The Gender of Sovereignty

It should be clear that because the two dominant schools of American political science select and value different objects and processes, and ask different research questions of those objects and processes, they have different investments in definitions of political order and political change. The implications of their approaches for political policy and action seriously differ, as well. Yet the academic “dialogue” between neorealists and neoliberals collaborates in reinscribing particular absences in political science research, just as the apparently different philosophies of Hobbes and Locke constitute together the origins of modern western political theory. Despite their apparent opposition, the two approaches share a state-level focus on international relations that refers to the liberal democratic nation-state as its normative ideal type. This focus defines “politics” in terms of states and excludes, on the one hand, the “politics” of popular social movements or workers’ struggles beneath the level of the state or organizing transnationally, and on the other, communist or socialist nonwestern states like China or Cuba, or those newly independent nations in Africa, Asia or the Caribbean whose narratives of political development diverge from the “modernization” model based on states in Europe or North America. A shared definition of “politics” as the activities of states and international regimes obscures an understanding of how government, interest, and power affect the lion’s share of the non-elite world. The definition of sovereignty as inhering exclusively in the nation-state itself effects a normative notion of governance that obscures other modes of rule, as well as other modes of politics that specifically counter that rule. State-centric approaches presume an isomorphism of nation-state properties and measure these increasingly standardized properties across nation-states both old and new. ¹ In effect, neo-functionalist state-centrism research effectively produces the conditions for “integration” among developing countries of relatively equal size, with symmetries of trade, level of development, governing institutions and ideologies, and per capita income. ² In a sense, most political science continues to be organized in relation to a “phantom” model of the nation-state, even when it sets out to study how global interdependence challenges or reinforces the power of the nation-state.

Political science that places nation-state sovereignty at the center of its studies has left “understudied” a broad range of phenomena, from sovereignty movements for self-determination by native indigenous peoples, to multilateral solidarities or international non-governmental organizations that have sponsored initiatives in the areas of human rights, war crimes, world health and environmental protection, to transnational extra-state activities like the so-called “anti-globalization” movement. ³ Native American, and indigenous sovereignty movements in North America, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, are rarely studied by the mainstream discipline. ⁴ Political science has also consistently disregarded the Bandung conference, which in 1955 gathered a coalition of 29 states organized by Indonesia, Burma, Ceylon, India, and Pakistan, representing more than half of the world’s population, promoting Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and opposing colonialism or neocolonialism by the United States or the Soviet Union. ⁵ The Bandung conference led to the organization of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, which joined over one hundred states not formally aligned with or against either Cold War power bloc in a “declaration on promotion of world peace and cooperation,” affirming their moral and practical solidarity with one another in their pursuit of independent sovereignty, territorial integrity, economic independence, and peace within the Cold War context. ⁶ Opening the 1955 conference, President Sukarno of Indonesia called for an end to colonialism, not only “the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew,” but also stressed that political economic domination by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. was “colonialism… in modern dress” and warned of war’s absolute powers of destruction in an atomic age. Jawaharlal Nehru spoke about the importance for Asian and African nations to stand for peace in an era in which war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. could destroy the world. The Final Communiqué of the Conference underscored the need for developing countries to become independent from the leading industrialized nations by forging an alternative path to development, with lateral technology exchanges among one another, and the establishment of regional training and research institutes. Yet despite the powerful vision of African and Asian anti-war and anti-colonial solidarity, the Bandung conference has been virtually forgotten by 20th century political science, illegible within its normative classifications. This “forgetting” of Bandung exemplifies a persistent disinterest in the study of the formerly colonized or developing world in U.S. political science, a “blindspot” that continues to be reproduced within the discipline’s concept of globalization. Neither neorealist nor neoliberal approaches make visible indigenous peoples, minority groups, women and children, and poor migrant workers beneath the level of the state, or more to the point, in neither approach are their deteriorating conditions within globalization made a priority as objects of research.

