Browsing by Subject "Sovereignty"
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Item Between gift and taboo : death and the negotiation of national identity and sovereignty in the Kurdish conflict in Turkey(2010-05) Ozsoy, Hisyar; Hale, Charles R., 1957-; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-; Visweswaran, Kamala; Strong, Pauline T.; Rudrappa, SharmilaThis dissertation explores politico-symbolic deployments of death in figurations of national identity and sovereignty in the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. Many Kurds have died in their successive rebellions over the last century. However, biological death has not necessarily excluded them from Kurdish culture and politics. Rather, through a symbolic economy of “gift” the Kurds resurrect their dead as martyrs – affective forces that powerfully shape public, political and daily life and promote Kurdish national identity as a sacred communion of the dead and the living. For its own part, the Turkish state has been endeavoring to eradicate this persistent power of the Kurdish dead by obstructing their appropriation and assimilation into the regenerative realms of Kurdish national-symbolic. While these struggles are still in effect, with the shift in Kurdish politics away from the original goal of national independence in 1999, the Kurdish dead emerged as a site of contention also among the Kurds. At least until 2005 the place of the dead in Kurdish politics also shifted with a new politics of memory that the leadership of Kurdish movement initiated to buttress the “peace process”. Based on two-year fieldwork in Diyarbakır, the informal capital of Kurds in Turkey, this study explores the Kurdish political imaginaries and subjectivities that are generated in and through these multiple struggles and contentions over the Kurdish dead, situating death as a central symbolic and semantic field constitutive to national identity and sovereignty. This study contributes to the ethnography of the Kurds, Turkey and the Middle East as well as theories of death, the body, nationalism, sovereignty and political subjectivity.Item Broken (his)tories inside restored walls : Kurds, Armenians and the cultural politics of reconstruction in urban Diyarbakir, Turkey(2014-06-25) Sengul, Serap Ruken; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-; Visweswaran, Kamala; Stewart, Kathleen C; Speed, Shannon; Cvetkovich, AnnAn old and long-contested city located in Northern Mesopotamia, Diyarbakır was multiply decimated and refashioned throughout the twentieth century. After serving as a coordinating center of the Armenian Genocide, the city became a strategic target of Turkish Republican policies of Turkifying history, space and the Kurds, and then the epicenter of Kurdish struggle as of 1970s. Since the 2000s, a comprehensive politics of reconstruction organized around an oppositional idiom of multiculturalism has brought Diyarbakır’s ancient urban historical heritage to the fore of the conflict between the Kurds and the Turkish state. In this process, a wide range of critical actors, including Kurdish dissidents, articulated for Diyarbakır a powerful “city of culture” image for reclaiming the city’s violently foreclosed non-Turkish (Kurdish) and non-Muslim (Armenian) heritages. However, the revelatory promise of this new representational regime was limited by rendering the meaning and significance of all phenomena that circulated in the city as witness to Diyarbakir’s cosmopolitan cultural heritage. As a result, the disquieting histories of political violence of the recent past often remained suppressed. Furthermore, because the city as exterior space is typically coded as male, this narrative put forward an archive of Diyarbakir’s past and present as essentially male, imagined and narrated through a middle-class male gaze, experience and voice. Based on eighteen-months of fieldwork begun in August 2006 followed by archival and secondary research at multiple sites, this dissertation critically analyzes the cultural politics of reconstruction in Diyarbakır by unpacking its culturalist and classed overdeterminations. Specifically, I take this politics as an entry point into differently embodied histories and experiences of Kurdishness, Armeniannes, and manhood involved in the processes of Turkish state-making and Kurdish nation-building in the city for the past century. I do this by tracing alternative genealogies of four gendered figures, namely Kirve, “the uncircumcised terrorist,” șehir çocuğu, and qirix, which have effectively marked male experiences of violence, oppression and struggle from time of the Armenian genocide to the present. This work contributes to ethnography of the Kurds, Armenians and the Turkish state, as well as to literatures on state sovereignty, nationalism, gender and masculinity, and urban geographies of (post)conflict.Item Building ASEAN Identity Within Member State Sovereignty(2020-05-13) Applefeld, Bryan; Newton, Katherine; Seng, Nakhim; Sofyan, Ayudhia; Weidenbach, NatalieThe issue of ASEAN identity affects more than just ASEAN sovereignty; it has the power to alter the international spectrum with its trans-national scope. To properly address the questions associated with the possibility of collective identity emerging from individual sovereignty, and its relation to regional identity, the following series of papers focuses on the themes of: territorial expansion, defense, economic integration and development, norm projection, hegemonic resistance, intra-regional dialogue, collective identity, sovereignty, the greater meta-themes of organizational evolution and effectiveness. These themes allow us to gain a better