Unsettling sovereignty

Violence, myths and the politics of history in the Ethiopian Somali metropolis

Bibliographic Data

ID5720728
AuthorsRony Emmenegger (0009-0009-8892-5916, University of Basel, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume90
Pages102476
Publication date2021-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0962-6298 • E-ISSN: 1873-5096
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102476
OpenAlexW3185242377
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited30

An increasingly consolidated anthropological scholarship has moved from a legal notion of sovereignty towards an analysis of its violent enactment. Yet, it has paid insufficient attention to the ways in which the idea of sovereignty forms and operates in localized political struggles. Taking seriously Bonilla’s (2017) call for the “unsettling” of sovereignty, this article scrutinizes how ideas of legitimate rule have formed around myths of violence in the capital of the Ethiopian Somali region. It uses ethnographic material to examine the politics of history around material constructions through which myths of violence are entangled with the city's landscape of memory. It reveals sovereignty in the process of formation, becoming culturally and materially grounded in the myths of violence of an emerging Somali nation within the ethnic federal Ethiopian state. This article argues that past claims to sovereignty continue to affect the politics of history, with profound consequences for ongoing nation-state building projects and the corresponding territorial imaginations. It thus highlights the inherently fragile nature of ideas of state sovereignty in the frontier metropolis. On this basis, it contributes to a geographically differentiated anthropology of sovereignty and to an understanding of its co-constitution through violence in the frontier and myths in the metropolis

Criminology · Mythology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Somali · Sovereignty · Classics · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Global Economic and Social Development · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access