Thomas Blom Hansen, who is married to the daughter of a Sri Lankan lady killed by the Tamil Tigers, and Finn Stepputat. who may not be married at all, published a paper in 2006 titled 'Sovereignty revisited'. At that time, the Ivory Tower Academia assumed national sovereignty would be diluted as 'ordoliberalism' increasingly prevailed. Fifteen years later, we have to admit that the reverse happened. Nobody will enforce bien pensant global rules. Those who talk woke bollocks will lose salience. What was previously called the 'Far Right' will become the mainstream in larger and larger swathes of Europe and America.
On the other hand, the failure of Putin's Wagner Group in Ukraine shows that one threat to national sovereignty- viz. outsourcing military power- has been shown to be bogus. A Nation is only a Nation if its own people are willing and able to kill invaders and shit on their graves.
The abstract to Hansen's paper reads-
Sovereignty has returned as a central concern in anthropology.
But nobody is now concerned with anthropology. There was a time when the Anthropology Dept had the best drugs. Then the Eighties happened. The best cocaine was a monopoly of the Business Schools.
This reinvention seeks to explore de facto sovereignty, i.e., the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity.
That isn't sovereignty which is always linked to authority. A bunch of hooligans may kill with impunity. They don't have any sovereignty if no one considers them to have authority over them.
The central proposition is a call to abandon sovereignty as an ontological ground of power and order in favor of a view of sovereignty as a tentative and always emergent form of authority grounded in violence.
There is no 'ontological ground' of power. The thing is purely empirical. You have power over x if you can change at will what x does or is. Viewing a bunch of thugs as having 'emergent' sovereignty is foolish. If nobody will kill or incarcerate them, run the fuck away. Authority is ineffective if everybody has run away from it.
After a brief account of why the classical work on kingship failed to provide an adequate matrix for understanding
to stupid cretins who couldn't understand shit
the political imaginations of a world after colonialism,
these nutters have no fucking imagination. They just regurgitate hateful nonsense coz they think it makes them look cool.
three theses on sovereignty—modern and premodern—are developed.
Any theses developed by cretins will be cretinous.
We argue that although effective legal sovereignty is always an unattainable ideal,
We aint allowed to beat these cretins to death- is that the unattainable ideal they are babbling about? But, the truth is we don't want to kill these guys. We just want their Departments defunded. Cheat students some other way.
it is particularly tenuous in many postcolonial societies where sovereign power historically was distributed among many forms of local authority.
Because, historically, that's the only way power can be distributed anywhere and at any time.
The last section discusses the rich new field of studies of informal sovereignties: vigilante groups, strongmen, insurgents, and illegal networks.
The field was neither new nor rich. Governments have always had Intelligence units which kept tabs on stuff of that sort.
Finally, the relationship between market forces, outsourcing, and new configurations of sovereign power are explored.
in the most foolish way possible.
To be fair, back in 2006 peeps were scared shitless of Al Qaeda and so forth. Then the Saudis showed how they should be dealt with. Then there was ISIS and again the solution turned out to be kill the fuckers and cut off their funding and then, just to be on the safe side, fuck them up some more. Anthropologists, obviously, weren't allowed to say things like that. Instead they wrote stuff like this-
the new threat to the established world order
which we now know arose from China's rise and Russia's recovery and Iran being handed first Iraq and then Syria on a plate
would come from forces that were difficult to conceptualize—
save as evil terrorist nutjobs
highly mobile, evanescent, and resolutely global networks, akin to what Deleuze & Guattari (1987 [1980]) call “nomadic war machines,” rhizomes of force ( puissance) that leave institutionalized power ( pouvoir) highly vulnerable.
Deleuze & Guattari were as stupid as shit. The Seventh Fleet is a 'nomadic war machine'. Al Qaeda- not so much. Institutionalized power is about guys sitting in offices piloting drones that blow up bad guys. No fucking vulnerability is involved. Snowden and Manning and Asange didn't matter in the slightest.
There is no clearer example of the paradoxes of sovereignty
Iraq was sovereign till its army was defeated and it was occupied. There was no fucking paradox.
in the twenty-first century than Iraq since the United States–led invasion in 2003. Here, multiple, fragile, and contested centers of military might, welfare, and ethnoreligious and local loyalties claim sovereignty over people and land—both legal sovereignty as in the legitimate right to govern and de facto sovereignty as the right over life (to protect or to kill with impunity).
Fuck off. Iraq, historically, was either under Turkish or Iranian influence. It looks like the Iranians have won though, no doubt, they may give a free hand to the Turks against the Kurds in the North. I was a kid in Baghdad between 1968-70. Nobody thought the country would survive unless it joined the UAR. Saddam, it is true, did initially look quite impressive. But he was off his rocker. It turned out that Lawrence of Arabia was right. Tekritis be totes tonto.
Back then, an anthropologist was a guy who smelled bad but who knew which clans were currently killing each other in the marshlands or the mountains. That was useful. Then these cretins started reading Continental philosophy and lost the few marbles they had. Consider the following-
The triumph of a Foucauldian view of power
is non-Foucauldian. His point was that he and he alone didn't understand it at all. Why was Mitterand not making him his gimp? Seriously, dude, is it my after-shave? As for Reagan, you can't tell me he don't got the power to get beefy Marines to hold me down while shoving pineapples up my ass! How come stuff like this aint happening to me? Does it have something to do with Neo-Liberalism? Please, please, figure this shit out! Otherwise. Power won't be properly used for Submission and Domination the way I have wet dreams about.
has in many ways created an impasse of its own. If power is dispersed throughout society, in institutions, disciplines, and rituals of self-making, how do we, for instance, account for the proliferation of legal discourse premised on the widespread popular idea of the state as a center of society, a central legislator, and an adjudicator?