understanding of collective organization in relation to US policy goals.Item Central-Asia energy geoeconomics and geopolitics : Central Asia’s pursuit of sovereignty and prosperity(2012-12) Nicholson, Robert Lawrence; Garza, Thomas J.; Bychkova-Jordan, BellaThe former-Soviet states that make up Central Asia are among the most challenging group of countries to understand in the twenty-first century geopolitical and geoeconomic context. As one of the last of the world’s frontiers, much of this regions’ energy potential in oil and natural gas has yet to be tapped or, even, be found; and the region’s strategic position make Central Asia a significant region for energy markets and global affairs. The last few decades in Central Asia have been shaped by the determination to develop their energy sectors with a balance between attracting foreign energy firms and preserving its authority over its energy assets. States have also struggled to protect their sovereignty over their political and economic affairs from militant, nationalist or sectarian groups as well as from great powers like Russia and China. In spite of its many challenges, Central Asia has many opportunities to develop those institutions, regional relationships and positive economic and political practices that will promote a productive energy sector and a thriving economy. Central-Asian states must achieve its goals of establishing an energy policy that secures prosperity for all, promoting productive energy relations with all Central-Asian states, reducing undue foreign influence but promoting foreign cooperation that benefits Central-Asia’s global relationships, and establishing peace and stability that protect energy infrastructure, production and exports. The future of Central-Asian energy relations can take many different paths and is dependent on the fate of its neighbors Russia, Afghanistan, South Asia and Iran. Russia’s needs for Central Asia’s neighbors to become unstable or inhospitable to energy development, but peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan can open new markets for Central Asia; and changes in Iran can unlock new opportunities to ship oil and gas to Western markets around Russia. For all that the region has endured since independence, the world should apply greater value on this region as its energy prowess and strategic importance make Central Asia an influential player in twenty-first century global relations.Item Decolonizing the archive in contemporary American Indian and Mexican American literature(2016-03-24) Lederman, Emily Ann; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Gonzalez, John M; Minich, Julie A; Campbell, CraigThis dissertation examines twentieth and twenty-first century American Indian and Mexican American novels and short stories that decolonize the archive through Indigenous and queer archives and archival practices. Historical documents such as colonial maps and newspaper clippings appear within the pages of these texts, and characters engage with objects and ephemera to access and assemble histories of settler colonial violence, tribal politics and culture, and queer lineages. Beyond filling in the gaps of the colonial archive, these texts challenge the epistemologies and power structures that sustain a colonial conception of the archive. Disrupting understandings of an archive as an institutional repository that contains a stable and objective past, they further work of the interdisciplinary archival turn of the past two decades and emphasize the importance of understanding historical and contemporary sociopolitical realities through the lens of a decolonized archive. My first chapter theorizes what I call “archival sovereignty,” demonstrating how American Indian texts such as LeAnne Howe’s Miko Kings (2007), as well as novels by Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and N. Scott Momaday, repurpose materials of the colonial archive within Indigenous epistemological frames. Exploring the limitations and possibilities of archival recovery, my second chapter reads queer archival practices in Felicia Luna Lemus’s Like Son (2007) and considers the politics of recovering Indigenous histories in Mexican and Mexican American contexts. Bringing together the theoretical threads of my first two chapters, my third chapter explains how Indigenous and queer archival practices strengthen tribal community bonds in Greg Sarris’s Watermelon Nights (1998), and contextualizes this novel within Sarris’s tribal political career and the politics of tribal citizenship. In conclusion, I analyze Manuel Muñoz’s “Lindo y Querido” (2007) and Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s “He Has Gone to Be With the Women” (2012) to consider how those undocumented and disappeared in the official record are remembered through queer archival practices that underscore the affective and political necessity of reimagining the content and form of the archive.Item "King hereafter" : Macbeth and apocalypse in the Stuart discourse of sovereignty(2010-05) Foran, Gregory Augustine; Rumrich, John Peter, 1954-; Whigham, Frank F.; Mallin, Eric S.; Ng, Su Fang; Levack, Brian P.