Everyday sovereignty: International experts, brokers and local ownership in peacebuilding Liberia
| Author | Niels Nagelhus Schia,Benjamin de Carvalho,Xavier Guillaume |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066118759178 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
759178EJT0010.1177/1354066118759178European Journal of International Relationsde Carvalho et al.
research-article2018
EJ R
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Article
European Journal of
International Relations
Everyday sovereignty:
2019, Vol. 25(1) 179 –202
© The Author(s) 2018
International experts,
brokers and local ownership
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066118759178
in peacebuilding Liberia
DOI: 10.1177/1354066118759178
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Benjamin de Carvalho
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway
Niels Nagelhus Schia
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway
Xavier Guillaume
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands
Abstract
The present article investigates how sovereignty is performed, enacted and constructed
in an everyday setting. Based on fieldwork and interviews with international embedded
experts about the elusive meaning of ‘local ownership’, we argue that while sovereignty
may, indeed, be a model according to which the international community ‘constructs’
rogue or failed polities in ‘faraway’ places, this view overlooks that these places are still
spaces in which contestations over spheres of authority take place every day, and thus
also spaces in which sovereignty is constructed and reconstructed on a daily basis. Local
ownership, then, becomes our starting point for tracing the processes of the everyday
enactment of sovereignty. We make the case that sovereignty should not be reified, but
instead be studied in its quotidian and dynamic production, involving the multiplicity of
actors reflecting the active production of the state beyond its presumptive existence as
a homogeneously organized, institutionalized and largely centralized bureaucracy.
Keywords
Brokers, failed state, global governance, peacebuilding, sovereignty, state, everyday
Corresponding author:
Benjamin de Carvalho, NUPI, P.O. Box 8159 Dep., Oslo, 0033, Norway.
Email: bdc@nupi.no
180
European Journal of International Relations 25(1)
Introduction
Although Jean Bodin first used the term in its modern sense in 1576, the concept of sov-
ereignty did not become the object of much debate and dispute in International Relations
(IR) until the late 1980s, when scholars began challenging its fixed character. In this
article, we draw on these constructivist and post-structuralist contributions to under-
standing sovereignty, and make the case for sovereignty as an everyday construction.
Post-conflict states are not spaces devoid of or with little sovereignty, we argue; nor are
they spaces from which sovereignty has been withheld by the international community.
Such a view, we argue, runs the risk of misrepresenting the everyday struggles over the
limits of political authority that are inherent to any post-conflict state. Rather than being
spaces ripe for technical interventions by agents of global liberal governance, these
spaces are political and rife with struggles over sovereignty. We make the case for under-
standing peacebuilding settings through the politics of sovereignty by bringing the dis-
course on sovereignty to bear on the policy of local ownership, through fieldwork in
Liberia and interviews with young expat experts working for Liberian ministries under
the Scott Family Liberia Fellows Program.1
With the burgeoning of post-positivist approaches in IR making sense of sovereignty
turned away from the sphere of more formal definitions of the concept as ultimate author-
ity or self-determination, taking into account not only how sovereignty in practice has
differed from its formal statements (e.g. Krasner, 1999), but also how it is constructed
and changes over time (e.g. Bartelson, 1995; Biersteker and Weber, 1996). Once the sine
qua non of statehood, many scholars today hold that sovereignty is no longer inalienable,
but can, in fact, be suspended. In such a view, sovereignty has become conditional upon
the exercise of responsible statehood or the ‘prize of rightful conduct’ (see the discussion
in Bartelson, 2014: 83).2 As the understanding of sovereignty in question here is that of
the recognized right and capacity for self-determination, one could argue that the con-
ceptual discussion has gone full circle — away from constructivist perspectives and back
to its Bodinian roots as an attribute of statehood.
