public law and political fact, and between the
juridical order and life”
 State of exception is normally a response to situations of
civil war, insurgencies etc.
 “the voluntary creation of a permanent state of
emergency (though perhaps not declared in the
technical sense) has become one of the essential
practices of contemporary states” 18

19.  The distinction between a “real state of exception” and a
“fictitious state of exception”
 The USA Patriot Act issued by the U.S. Senate on
October 26, 2001
 A captured Taliban terrorist is neither a prisoner of war
(Geneva Convention) nor an ordinary criminal under
American legal system
 The logic of Nazi camp- deprived of citizenship/no legal
identity
 State of exception- a special kind of law? Or a
suspension of juridical order itself?
 State of exception “appears increasingly as a technique
of government rather than an exceptional measure”
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20. GIORGIO AGAMBEN (1998) HOMO SACER:
SOVEREIGN POWER AND BARE LIFE
 state’s extension from political life to biological life
 Michel Foucault- first volume of The History of
Sexuality- natural life begins to be included in the
mechanisms and calculations of State power, and
politics turns into biopolitics.
 biological creation of docile bodies
 analysis of the concrete ways in which power
penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life.
20

21.  “the production of a biopolitical body is the
original activity of sovereign power”
 “ life as such becomes a principal object of the
projections and calculations of State power”, not
just inclusion of bare life into political realm.
 -body as a territory to be governed
 -the tension between humans as specific object of
governance, and humans as subjects of political
power.
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22. AIHWA ONG (2004), THE CHINESE AXIS: ZONING
TECHNOLOGIES AND VARIEGATED SOVEREIGNTY
 “developmental” strategies highly varied and that
their regulatory effects are not uniform across the
national territory” against the container concept of
sovereignty.
 “Zoning technologies provide the mechanisms for
creating or accommodating islands of distinct
governing regimes within the broader landscape of
normalized rule, thus generating a pattern of
variegated but linked sovereignty”
 “Zoning technologies create zones of political
exception to normalized Chinese rule, generating
economic, social, and political conditions that
constitute a detour to political integration with Hong
Kong, Macao, and, expectantly, Taiwan”.
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23. TASK
 Identify laws, governance policies and techniques
in India that denotes the emergence of ‘state of
exception’ on territory.
 Examples: AFSPA, CRZ Notification, Union
Territories, SEZ Act
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24. QUESTIONS TO PONDER
 How sovereignty and biopolitics interact in the case of
an Australian surrogate child left to the Thai surrogate
mother?
 How do you characterise the authority of ISIS in Iraq?
Whom should the people in ISIS controlled areas obey,
ISIS or the Iraqi State?
 What happens to sovereignty when a people cordon off
their area from state’s control in order to resist land
acquisition as it happened in Nandigram?
 Can you relate biopolitical sovereignty to female
foeticide in India?
 Can we consider the constant use of Eminent Domain
as a case of state of exception becoming a technique of
government?
 Is NSA spying an act of normalising state of exception? 24

25. FURTHER READING
 Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and
bare life (trans: Heller-Roazen, D.). Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
 Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of exception (trans: Attell, K.).
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
 Benjamin, Walter. 1996. Critique of violence (trans: Jephcott,
W.). In Selected writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus
Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 236–252. Cambridge:
Belknap/Harvard University Press.
 Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious life: The powers of mourning
and violence. New York: Verso.
 Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, territory, population. lectures
at the colle`ge de France 1977–1978, ed.Michel Senellart
(trans: Burchell, G.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
 Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political theology: Four chapters on the
concept of sovereignty (trans: Schwab, G.).Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. 25