“‘King Hereafter’” posits Shakespearean theater as a gateway between Reformation England’s suppressed desire to rid itself of monarchy and that desire’s expression in the 1649 execution of King Charles I. Specifically, I argue that Macbeth darkly manifests a latent Protestant fantasy in which the kings of the earth are toppled in a millenarian coup. Revolution- and Restoration-era writers John Milton and William Davenant attempt to liberate or further repress Macbeth’s apocalyptic republicanism when they invoke the play for their respective causes. Shakespeare’s text resists appropriation, however, pointing up the blind spots in whatever form of sovereignty it is enlisted to support. I first analyze Macbeth (1606) in its original historical context to show how it offers an immanent critique of James I’s prophetic persona. Macbeth’s tragic foreknowledge of his own supersession by Banquo’s heirs mirrors James’s paradoxical effort to ground his kingship on apocalyptic promises of the demise of earthly sovereignty. Shakespeare’s regicidal fantasy would be largely repressed into the English political unconscious during the pre-war years, until John Milton drew out the play’s antimonarchical subtext in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649). Yet the specter of an undead King Charles, I argue in chapter two, haunts Milton just as Banquo’s ghost vexes Macbeth because Milton’s populist theory of legitimate rule continues to define sovereignty as the right to arbitrary violence. In chapter three, I show how Sir William Davenant’s Restoration revision of Macbeth (c.1664) reclaims the play for the Stuart regime by dramatizing Hobbes’s critique of prophetic enthusiasm. In enlarging upon Macduff’s insurgency against the tyrant Macbeth, however, Davenant merely displaces the rebellious potential of the rogue prophet onto the deciding sovereign citizen. Finally, my fourth chapter argues for Milton’s late-career embrace of Shakespearean equivocation as a tool of liberty in Samson Agonistes (1671). Samson’s death “self-killed” and “immixed” among his foes in a scene of apocalyptic destruction challenges the Hobbesian emphasis on self-preservation and the hierarchical structures on which sovereignty itself depends for coherence. Milton’s mature eschatological vision of the end of sovereignty coincides with his artistic acceptance of the semantic and generic ambiguities of Shakespearean drama.Item Legal Magic: Sovereign Citizenship as Mana-Work and Political Critique(2022) Powers, Conor; Stewart, KathleenThis is a thesis on the Sovereign Citizen Movement, a niche extremist group in the United States which, through a pastiche of historical and legal material, claims that the federal government is an illegitimate successor state with no jurisdiction over its members. Adherents to the ideas put forth by Sovereign Citizen thought leaders often make their beliefs known by targeting government offices with so-called ‘paper terrorism’, flooding them with bogus liens, lawsuits, and claims of sovereign emancipation that appeal to a reading of common law preceding and more powerful than written legislation. More broadly, however, Sovereign Citizens serve as an interesting case study in the myth making that happens when people are faced with the power of state sovereignty as it is distributed through markers of charismatic authority.Item The permanence of power : postcolonial sovereignty, the energy crisis, and the rise of American neoliberal diplomacy, 1967 - 1976(2012-08) Dietrich, Christopher Roy William; Stoff, Michael B.; Lawrence, Mark AtwoodThe dissertation addresses the causes and consequences of the 1973-1974 energy crisis. A new postcolonial concept of sovereignty, "permanent sovereignty over natural resources," challenged the structure of the international economy in the early 1950s. The proponents of permanent sovereignty identified the relationship between the industrial nations and raw material producers as a vestige of empire. By gaining control over national resources, Third World leaders hoped to reset the relationship between the developing and developed nations. The concept of permanent sovereignty authenticated new definitions and goals of decolonization and statehood. A new middle ground between U.S. diplomacy and Third World economic thought emerged in international oil politics. Chapters on the 1967 Arab oil embargo, Saudi and Iranian demands in the wake of imperial Britain's Persian Gulf withdrawal, the legal battles over the Iraqi Ba'ath regime's nationalized oil, and the reverberating effects of newly radical Libyan politics, explain how members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) remade permanent sovereignty between 1967 to 1972. OPEC underscored the salience of permanent sovereignty in the international political economy, but it also undermined it. The built-in tension culminated in the 1973-1974 energy crisis. The final chapters discuss how the impregnable sovereignty preached by OPEC and its transnational backers in the New International Economic Order engendered a strategic response from the United States: neoliberal diplomacy. OPEC's cartel politics became a scapegoat for policymakers who simplified and codified neoclassical economic ideas. Market-centered reform developed into an analytical refuge in the political-economic wreckage of the energy crisis. American strategy toward the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations reveal that neoliberal diplomacy became widely influential in U.S. foreign policy.Item Princes, diwans and merchants : education and reform in colonial India(2012-05) Bhalodia-Dhanani, Aarti; Minault, Gail, 1939-Scholarship on education and social reform has studied how communities with a history of literacy and employment in pre-colonial state administrations adjusted to the new socio-political order brought about by the British Empire in India. My work shifts the attention to the Indian aristocracy and mercantile communities and examines why they promoted modern education. I argue that rulers of Indian states adapted to the colonial environment quite effectively. Instead of a break from the past, traditional ideas of rajadharma (duties of a king) evolved and made