David Lewis, appealing to Thomas Schelling answered that. There are focal solutions to coordination and discoordination games. Also, Society faces a Transportation problem. Do the fucking Math.
How do we understand popular mythologies of power, corruption, secrecy, and evil as emanating from certain centers, people, or hidden domains?
By becoming mentally ill and talking to the neighbor's cat which is surveilling us for the PTA.
How do we interpret how violence destroys social ties but also produces informal authority?
Through a fucking lawyer. Say nothing till you have talked to your brief.
How can we understand war as a totalizing logic of life and society, as Foucault himself pointed out in the late 1970s (2003)?
In the same way that we can understand war as a lesbian giraffe who works on Wall Street- but not the one in America as certain Surrealists have suggested.
The return to sovereignty, often via Agamben’s writings on banished life (homo sacer), desymbolized and “bare,” as the included outside upon which a community or a society constitutes itself and its moral order (Agamben 1998), promises a new and fruitful focalization—maybe another strategic reductionism—of ongoing debates on the nature of power and violence.
Agamben was last heard from frothing at the mouth over the COVID lockdown. There was nothing new or fruitful in his worthless shite.
In the following, we offer an interpretation of what has prompted this revisiting of sovereignty as a central concern in anthropology; what possibilities this move has offered; and which new fields of inquiry it promises to open. This revisiting differs from the past endeavors in anthropology, and from the debates on sovereignty in political science and history, in two important respects: It is, in the main, oriented toward exploring de facto sovereignty, i.e., the ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity wherever it is found and practiced, rather than sovereignty grounded in formal ideologies of rule etc,etc.
We can now be sure that what prompted the 'revisiting' mentioned above was exactly the same thing as that which prompts a dog to return to its vomit.
In the case of these two Nordic nutters, that vomit was racist shite compiled by the likes of Evans Pritchard.
“An African ruler,” Evans-Pritchard & Fortes write in their introduction to the classical collection African Political Systems, “is not to his people merely a person who can enforce his will on them. He is...the embodiment of their essential values....His credentials are mystical and are derived from antiquity” (Evans-Pritchard & Fortes 1940).
This may have been said of the British Queen or the Ugandan Kabaka or the Emperor of Japan. Still, by mentioning Africa, the image of ginormous black dongs is created in the minds of Anthropology students who start rubbing their juju furiously.
The plain fact is that, by the Sixties, you had a mathematical theory regarding coordination and discoordination problems. There was no need to mention ginormous African dongs. It was easy enough to model the mechanisms operating in a particular 'Law & Econ' regime.
The authors admit that Anthropology was useless-
How useful has this substantial body of work on kingship been in subsequent work on what in the 1960s became known as “new states” in the postcolonial world? The answer is that it has been surprisingly absent, as if the conceptual gulf posited between the traditional and the modern became quite accurately applied to the distinction between colonizer and colonized, Western and Eastern/African, modern modalities of power versus traditional registers.
Bullshit! Peeps were making money out of those places and they adjusted as things changed there so as to keep making money. This meant that, just by talking to the guys currently making money, you got a good enough Structural Causal Model of how the place worked. This meant third rate bureaucrats could pretty much run things without ever having to get anywhere near a ginormous black dong.
In a recent meditation on how anthropology was forced to adjust itself and be more sensitive to history and to the new tumultuous world of postcolonial states and their polities, Geertz (2004) suggests that anthropologists have been so beholden to an idea of the homogenous nation-state as the essential form of modern power that they have failed to understand actual states “against the background of the sort of society in which it is embedded— the confusion that surrounds it, the confusion it confronts, the confusion it causes, the confusion it responds to” (p. 580).
We get it. The guy was confused. There were a lot of darkies on campus. Did they all have ginormous dongs? Would they shove them up his pooper? If so, would it count towards the class of Degree the Department should award them?
Geertz calls for an understanding of states and sovereignties as cultural constructs but not necessarily as entities whose nature and practices can be derived from, or reduced to, any cultural logic. To push the point further, it was historians and a few distinguished anthropologists of Latin America and the Caribbean (Wolf 1982, Mintz 1985) who, in their interrogation of colonial history, began to blur these distinctions and pointed toward a more complex and necessarily globally entangled history of the formation of states and sovereignties, as we discuss below.
These stupid fuckers can't interrogate shit. I can't stomach any more of their warmed up sick. Let me switch to a splendid irony which these cretins, in 2006, would not have been aware of- viz. the fact that the son of an anthropologist would become President two years later. Did he display his ginormous juju? Nope. He was a straightforward Law & Econ pragmatist whose Mum might just as well have been an Actuary or an Air Hostess. Anthropology of the old fashioned sort, was just a job for ex-pats like any other. Sovereignty remained something only Constitutional Lawyers understood and Nations thrived or failed to thrive for reasons studied by Economists and Military strategists and other such boring bourgeois squares.
Hansen, it must be said, did have something of a side-career shitting on Hinduism but anybody can do that- even Rahul Gandhi.
To be fair, plenty of shitty JNU types have published papers just like Hansen. But our savants glory in their illiteracy. Without consuming expensive drugs, they concoct schizophrenic word-salads yet more turgid.
Say it with pride, hamara Bharat mahan.
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