Project details
The politics of aspiring sovereignty: Understanding separatist politics from a performative perspective.
Many of the world’s biggest political crises comprise conflicts over sovereignty. Existing analytical approaches are poorly equipped to make sense of a centrally important aspect of such conflicts: how to understand political entities that aspire sovereign statehood and present themselves accordingly, but which lack a recognised status?
Bounds of democracy
Typically, the aspirations of these movements are at loggerheads with the very fundaments of the democratic system within which they operate. Yet, to pursue these aspirations, they are required to operate within these very rules. This makes separatist democratic politics inherently contradictory. Our central aim is to better understand the contradictory nature of separatist politics.
The movements that we study straddle the bounds of the democratic arena and they twist institutions and procedures. This confronts us with a range of interpretative and normative problems. Purely categorizing them from a formal, legal perspective misses the points; blindly adopting their claims is overly naïve.
To be or not to be?
In essence these movements confront us with a range of interpretative to-be-or-not-to-be dilemmas. If they organize a popular poll on independence without a formal mandate to do so, is it a referendum, an opinion poll or unlawful activism? If it establishes rules, is this legislation or racketeering? If the people of a self-declared state elect a leader, is that person a president or an imposter?
It is hard to categorize these political phenomena. The point, however, is that they defy categorization. The contingent, not-yet-known status of these political entities is central to what they are. It is because of their undetermined status that we see the dynamics that we see.
Performative politics
To address this problem, we adopt a performative perspective. Instead of imposing new categories and typologies to establish what they really are, it focuses our attention on what they do and what political meaning they assume in practice. It contends that we must focus on political repertoires: the enactment of institutional forms and aesthetic scripts to make political claims and counterclaims.
This project will determine what repertoires sovereignty-aspiring entities use and how such performances interact with their audiences. More concretely, it focuses on the aspirational politics of three entities that pursue sovereign status: the Catalan, Kurdisch and Sri Lankan Tamil case.
Four different approaches
The project is structured around four interconnected Work Packages (WP), each with its own Research Question (RQ) and methodological approach.
WP-I: an ethnography of political repertoires of three political movements (Catalans, Kurds, Tamils).
RQ1: what political repertoires do these movements use to navigate the tensions between their objectives and the prevalent political landscape?
WP-II: an analysis of the aesthetics of these repertoires, thus complementing these three case studies.
RQ2: what visual representations do these movements use to bolster their repertoires?
WP-III: a systematic assessment of public perceptions of these repertoires and their aesthetics, using carefully sampled focus-group workshops.
RQ3: how do constituencies in the region concerned understand these repertoires and visual expressions?
WP-IV: a global database of the repertoires of separatist politics.
RQ4: what variations of these repertoires exist in similar contexts across the globe?
