Sovereignty in Exile: A Saharan Liberation Movement Governs by Alice Wilson (review)

How does attending a wedding or strolling around an informal market in a refugee camp provide insights into capital-letter political concepts such as revolution, statehood, sovereignty, governance, and democracy? To what extent are these core notions broadened or unsettled by the everyday micro-politics of the anomalous yet normalized "state of exception"¹ that protracted exile constitutes? More specifically, and puzzlingly enough for politics and law scholars educated in the indissoluble marriage between sovereignty and statehood, can there be sovereignty beyond and below the state? Can sovereignty or "projects" thereof, be found in decentered extraterritorial, and liminal refugee settings? Or in the doings of tribal authorities working through traditional informal institutions and practices?

Alice Wilson's answer to these questions is positive and compelling. In the first place, Sovereignty in Exile is a wide-ranging ethnography of the internal politics of the Sahrawi refugee camps near Tindouf, in southwestern Algeria.² These host a large part of the indigenous civilian population who fled Western Sahara when the conflict with Morocco over this non-self-governing territory broke out from 1975 to 1976, along with their descendants. They are de facto jointly ruled over by the Sahrawi national liberation movement (Polisario Front) and the state it proclaimed in exile in 1976, with limited yet not negligible international recognition (Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, SADR)—an often indistinguishable governing pair that Wilson refers to as the "state-movement."³ A first-class ethnography, the book is the fruit of the anthropologist's long and deep immersion in the Sahrawi refugee community, grounded in thick description and rich vignettes, honest in acknowledging the fieldwork's challenges and limitations—such as the political taboos surrounding tribalism,⁴ the spaces such courts of justice that remain closed to researcher⁵—and permeated by a good deal of self-reflexivity, including at times doubts about the right questions being raised.⁶ The reader is offered a vivid journey through various facets of the sociopolitical life of the camps, punctuated by sharp observations, analysis, and even notes of humor that that put a smile on their face.

At the same time, Sovereignty in Exile is much more than a political ethnography. In addressing state-society relations from the latter's (micro) perspective, the study focuses on a certainly unclassifiable and difficult case: a protracted refugee situation associated with a mostly extraterritorial state-in-exile struggling to assert its statehood under the political authority of an also atypical state-movement duo. Yet Wilson makes the most of the Sahrawi political exceptionality, confirming that deviant or extreme cases may be particularly productive for shedding light on the norm.⁷ This is a key point in both the literature on liminality and Giorgio Agamben's notion of the state of exception, with which the author appropriately engages. The relationship between the sovereign power (norm) and the state of exception is one of co-constitution and, therefore, the one cannot be understood without the other. The wider significance of the findings of the ethnography, combined with relevant comparative insights and theoretical ambition, results in a persuasive meta-argument that runs through the book's chapters and speaks to a range of social science debates and disciplines. This is where both the beauty and the risk-taking of Wilson's work lie.

The core concept at stake is sovereignty. In order to challenge its longstanding state-centric focus and thereby "decenters state power from discussions of sovereignty,"⁸ Wilson defines the latter as "social relations between governing authorities and governed constituencies."⁹ Based on this, non-state social relations of sovereignty such as those of tribes may defy and impinge on the taken for granted state monopolies on legitimate violence¹⁰ and the state of exception—"sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception."¹¹ In the case of the Sahrawi refugee camps, Wilson argues that two non-mutually exclusive "projects of sovereignty" have coexisted maintaining...