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.