Racial sovereignty
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066119882991 |
| Author | Kerem Nisancioglu |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Subject Matter | 25th Anniversary Special Issue |
research-article2019
EJ R
I
25th Anniversary Special Issue
European Journal of
International Relations
Racial sovereignty
2020, Vol. 26(S1) 39 –63
© The Author(s) 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119882991
DOI: 10.1177/1354066119882991
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Kerem Nisancioglu
SOAS University of London, UK
Abstract
This article explores how International Relations (IR) might better conceptualise and
analyse an underexplored but constitutive relationship between race and sovereignty.
I begin with a critical analysis of the ‘orthodox account’ of sovereignty which, I argue,
produces an analytical and historical separation of race and sovereignty by: (1) abstracting
from histories of colonial dispossession; (2) treating racism as a resolved issue in IR.
Against the orthodox account, I develop the idea of ‘racial sovereignty’ as a mode of
analysis which can: (1) overcome the historical abstractions in the orthodox account;
(2) disclose the ongoing significance of racism in international politics. I make this argument
in three moves. Firstly, I present a history of the 17th century struggle between ‘settlers’
and ‘natives’ over the colonisation of Virginia. This history, I argue, discloses the centrality
of dispossession and racialisation in the attendant attempts of English settlers to establish
sovereignty in the Americas. Secondly, by engaging with criticisms of ‘recognition’ found
in the anticolonial tradition, I argue that the Virginian experience is not simply of historical
interest or localised importance but helps us better understand racism as ongoing and
structural. I then demonstrate how contemporary assertions of sovereignty in the context
of Brexit disclose a set of otherwise concealed colonial and racialised relations. I conclude
with the claim that interrogations of racial sovereignty are not solely of historical interest
but are of political significance for our understanding of the world today.
Keywords
Racism, sovereignty, colonialisation, resistance, territorial state, decolonialisation
Debates1 around sovereignty are back on the map, having been reinvigorated in popular
discourse around Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Across both political contexts,
it is now common to hear sovereignty invoked as a response to numerous contemporary
Corresponding author:
Kerem Nisancioglu, SOAS University of London, SOAS, London WC1H 0XG, UK.
Email: kn18@soas.ac.uk
40
European Journal of International Relations 26(S1)
issues: globalisation, deindustrialisation, international trade agreements, immigration,
development, energy policy, terrorism, human rights and so forth. Less prevalent are dis-
cussions of its meaning. Sovereignty is widely assumed to denote ‘taking back control’
over a nation’s politics and ‘independence’ from outside forces. Presented in this way,
sovereignty appears disconnected from the considerably more contentious politics of race
that have characterised Brexit and Trump’s election (Bhambra, 2017). In fact one curios-
ity of contemporary uses of sovereignty is its repeated appearance alongside explicit disa-
vowals of racism. As one British newspaper, The Sun (2017), wrote: ‘Brexit voters were
“mainly driven by taking back control of law-making powers from EU” – not racism’.
That such appeals to sovereignty are presented by their proponents as relatively
unproblematic is perhaps indicative of the concept’s resonance with common-sense
notions of the role and function of the nation-state. Less acknowledged, by both propo-
nents and critics alike, is how these seemingly ‘race-blind’ demands for sovereignty have
been deployed to articulate a set of politics that are nonetheless racialised. The slogan
‘taking back control’, for example, has expressed ideas of authority and independence
alongside fears of perceived threats from racialised Others (in the form of immigration,
terrorism or non-European culture). The idea of sovereignty has therefore been central to
the articulation of post-racial discourses, involving the ‘self-conscious disavowal of rac-
ism and racist intent, while simultaneously serving to attack or problematize the exist-
ence or behavior of certain racialized groups’ (Pitcher, 2006: 535).
In contemporary debates around sovereignty, then, we find a conundrum: how and
why is it that this ‘essentially contested’ term remains so uncontested (Leigh and Weber,
2018)? This question should not be unfamiliar to International Relations (IR) scholars.
