Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence

NOTES

NOTES PREAMBLE, OR POWER AND ITS RELATIONS 1. The crucial reason of approaching the question of sovereignty through justification and the means-and-ends relation is that it essentially bypasses the presupposition of almost the entirety of the recent literature on sovereignty—namely, that the defining characteristic of sovereignty is exceptionality. This is not to say, of course, that exceptionality is not a characteristic of sovereignty, but rather that exceptionality is a product of the different modalities of justification. Such an approach offers, as I will be showing throughout the book, the chance of a stronger critique of sovereignty than relying on exceptionality. 2. Ultimately this leads to the question of how sovereignty and democracy relate to one another—that is, what is the relation of their relations. This question is present throughout the study. It comes to the foreground in the final chapter. See also the concluding paragraph of this chapter. 3. This is at least a common view expressed in the secondary literature. For instance , Andrew McNeal contrasts Agamben’s approach to sovereignty with Foucault ’s on the grounds that the latter offers a “historical critique of sovereignty” in his lecture course Society Must Be Defended; Andrew W. McNeal, “Cutting off the King’s Head: Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended and the Problem of Sovereignty,” Alternatives 29 (2004): 375. I will argue in Chapter 5 that there is a way of reading Foucault that presents his typology of power as being at the same time attuned to the limitations of understanding different forms of power as separated. 4. Even though Foucault continuously reworks the terms of his typology of power, the direction of his thought toward such a typology is already clear in Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. J. Murphy, ed. Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), in which the operative term is that of confinement and hence of the modern power’s insistence on territory and the border. 206 Notes to page 2 5. The literature here is enormous, so I will only mention some indicative examples. In international relations one of the most interesting books remains Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2002), a study on the distinction between internal and external sovereignty; and Stephen D. Krasner’s Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1999), which is an attempt to show that the development of sovereignty is based on the pragmatic principle that “might is right” instead of any universal principle. Hendrik Spruyt’s The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) seeks to describe the transition from feudalism to modernity through an analysis of sovereignty. And Daniel Philpott’s Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) seeks to account for the transition between different forms of sovereignty according to the development of different conceptions of justice. Works on sovereignty in neighboring disciplines also make a similar set of assumptions. For instance, for a recent book on sovereignty from the perspective of geography, see John Agnew, Globalization and Sovereignty (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). 6. The standard turning point for the separation of internal and external sovereignty according to this approach is the Treaties of Westphalia; see, for instance, Daniel Philpott, “Westphalia, Authority, and International Society,” Political Studies 48 (1999): 566–89. For a critical, dissenting view about the novelty of Westphalia , see Stéphane Beaulac, The Power of Language in the Making of International Law: The Word Sovereignty in Bodin and Vattel and the Myth of Westphalia (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2004). The distinction between internal and external sovereignty relies on a strong sense of the border that separates states; see Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003). For a critique of the idea of the border that is implicitly a critique of the idea of Westaphalian sovereignty, see two magnificent books: Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007); and Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010). I also argue in Chapter 2 that the distinction between internal and external sovereignty is already implied in the political arrangement of the city states in ancient Greece. 7. For instance, Robert Jackson expresses the historical and substantive characterization of sovereignty according to this approach thus: “Sovereignty is a distinctive configuration of state...