room for reformist social and economic policies. This dissertation examines why many Indian princes (kings and queens) adopted liberal policies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that English-educated rulers of Indian states became reformers and modernizers to enhance their monarchical authority. The main audience for princes was their own state population, neighboring princes, imperial officials, and Indian journalists and politicians. I have carried out research at government archives and public and private libraries in India and the United Kingdom. Sources used include official records and correspondence, annual administrative reports, newspaper accounts, social reform journals, and weeklies and monthlies dedicated to educational topics. I have also consulted memoirs and biographies of kings, queens, diwans (prime ministers) and merchants. My source material is in English and Gujarati. I draw evidence from princely states across India with a focus on Hindu Rajput and Pathan Muslim states in the Gujarat (specifically Saurashtra) region of western India, neighboring the former Bombay Presidency. Due to Gujarat's strong mercantilist tradition, commercial groups played an influential role in society. I examine how and why merchants in princely states supported their ruler's educational policies. I also discuss how mercantile philanthropy crossed political and religious boundaries with the Gujarati (Hindu, Muslim and Jain) diaspora across India, Africa and Burma supporting educational institutions in Gujarat. My dissertation examines the interactions between the English-educated upper caste Hindus, the Anglicized Rajput rulers and the Gujarati merchants to understand how they all contributed to the shaping of modern Gujarati society.Item Sacrificial limbs of sovereignty : disabled veterans, masculinity, and nationalist politics in Turkey(2011-05) Aciksoz, Salih Can; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-; Stewart, Kathleen; Strong, Pauline T.; Hartigan, John; Cvetkovich, AnnThis dissertation concerns the disabled veterans of the Turkish army who fought against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) guerillas as conscripted soldiers. While being valorized as sacrificial heroes, “ghazis,” in the realm of nationalist politics, these disabled veterans also face socio-economic marginalization and demasculinization anxieties in Turkey, where discrimination against the disabled is rampant. In such a context, disabled veterans emerged as important ultranationalist actors in the 2000s, championing a conservative agenda around the issues of state sovereignty, democratization, and Turkey’s pending European Union (EU) membership. In this dissertation, I locate the disabled veteran body at the intersection of medical and welfare institutions, nationalist discourses, and cultural formations of gendered normativity to trace the embodied socio-cultural and political processes that constitute disabled veterans as ultranationalist political subjects. I approach the politicization of disabled veterans through the analytical lens of the body in order to understand how veterans’ gendered and classed experiences of warfare, injury, and disability are hardened into an ultranationalist political identity. Exploring the tensions between the nationalist construction of the disabled veteran body and veterans’ embodied experiences as lower-class disabled men, I show how the dialectic between political rites of consecration and everyday rites of desecration translates disability into a political force. By unraveling the ways in which disability caused by violence generates new forms of masculinity, embodiment, and political identity, I illustrate how the disabled veterans’ suffering is brokered into militarization and ultranationalist protest in contemporary Turkey.Item Sovereign subjects : same-sex desire and national formation in the Ñuu Savi diaspora(2021-07-13) López, Noé; Menchaca, Martha; Merabet, Sofian; Canova, Paola; Domínguez Ruvalcaba , HéctorThe following dissertation is an Anthropological study that took place in the agricultural city of Oxnard, California, and in Oaxaca, Mexico (2017-2018). I examine sovereignty and community belonging among the Ñuu Savi people, commonly known as the Mixtec. I deliberately place same-sex desire among indigenous “queer” men as the focus to assess formations of indigenous nationalism and citizenship across the contemporary United States-Mexico borderlands. I do this through an ethnographic account of the queer-identified people among the Ñuu Savi. Between 2017 and 2018, I met informants who shaped their community's notions of belonging and sexuality based on their intimate and diasporic lives. I argue that same-sex desire, found within complex global and historical assemblages—geographical, political, economic, and cultural pluralities —is pivotal to understand contemporary indigenous community political formations, as desire— will, eroticism, and pleasure —, is interlinked with traditional notions of gender and sexuality. In turn, the reformulations of sexuality and gender in the diaspora shape traditional notions of indigenous citizenship, land acquisition, and national proclamations. I assert that indigenous sovereignty in the contemporary globalized world is rooted in a deep historical consciousness, a desire for pleasure, and a legitimate call for self-determination. This means that indigenous people who negotiate their gender and sexuality in a diasporic context also exercise their indigenous national sovereignty in Mexico and the United States.Item Stoking the fire : nationhood in early twentieth century Cherokee writing(2012-05) Brown, Kirby