The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty: Political Imagination Beyond the State

by Rebecca Bryant (Editor), Madeleine Reeves (Editor)

Around the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to take back sovereignty. The contributors to this collection use ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the state form. Examples from Spain to Afghanistan and from Western Sahara to Taiwan show how calls to take back control or to bring back order are best understood as longings for sovereign agency. By paying close ethnographic attention to these desires and their consequences, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty offers a new way to understand why these yearnings have such profound political resonance in a globally interconnected world.


Contributors: Panos Achniotis, Jens Bartelson, Joyce Dalsheim, Dace Dzenovska, Sara L. Friedman, Azra Hromadzic, Louisa Lombard, Alice Wilson, and Torunn Wimpelmann.

276 pages, Paperback

Published June 15, 2021

About the author

I am Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University and an anthropologist of politics and law. My work has focused on ethnic conflict and displacement, border practices, post-conflict reconciliation, and contested sovereignty on both sides of the Cyprus Green Line and in Turkey. I studied Philosophy (B.A.) and Cultural Anthropology (M.A., Ph.D.) at the University of Chicago and have since held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics, George Mason University, and the American University in Cairo. I have also taught as a Fulbright fellow at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and as a visiting professor at Middle East Technical University's Cyprus campus. I hold affiliations as an Associate of the Peace Research Institute Oslo and a Senior Research Fellow in the European Institute of the London School of Economics.