New vacancy: Post-doctoral Researcher on Sovereignty and Aesthetics Politics

The SovereignPerformance project is recruiting a new Post-doctoral researcher to work on the aesthetic politics of aspiring sovereignty. The successful candidate will contribute to the project’s second work package, which focuses on the aesthetics dimensions of the political repertoires of the Catalan independence movement, the autonomous region in Northeast Syria known as Rojava (and Kurdistan more widely) and the Sri Lankan Tamil nationalist movement. You can find more information on our Team & Vacancies page.

UGent Conflict Research Group Book Launch: Contested States in War and Law

On 2 June, the CRG Book Launch series will feature the book Contested States in War and Law (edited by Janis Grzybowski, Giulia Prelz Oltramonti, and Agatha Verdebout). Focusing on some of the most entrenched conflicts around the world, this book reveals how different actors, including de facto governments, parent and patron states, local populations, and international courts, navigate the grey zone as they redraw, or work around, the fault lines of war and law. This event will be a conversation between Laura Luciani (Ghent Institute for International and European Studies) and Janis Grzybowski (Université libre de Bruxelles), Gaëlle Le Pavic, and Bart Klem (Ghent University). You can find more information here, and register at this link.

New publication in the GLD Policy Brief series

How can we restore focus on the political relevance of civic engagement? The Policy Brief “Trespassing ‘Civic’ Spaces: Insights from the Political Resonance of Citizenship Performances in Local Morocco” (authored by Francesco Colin) argues that examining how citizens perform rights claims helps us understand the political struggles behind state-society relations. It articulates key recommendations to policymakers and development professionals to take the politics of local performance seriously.

New webpage for SovereignPerfomance events

As the project grows, the SovereignPerformance project is launching our dedicated Events page on this website. It will be the place to discover upcoming conferences, workshops, and other activities related to the project. Stay connected with our team’s activities and join us in exploring the performative repertoires of sovereign aspiring entities.

New publication in the European Journal of International Relations

“Bootstrapping sovereignty: the placeholder dynamics of contested states from identity documents to international courts” (authored by Janis Grzybowski and Bart Klem) looks at how actors other than governments and international organizations, including ordinary people, field offices of UN agencies, and international courts, come to indirectly validate assumptions of sovereignty. Speaking to the core of this project, this article argues that claims to state sovereignty have performative effects when picked up in circulating attributions, including unwitting ones. These placeholder dynamics help explain how attributions of sovereignty simultaneously challenge, mimic, and rearticulate the statist international (dis)order.

Reading Sovereignty: New Seminar Series

The SovereignPerformance project will organise a series of reading seminars to critically examine sovereignty and related issues from a broad array of theoretical and empirical perspectives.

Hosted by Ghent University, these seminars will be an opportunity for researchers and scholars across social science disciplines to engage with the literature on and around sovereignty, challenging its assumptions and fostering a discussion that uncovers new perspectives to study sovereign aspirations and their performance.

On top of laying the groundwork to develop a network of academics that are committed to the questions raised by the project, these seminars will also foster the consolidation of a robust research agenda that seeks to improve our understanding of sovereign aspiring entities.