Imagined Sovereignties: Frontiers of Statehood and Globalization

State sovereignty is challenged today by a range of factors, including global economic interdependence and multinational corporations, transnational civil society and political activism, and remote-controlled high-tech warfare. Despite a common belief that sovereignty is indivisible, we can find numerous cases of exceptional or compromised sovereignty, in the form of enclaves, protectorates, autonomous regions, reservations, and unrecognized states such as Northern Cyprus. The more closely we examine a map of the world, the more we see that it is covered with exceptions to the principle of state sovereignty. Despite the apparent challenges to the Westphalian model of sovereignty, we have found that state sovereignty is maintained, at least as a way of thinking, communicating and acting. Moreover, conflicts over sovereignty retain a prominent role in international politics. In this project we investigate sovereignty as practice, in other words how sovereignty is asserted and negotiated in daily life, studying bureaucracies and borders, civil societies and transnational movements. The aim is to understand the everyday construction of sovereignty, and why struggles over sovereignty persist and even seem to be gaining ground, at a time when so many theorists of globalisation have thought of sovereignty as declining. This project has investigated how sovereignty is imagined and debated, looking at conflicts over governance and identity (especially indigeneity, ethnicity and nationhood) with a focus on the cases of Northeast India, Cyprus and the Basque Country. Sovereignty contestations differ in drawing on culturally shaped notions of identity, territoriality and legitimacy in the imagining of different sovereign futures, even while stakeholders have basic ideas of statehood and global influences in common. The project was launched with a workshop and seminar on The New Basque Peace Process: Towards a Resolution of the Basque Conflict (PRIO, 26-28 May 2013). Since then, the anthropologists in the team, Åshild Kolås and Rebecca Bryant, have carried out fieldwork in Cyprus and Northeast India. The project further organized a civil society meeting in Bilbao (Imagining Basque Sovereignty: Voices From Civil Society, 30 May 2014), workshops in Barcelona with our partners at the International Catalan Institute of Peace (ICIP), (28 April 2014), and the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao (28-29 May 2014). Together with Pedro Ibarra Güell and the Basque research team we held another conference in the ancient university town of Oñati, at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (14-15 May 2015). With Rebecca Bryant we also organized a conference with the PRIO Cyprus Centre and Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty, held in the buffer zone of Nicosia, Cyprus (9-10 October 2015). The final conference was held in Guwahati, Assam, hosted by our partner institution in India, Omeo Kumar Das Institute of Social Change and Development. Altogether we have published three edited volumes with more twenty-five chapters, several other book chapters, and nine academic articles and book reviews.Two monographs are coming out in 2017 or 2018. As a part of this project, a visiting researcher from the Indian Council of Historical Research, Uttam Bathari, worked at PRIO on the indigenous construction of historical narratives in Northeast India (PRIO, April-October 2013), completing his doctoral thesis in History on Memory, History and Polity: A Study of Dimasa Identity in the Colonial Past and Post-colonial Present. A master student in International Relations, Zubaidah Al-Jubory, wrote her thesis on A Genealogy of Sovereignty. The project also co-hosted an academic course on Civil Resistance in the Age of Peoples Uprisings (PRIO, 12-14 May 2013). A PRIO policy brief, SovereigntyTM: Global Governance, Multinationals and Multitudes, sums up the findings of this project. Among the key points, we find that sovereignty is the source of near constant dispute, and that it is continuously under reconstruction as new technologies, norms and means of governance are applied. Theoretical distinctions between 'real' and 'simulated' sovereignty lose significance when we shift focus from theories of sovereignty to sovereignty as practice. We then find that the sovereignty of the state is being eroded as public-private partnerships take over many of the state's sovereign powers and functions. With the rise of private security and the Responsibility to Protect, the state also loses its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, opening up spaces for contestation by non-state actors. In the present age, most conflict involves sovereignty contests in some shape or form.

As evidenced by contemporary political protest across the world, from the mass mobilisations of the Arab Spring to the Occupy movements, the nature of sovereignty is fiercely contested and the role of the state as the key vehicle for the will of the peopl e cannot be taken for granted. In numerous on-going conflicts, the sovereignty of the state is challenged by groups vying for independence or an arrangement for the sharing of sovereignty in the form of autonomy or self-governance. At the same time, trans national legal and political mechanisms, new governance techniques and global interconnectedness are changing the sites and means by which state sovereignty is exercised and negotiated. This project investigates how sovereignty is perceived and debated by stakeholders and contestants in on-going sovereignty contestations taking place in culturally diverse and historically unique settings. In order to explore the multiple ways in which sovereign futures are currently imagined, we will conduct in-depth stud ies of three cases of protracted, on-going conflict, exploring how sovereignty is imagined and debated by key actors and contestants, and their constituencies. The three cases under study are: statehood contestations on the divided island of Cyprus, the B asque movement for self-determination, and Northeast Indian separatist and autonomy movements. Each case exemplifies a particular issue in current debates on the meaning of sovereignty: statehood, nationhood and indigeneity. This project seeks to highligh t the gaps between abstractions of sovereignty in theoretisation and the meanings of sovereignty that are culturally shaped and drawn from everyday local experiences. By studying and comparing three cases of protracted and on-going conflict in which sover eignty issues are currently under negotiation, we aim to shed new light on the changing nature of contestations over citizenship, legitimate governance and territoriality in a globalizing but still diverse world.