Practices such as peacekeeping and peacebuilding, in such a view, have become insti-
tutionalized tools in a broader process in which sovereignty has become governmental-
ized (Aalberts, 2014; Andersen and Sending, 2010; Bartelson, 2014; Zanotti, 2011), itself
a tool for restoring order in areas where ‘forms of political authority still refuse to be
squeezed into the symbolic form of sovereignty’ (Bartelson, 2014: 89). No longer abso-
lute, but contingent upon ‘proper’ state behaviour, sovereignty today becomes the prize of
good behaviour, but also the blueprint or prescription for how to craft polities coming out
of longer periods of protracted conflict (Andersen and Sending, 2010). According to such
a view, sovereignty as autonomy is withheld from the rogue state, before it can be pro-
duced and then once again vested into the rogue-turned-responsible state.
Such a view, we believe, is too narrow in that it overlooks the fact that in these places,
sovereignty is still wrestled with, constructed, reconstructed and performed on a daily
basis (see Narten, 2008).3 State weakness or failure does not automatically translate into
lacking sovereignty. Sovereignty is more than a right granted by the international com-
munity. Sovereignty is present in these settings as the product of the quotidian wrestling
between actors representing different spheres of authority. No matter how rogue, failed
or even ‘peacekept’ these states or spaces are, they are rife with contestations over the
de Carvalho et al.
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demarcations of legitimate political authority. As a social process brought about through
the interaction of actors involved in a range of policy processes, sovereignty is all around.
We seek to showcase this through examining the role of international experts of a
specific kind — the Scott Fellows — in Liberian ministries, and the role they play as
mediators on the sovereign boundary. Brokers between two worlds, we argue, they also
bring to life and reproduce that specific boundary that they are meant to help overcome.
The Scott Fellows interviewed in Monrovia were expats — young American graduates
from top universities — whose work in and for Liberian ministries was funded by a US
foundation in collaboration with the office of the Liberian president. Policies aimed at
enhancing local ownership and the work of the Scott Fellows, then, serve as a prism
through which we explore notions of sovereignty. Although the imperative of local own-
ership is a policy advanced and implemented by international actors, using it as a lens to
make sense of the Liberian context in practice offers a window into a conception of
sovereignty that is not ascribed through preconceived (European) binoculars, but more
attuned to the multifarious realities of post-conflict African statehood. While our aim is
not to generalize, it is our hope that taking sovereignty in practice in the Liberian context
as a point of departure may also contribute to a rethinking of sovereignty in general terms
on the basis of an (usually perceived as peripheral) African experience.
By means of an ethnographic account, we argue that while the policy of local owner-
ship may be an important way for post-conflict states to ‘practice’ sovereignty before
‘perfecting’ it, more important than the policy of local ownership itself for shaping sov-
ereignty is its local and daily performance, negotiation and circulation in humdrum
Liberian politics and relations with the international actors involved. In short, these eve-
ryday negotiations between people in different offices, representing and relying on dif-
ferent spheres of authority, structure sovereignty on an everyday basis. In order to
illustrate this, we concentrate on specific individuals, specific knowledge brokers, who
navigate between different fields of authority. Importantly, these expat international
experts are simultaneously on the ‘inside’ of the sovereign state by virtue of their work
and on the ‘outside’ by virtue of being expats and by cultural affinity. Yet, in their daily
interactions with and circulations between these spheres traditionally seen as exclusive,
they offer a unique prism through which we can understand the quotidian scripts and
practices from which sovereignty emanates on an everyday basis.
In so doing, we take up Oliver Richmond’s call for more context-sensitive approaches
to local ownership: ‘Local ownership as it is often seen by key actors’, he writes, ‘is nei-
ther “local” nor ownership.… It is telling that though international actors claim to be
interested in local ownership, there is little if any documentation that discusses it in such
nuance’ (Richmond, 2012: 371). To Richmond’s (2012: 372) call for ‘an ethnographic and
sociological perspective’ on local ownership to contest the hegemony of overly rigid
approaches emphasizing liberal rights and marketization as local ownership, we offer an
account based on in-depth interviews on site and extensive fieldwork in Liberia. However,
against the anticipation of such approaches to have strong emancipatory potential and
remedy the ‘failure of most internationals and donors...
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