Despite important interventions from critical perspectives, orthodox conceptions of sov-
ereignty as the foundational grammar of ‘the international’ remain resilient (Costa Lopez
et al., 2018: 491). Here too, sovereignty is typically defined as ‘authority over a territory
occupied by a relatively fixed population, supposedly necessary to protect that territory
and its citizens from external [and internal] threats’ (Leigh and Weber, 2018). It is nota-
ble, then, that long-held scholarly assumptions about modern sovereignty within IR
share a common language with the politics of Trump and Brexit.
This article therefore asks: what might IR say about these mobilisations of its core
disciplinary concept? How might moving outside of IR into interdisciplinary conversa-
tions around race help us understand contemporary uses of sovereignty? Is it possible to
think about sovereignty independently of race? In this article, I argue against the domi-
nant wisdom in IR that sovereignty and race are analytically and historically discrete. In
contrast, I show the ways in which race permeates and structures modern sovereignty,
whereby ‘claims to sovereignty are woven through and require a specific relationship to
race’ (Leigh and Weber, 2018).
I suggest that the underexplored relationship between race and sovereignty is best
resolved by the term ‘racial sovereignty’.2 My use of racial sovereignty draws its inspira-
tion from similar theorisations of race in the ideas of ‘racial capitalism’ (Robinson, 1983)
and ‘racial states’ (Goldberg, 2002). Like these terms, racial sovereignty denotes a con-
ceptual drawing together of social relations, histories and practices typically understood
as unrelated. Racial sovereignty is a term that bridges the analytical and historical sepa-
ration of race and sovereignty, offering an alternative theorisation of sovereignty in
Nisancioglu
41
which the structuring effects of racism are disclosed and opened for analysis. I suggest
using the term racial sovereignty can give us a better purchase on both historical forma-
tions of sovereignty and contemporary calls for its renewal in a context of racist
resurgence.
This article therefore contributes to interdisciplinary conversations on the question of
race and racism. Although discussions of race and racism are present in IR (see among
others Anievas et al., 2014; Henderson, 2013; Jones, 2008; Krishna, 2001; Sabaratnam,
2019; Shilliam, 2017; Thompson, 2013; Vitalis, 2015; Younis, 2018), they have at times
overlooked their contestation as categories of analysis outside of the confines of the dis-
cipline. This ‘united front’ has undoubtedly been useful in carving out a space of possi-
bility – where discussions around race and racism can take place in IR – but they also
have the effect of glossing over some otherwise profound theoretical and political differ-
ences. I say this less to pick a fight but more to suggest that an attentiveness to these
points of contestation can enable IR as a discipline to actively participate in debates
around racism today. That is, if discussions of racism outside of the discipline can inform
IR debates on sovereignty, the reverse may also be true: a focus on sovereignty might
help us better understand racism.
This is especially pertinent in a context where contemporary discussions around race
are regularly weighed down by fixations on identity and culture (which are important
‘but not to the exclusion of all else’, Bhattacharyya, 2018: 2). In this article, I argue that
this tendency has (in small part) been produced by ‘the orthodox account’ of sovereignty
as a distinctly post-racial discourse generated within IR. In contrast, this article concep-
tualises the materiality of racism by prompting an analytical focus on the specific prac-
tices denoted by racial sovereignty. In drawing together authority, territory and population
as its defining components, sovereignty is arguably a distinctive racialising practice in its
capacity to affect how we understand the classifications of, relationships between, and
the technologies of control over lands and peoples. These are always racialised issues.
More precisely, this article aims to show how racial sovereignty is a practice of raciali-
sation, which emerges as a response to colonial crisis: ‘the crisis occasioned when colo-
nisers are threatened with the requirement to share social space with the colonised’
(Wolfe, 2016: 14). Although at first glance, such a definition might appear applicable
only in certain historical moments, I argue the opposite is true: racial sovereignty is a
mode of analysis that captures practices that extend and circulate beyond specific acts of
colonisation.
In the first section, I demonstrate how the ‘orthodox account’ of sovereignty in IR has
generated an analytical separation of race and sovereignty and, with it,...
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