Book Review: Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence
| Published date | 01 October 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663919859776 |
| Author | Simon Behrman |
| Date | 01 October 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Social & Legal Studies 28(5)
References
Author interview: The Politico-Legal Dynamics of Judicial Review – A Comparative Analysis,
IACL-AIDC Blog, 26 September 2018. Available at: https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/just-published/
2018/9/26/author-interview-the-politico-legal-dynamics-of-judicial-review-a-comparative-
analysis (accessed 24 June 2019).
Hailbronner M (1980) The Indian Supreme Court and Politics. Lucknow: Eastern Book Co.
Hailbronner M (2015) Traditions and Transformations: The Rise of German Constitutionalism.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lijphart A (2012) Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six
Countries, 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
STEWART MOTHA, Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
2018, pp. 208, ISBN 978-0-472-05386-5, $24.95 (pbk).
How are the violent origins of sovereign orders so successfully masked by legal fictions?
And yet, why, in spite of the work of law in this regard, is law faced with the task of
revisiting those origins and the legal fictions necessary to maintain the fac¸ade of reason
and just order? In this book, Stewart Motha frames these questions in terms of archiving:
an ‘“archive” is understood as both the origin and function of law. The archive represents
‘what law does’ (p. 2). However, he is quick to note that his understanding of archive in
the context of sovereign violence is that it is not something that has been cast aside or
filed away but is instead something that is always in the process of being created and
recreated. Indeed, Motha’s argument was neatly reinforced for me, as this review was
being written on the very day that the International Court of Justice was ruling on the
United Kingdom’s claim to the Chagos Islands (one of the examples discussed by
Motha), in which the archive of government reports and memoranda used to justify the
violence of colonial dispossession were being once again reread and judged upon.
To illustrate his thesis, Motha examines four examples: the displacement of the
Chagos Islanders by the United Kingdom in the 1960s and their continued exclusion
from their homeland; the confinement of refugees on Nauru by Australia; the systematic
removal of Aboriginal children from their families, also in Australia; and the accounting
of political violence in apartheid South Africa and the fall out in terms of identity and
belonging in the post-apartheid period. Chapter 1 on the Chagos Islanders...
To continue reading
Request your trial