Project syllabus

Anthropologists have a long tradition of studying politics through its vernacular understandings and everyday dynamics. Rather than taking the formal institutional architecture of democratic politics as their central vantage point, they explore the meaning that political processes may assume and the ritualistic and symbolic dimensions they may have. The crossovers between religion and politics and between violence and democracy tend to come out in stark relief in anthropological accounts. Some of this work has explicitly grapples with questions of sovereignty – specifically the societal meanings and institutional forms that sovereignty assumes in everyday practice.

We are thinking here of the work by Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat, Jonathan Spencer, Lisa Wedeen, and – more recently – the volume by Madeleine Reeves and Rebecca Bryant. Our project draws directly on these insights and approaches by studying separatist politics through lived experiences and symbolic forms.

Most states have outlawed separatism, and yet the origin of the state itself has a problematic relationship with the law. Many critical law scholars have reflected on this conundrum by rethinking the foundations and boundaries of law. Their intereventions highlight the colonial context of usurpation of title, legal subject creation and self-referential logics that bootstrapped the law (and states) into being.

Authors that inspire our work include Anthony Anghie, Lea Brilmayer, Tanja Aalbers, Katharine Fortin and Michael Schoiswohl, as well as interventions that straddle International Relalations and Law, such as those by by Janis Grzybowski and Martti Koskenniemi, and Ramesh Ganohariti.

Both IR scholars and geographers have interrogated the power invested in the way states are projected and understood. Feminist and de-colonial perpectives have unsettled the self-evident nature of established states to facilitate alternative ways of conceptualising politics and state conduct. This is instructive for our project, because it opens space for movements and entities that vie for recognition and/or challenge the prevalent international order of states.

The list of authors who could be mentioned here is long, but it would certainly include Cynthia Weber, Costas Constantinou, Fiona McConnell and their co-authors.

Some authors in this field have specifically focuses on political aesthetics, thus forging the path for our project to study separatist democratic politics through its images, icons and symbolic references. Sophie Harman’s work and the volume by Pnina Werbner, Martin Webb and Kathryn Spellman Poots inspire us.

Alongside these disciplinary orientations, our project builds on the existing scholarship on rebel governance (the governing practices or insurgent movements) and de facto states (self-declared sovereign states with limited or no international recognition).

Authors that we draw on include Eiki Berg and James Ker-Lindsay, Nina Caspersen, George Kyris, Zachariah Mampilly, Ana Arjona and her co-authors, and Gëzim Visoka.

Finally, there is some work – scattered across disciplines and diverse case contexts – that adopts an approach of studying separatist politics (and cognate phenomena) with a performative lens. This is the scholarship that we draw on most closely in this project.

Some of the most helpful interventions are those Michael Bobick, Rebecca Bryant, Bart Klem (and his co-authored work with Sidharthan Maunaguru), Fiona McConnell and Gëzim Visoka.