On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions

199 Pages·2014·3.6 MB·English

by  Joan Cocks

On Sovereignty and Other
Political Delusions
THEORY FOR A GLOBAL AGE
Series Editor: Gurminder K. Bhambra, University of Warwick, UK.
Editorial Board: Michael Burawoy (University of California Berkeley, USA), Neera
Chandoke, (University of Delhi, India) Robin Cohen (University of Oxford, UK), Peo
Hansen (Linköping University, Sweden) John Holmwood (University of Nottingham,
UK), Walter Mignolo (Duke University, USA), Emma Porio (Ateneo de Manila
University, Philippines), Boaventura de Sousa Santos (University of Coimbra, Portugal).
Globalization is widely viewed as the current condition of the world, only recently come
into being. There is little engagement with its long histories and how these histories continue
to have an impact on current social, political, and economic configurations and understandings.
Theory for a Global Age takes ‘the global’ as the already-always existing condition of the
world and one that should have informed analysis in the past as well as informing analysis
for the present and future. The series is not about globalization as such, but, rather, it
addresses the impact a properly critical reflection on ‘the global’ might have on disciplines
and different fields within the social sciences and humanities. It asks how we might
understand our present and future differently if we start from a critical examination of the
idea of the global as a political and interpretive device; and what consequences this would
have for reconstructing our understandings of the past, including our disciplinary pasts.
Each book in the series focuses on a particular theoretical issue or topic of
empirical controversy and debate, addressing theory in a more comprehensive and
interconnected manner in the process. With books commissioned from scholars
from across the globe, the series explores understandings of the global – and
global understandings – from diverse viewpoints. The series will be available in
print, in eBook format and free online, through a Creative Commons licence,
aiming to encourage academic engagement on a broad geographical scale and
to further the reach of the debates and dialogues that the series develops.
Also in the series: Forthcoming titles:
Connected Sociologies The Black Pacific: Anticolonial Struggles
Gurminder K. Bhambra and Oceanic Connections
Robbie Shilliam
Eurafrica: The Untold History of
European Integration and Colonialism John Dewey: The Global
Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson Public and its Problems
John Narayan
Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and
Cultural Production in the Global South Stark Utopia: Debt as a Technology of Power
Edited by Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz Richard Robbins and Tim Di Muzio
Cosmopolitanism and Antisemitism
Robert Fine and Philip Spencer
Debating Civilizations: Interrogating
Civilizational Analysis in a Global Age
Jeremy Smith
On Sovereignty and Other
Political Delusions
Joan Cocks
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2014
© Joan Cocks, 2014
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Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
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or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the authors.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-7809-3356-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
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Contents
Series Editor’s Foreword vi
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 1
1 The Sovereignty Concept 11
2 Foundational Violence and the Politics of Erasure 47
3 The Search for Sovereign Freedom 87
Conclusions and Extrapolations 125
Notes 141
Bibliography 173
Index 183
Series Editor’s Foreword
In this important book, On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions,
Joan Cocks unsettles conventional concepts within Western political
theory; in particular, that of sovereignty, and related notions of
sovereign power and sovereign freedom. While such concepts are often
considered in territorially bounded terms, she re-imagines them from
the perspective of an inter-related world. In addition, the standard
accounts treat specific ‘polities’ and ‘peoples’, usually those of the
Westphalian settlement, as exemplary. Instead, with her elegant prose
and humanist commitments, Cocks highlights the political experiences
of people who have not been central to the making of political theory.
She does this by examining the confrontations between European
settlers and indigenous peoples in the lands that were to become the
United States of America and also by analysing the precipitating factors
and subsequent effects of the Jewish search for sovereign freedom
in Palestine. According to Cocks, these two cases demonstrate the
complex ways in which both the ideas and practices of sovereign
freedom and domination are mutually imbricated.
On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions clearly demonstrates
the necessity of rethinking our social and political concepts and
paradigms from a perspective that acknowledges the connectedness
of the worlds within which we live. This is one of the key aims of the
Theory for a Global Age series and one that Cocks fulfils admirably.
She both challenges the standard historical narratives that underpin
these profoundly important concepts and calls on us to question the
disciplinary practices that have enabled such partial accounts to stand
for so long. Indeed, her book presses us to renovate key political
concepts, not only because of their increasing incongruity with new
substantive conditions of globalization, but also as a critical response
to the price that already has been paid during the historical course of
their translation from theory to practice.
Series Editor’s Foreword vii
This is a powerfully argued book that is open to existing histori-
ography and political sensitivities while nonetheless forging a clear
path through the complexities that often serve to obscure more than
enlighten. It is an exemplary piece of scholarship that deserves the
widest audience and deep engagement.
Gurminder K. Bhambra
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to Kavita Datla, Karuna Mantena, and Elizabeth
Markovits for their perceptive comments at a workshop on an early
draft of this manuscript and for their ebullient company that afternoon.
Much thanks, as always, to Peter Cocks, who served as both a
perpetual sounding board and a dedicated if stringent critic, and to
Karen Remmler, who was delicately attuned to the inner spirit of this
book. I owe a debt to Gurminder Bhambra, who—not for the first
time—prodded me to contribute to a project she was spearheading.
Caroline Wintersgill put up with my endless emails from America
and remained a pleasure to work with throughout the entire process;
the imaginative and patient cover designer, Paul Burgess, must hope
never again to deal with an author who cares about how shadows fall
on the image of a rock. Kim Storry was a painstaking project manager.
Thanks to the Mellon Foundation for funding our comparative empire
faculty seminar at Mount Holyoke College. My appreciation also
goes to Amy Martin and Richard Payne for their thoughts on the
logical relationship of empires to nation-states and their responses to
a paper that became the backbone of Chapter 2 of this book; to Yves
Winter, for organizing our Johan Galtung-on-violence panel at an
American Political Science Association annual convention a number
of years ago; and to Uday Mehta and Amrita Basu, for asking me to
join their Five-College seminar on political violence, and for being,
with the other members, such stimulating conversationalists. Thanks
to Falguni Sheth and Bonnie Honig for recommending this project
for college funding and for our intellectual interchanges in the past,
as well as to Sayres Rudy, Jim Scott, Dustin Howes, and Ron Shaw for
useful bibliographical tips. Last but not least, I’d like to recognize all
the students at Mount Holyoke College who accepted my invitation
to tackle, in successive semesters over the last decade, the meaning of
sovereign power, political violence, citizenship, exile, and nationalism.
Acknowledgments ix
While they came from places as far apart as Serbia, Pakistan, South
Korea, Egypt, China, Albania, India, the Occupied Territories, Nepal,
and different corners of the United States, these undergraduates avidly
pursued the same vexing intellectual and political questions when they
found themselves sharing a seminar table in a small liberal arts college
in Western Massachusetts. I dedicate this book to them.
A section of Chapter 2 originally appeared in my article, “Foundational
Violence and the Politics of Erasure,” in “Violence: Systemic, Symbolic,
and Foundational,” ed. Brandon Absher, Anatole Anton, and José Jorge
Mendoza, special issue, Radical Philosophy Review 15, no. 1 (2012):
103–26.
Several passages in Chapter 3 originally appeared in my article,
“Jewish Nationalism and the Question of Palestine,” in “Edward W.
Said and Questions of Nationalism,” ed. Gurminder K. Bhambra,
special issue, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
8, no. 1 (2006): 24–39.
Where possible, I’ve included, in brackets in the endnotes and in
parentheses in the bibliography of this book, the original date of publi-
cation of each cited author’s work when it differs significantly from the
date of publication of the edition from which I am citing.