Lynn; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Perez, Domino R.; Gonzalez, John M.; Sturm, Circe D.; Justice, Daniel H.My research builds upon interdisciplinary trends in Native scholarship emphasizing tribal-specificity; attention to understudied periods, writers, and texts; and a political commitment to engage contemporary challenges facing Indigenous communities. My dissertation examines the persistence of nationhood in Cherokee writing between the dissolution of the Cherokee government preceding Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and political reorganization in the early 1970s. Situating writing by John Milton Oskison, Rachel Caroline Eaton, Rollie Lynn Riggs and Ruth Muskrat Bronson explicitly within the Cherokee national contexts of its emergence, I attend to the complicated ways they each remembered, imagined, narrated and enacted Cherokee nationhood in the absence of a functioning state. Often read as a transitional “dark age” in Cherokee history, this period stands instead as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory capable of informing contemporary debates in the Cherokee Nation and Native Studies today.Item Tatar nation, reality or rhetoric? : nation building in the Russian Federation(2010-12) McIntyre, George Eric; Moser, Robert G., 1966-; Garza, Thomas J.Tatarstan’s degree of political, economic and cultural sovereignty within the Russian Federation is the result of Soviet era ethno-national politics. The re-adoption of the ethnic federal state model in 1992 by Russia allowed ethnic regions such as Tatarstan to challenge the federal authorities for con-federal relations within the Federation. The Tatar leadership has attempted to work within the institutional and legal framework of the Russian Federation in an attempt to codify their state sovereignty within the Russian Federation. The political and economic concessions gained through tedious negotiation with the center have provided the Republic with the means to build a culturally distinct and semi sovereign state in the heart of the Russian Federation.Item The politics of sovereignty : federalism in American political development(2016-12) Ewing, Connor Maxwell; Tulis, Jeffrey; Jacobsohn, Gary J., 1946-; Levinson, Sanford V; Perry, H.W.; Brinks, Daniel MThe development of American federalism is a story of contested sovereignty, and those contests are fundamentally shaped by the evolving structures, relationships, and understandings of the constitutional order. This dissertation seeks to show how the American federal system is both cause and effect of political development. Even as it structures legal and political contestation, American federalism is shaped—even redefined—by such contestation. Central to the account of American federalism that I advance are two related arguments about the nature of the federal system. The first is that the Constitution’s definition of the state-federal relationship is structurally underdeterminate: while the Constitution constrains the set of permissible state-federal relationships, it fixes no single definition. Rather than establish a determinate division of state and national powers, the Constitution establishes a range of parameters for their relationship and sets forth the legal and political processes through which that relationship is contested, defined, and revised. As a result, the American federal system both shapes and is shaped by constitutionally structured politics. Developing an implication of this argument, the second argument holds that notions and definitions of sovereignty are structured relationally. Articulations of national power reciprocally define a category of state powers, just as invocation of local concerns over which states have authority reciprocally define national concerns over which the national government has authority. On this account federalism is both an independent and a dependent variable, an approach that shifts our focus from federalism and American political development to federalism in American political development. By foregrounding the underdeterminacy of the federal system and interrogating the constitutional construction it anticipates, we can glimpse the intertwined contingency and continuity of American constitutional development. This dissertation is broadly divided into two parts—the first theoretical, the second developmental—each of which consists of two components. The resulting four chapters constitute the core of the project. The theoretical chapters (Chapters One and Two) provide a framework for understanding the federal system both in the general context of the American Constitution and, more specifically, in contrast with the separation of powers. This framework is fundamentally structured by the underdeterminate constitutional division of state and national powers and the consequent need for constitutional construction of the state-federal relationship. The developmental chapters (Chapters Three and Four) operationalize the theoretical framework developed in the first two chapters in two different domains: constitutional jurisprudence and a discrete episode of the political construction of the state-federal relationship. Taken together, these chapters are intended to illustrate the central argument of the preceding chapters: that the constitutional design of the federal system anticipates development and that this development is inflected by the institutional logics of the principal institutions of American government. The dissertation concludes with a brief reflection on the two conceptual cornerstones of the analysis presented in the preceding chapters: constitutional construction and constitutional logics.