Julian Hollstegge

‘Sovereignty Entrepreneurs’ and the Production of State Power in Two Central African Borderlands

ABSTRACT This article advances a subaltern geopolitics of sovereignty production at the borders of the DR Congo – the supposedly most fragile – and South Sudan – the youngest state in Africa. Moving beyond critiques of representing postcolonial statehood and sovereignty in terms of ‘lack’ and ‘failure’, we localise and ground analysis by drawing on Butler’s figure of the ‘petty sovereign’‘ to analyse the agency of border officials at the DR Congo/Rwanda and the South Sudan/Uganda border who we refer to as ‘sovereignty entrepreneurs’: officials who, tasked with managing and controlling the border, in constant face-to-face negotiations and closely linked to resource competition prescribe, set and decide on the terms and conditions of border crossing. It is argued that in the context of the DR Congo and South Sudan, where the states’ claims to territorial sovereignty face similar internal and external challenges, the border work of sovereignty entrepreneurs, characterised by the ability to tax, threaten and discipline with impunity, represents a form of sovereign power that renders the state’s capacity to act excessively visible at its borders.

Book review: Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor

globally constituted through bodily differences’, the editors dish up a strongly Deleuzian and materialist theory of race with dashes of feminist corporeality (p. 7). A few of the essays in the collection fit this call, but most do not, and several essays afford little more than a cursory citation in naming the problem of race. Nkazanin Naraghi and Paul Kingsbury use Lacanian theory and Žižek to get at race through multicultural consumption in West Vancouver, while Mimi Sheller and Rick Dolphijn each take up very different concepts from Deleuze to look at racialized food. Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel and Deirdre Tedmanson use Foucault and Agamben to examine Australian federal initiatives targeting alcoholism in indigenous communities as a form of racial combat in terms of coercion, enforcement and control, whereas Aaron Bobrow-Strain takes up Foucault’s biopolitics to examine the industrialization of bread in North America and associated normative discourses of hygiene, purity, and cleanliness. Hilda Kurtz uses Goldberg’s theory of the racial state to elaborate a concept of nutrition deserts as an alternate framing of food deserts, pointing out the analytical richness of segregation that many studies of food deserts fail to engage. While each contribution exemplifies powerful research on race and food, the reader is left to piece together for herself how the various theoretical strands speak to one another, if at all. It seems tempting to ask that each contribution elaborate a theory of race, as the editors have done in the introduction, but fulfilling such a desire would make for a book series, not an edited collection. And the multiplicity of frameworks for addressing the ‘vexed concept of race’ should not really come as a surprise (p. 2). Whereas critical geographies of race around the millennium seemed to consolidate productively around whiteness, privilege, identity, and segregation, approaches to race today seem to run off in any number of theoretical directions. The essays collected in Geographies of Race and Food reflect this lack of consensus about race which, as Julie Guthman suggests in the prologue, might well be seen as both a necessary and wholesome diversity.

Mezzadra, Sandro ; Neilson, Brett: Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor. Durham, 2013

globally constituted through bodily differences’, the editors dish up a strongly Deleuzian and materialist theory of race with dashes of feminist corporeality (p. 7). A few of the essays in the collection fit this call, but most do not, and several essays afford little more than a cursory citation in naming the problem of race. Nkazanin Naraghi and Paul Kingsbury use Lacanian theory and Žižek to get at race through multicultural consumption in West Vancouver, while Mimi Sheller and Rick Dolphijn each take up very different concepts from Deleuze to look at racialized food. Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel and Deirdre Tedmanson use Foucault and Agamben to examine Australian federal initiatives targeting alcoholism in indigenous communities as a form of racial combat in terms of coercion, enforcement and control, whereas Aaron Bobrow-Strain takes up Foucault’s biopolitics to examine the industrialization of bread in North America and associated normative discourses of hygiene, purity, and cleanliness. Hilda Kurtz uses Goldberg’s theory of the racial state to elaborate a concept of nutrition deserts as an alternate framing of food deserts, pointing out the analytical richness of segregation that many studies of food deserts fail to engage. While each contribution exemplifies powerful research on race and food, the reader is left to piece together for herself how the various theoretical strands speak to one another, if at all. It seems tempting to ask that each contribution elaborate a theory of race, as the editors have done in the introduction, but fulfilling such a desire would make for a book series, not an edited collection. And the multiplicity of frameworks for addressing the ‘vexed concept of race’ should not really come as a surprise (p. 2). Whereas critical geographies of race around the millennium seemed to consolidate productively around whiteness, privilege, identity, and segregation, approaches to race today seem to run off in any number of theoretical directions. The essays collected in Geographies of Race and Food reflect this lack of consensus about race which, as Julie Guthman suggests in the prologue, might well be seen as both a necessary and wholesome diversity.