Changing concepts for a changing world

The apparent messiness of today’s world forces social and political science to revise the concepts we use for analysing and understanding political landscapes. In a new article, Finn Stepputat discusses a recent revision of the notion of sovereignty that emphasizes de facto rather than de jure sovereignty and focusses on performative, sometimes violent, claims to sovereignty by local strongmen, communities, insurgencies, drug cartels and so forth.

Following this approach, we have to see political landscapes as formed by multiple, overlapping, coexisting, and often competing claims to sovereignty over territories, populations or networks within and across state boundaries. The article suggests using “formations of sovereignty” as a way of understanding these political landscapes and how they change over time in specific areas.

Empirically, the article analyses shifting formations of sovereignty in an area at the border of Guatemala from before the civil war of the early 1980s to the current intrusion of Mexican drug cartels. As in many areas across the world, the state has never managed to establish effective sovereignty here.

The article appears in a new journal for studies of organized violence, called Conflict and Society - Advances in Research.