Academic disinterest in the 1955 Bandung conference is commensurate with both the powerlessness of the developing world in world governance, and the complicity of social science research in the centralization of U.S. interests. Both demonstrate the urgent need for alternative forms of study, literacy, and interpretation, including feminist paradigms for understanding the “politics” of globalized communities. ⁷ We must relinquish the presumption that all societies in the modern world system are organized in the same way, in order to take seriously the ample evidence that modernization has been a violently uneven process that has produced antagonisms and asymmetries in different regions and locales, and that neither exploitation, nor the emergence of political subjects and practices, can be thought of only in terms of a single uniform collectivity, teleology, or narrative of development. In other words, the practice and the terrain of the political must be redefined and imagined differently in relation to different histories of uneven material conditions.

I began my discussion by linking the neoconservative American foreign policy of the U.S. war in Iraq with the anti-immigrant fortification of the U.S-Mexican border. Mainstream ideas of nation-state sovereignty used to justify contemporary militarism in Iraq and at the border misrecognize and misrepresent the material practices of globalization, and transnational “gender” is one significant index in which we may “read” this incommensurability. Transnational gender disciplines register the shift from the Cold War management of nation-states to a biopolitical governmentality focused on bodies and populations. An interdisciplinary feminist analysis can foreground the contradiction between political isolationism and economic globalism, between manipulations of racialized gendered labor in the production of an alleged “immigration crisis” and the dependence of U.S. middle class consumer society on male migrant labor and female manufacturing labor in the export processing zones. Government-declared national “crises” appear to authorize the state’s monopoly on violence, and are used to justify the disrespect of laws and liberal political bodies, and the overriding of civil rights. Recent cross-border feminist projects on the U.S.-Mexican border address these contradictions in a variety of ways: from workplace struggles, to campaigns for environmental justice, to the protection of migrant communities. These movements constitute new forms of transnational politics that establish and practice an alternative meaning of “sovereignty” in domains that the social sciences have normally bracketed as “culture.” By addressing issues of life and death in the workplace, community, and border regions, these feminist movements have named the power of the state in deciding who lives and who dies; appealing to a transnational public sphere that includes both Mexicans and U.S. Americans, these cross-border movements have redefined social justice as the gendered exercise of sovereignty by the border communities themselves to end the state’s arbitrary power over life. They have called for transformations in the responsibilities of states and corporations on both sides of the border toward the legal, economic, and environmental protection of border communities.

1. Though within the subfield of sociological institutionalism, a good example of this approach might be found in the following text: John Meyer, John Boli, George Thomas, and Francisco Ramirez. “World Society and the Nation-State,” American Journal of Sociology 103: 1 (July 1997): 144-81. Meyer et al. argue that a causally significant world culture creates incentives for countries to conform to the modern nation-state model in order to integrate into world society; alternative models have little legitimacy and find it difficult to survive if they do not assume the legitimized form.[↑]
2. Among the most important postwar theories of European integration were Leon N. Lindberg, The Political Dynamics of European Economic Integration. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963; Ernst Haas, Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964. Current studies include Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998; Wolfgang Wessels, et al. Eds., Fifteen Into One? The European Union and Its Member States. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.[↑]
3. U.S. political science employs a top-down perspective on nation-states as the privileged unit of government and action; women, poor, non-elites, indigenous peoples, and international non-governmental organizations are largely invisible in most of these studies. The international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) that are the most bureaucratized are the most legible for study[↑]
4. Native sovereignty refers to the authority of native peoples to determine and govern themselves. See David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law. Tulsa: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002; Paul Chatt Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press, 1997. In Canada, indigenous peoples are referred to as First Nation peoples; in other contexts, native people are considered “Fourth World.” The Hawaiian sovereignty movement is a coalition of groups seeing self-determination for native peoples and redress of the U.S. government for military occupation and appropriation of lands beginning in 1893. See Hanauni Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999; Jocelyn Linnekin, “Indigenous Sovereignty Scenarios in Latin America and Hawaii: Parallels and Possibilities,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 1:2 (Spring 1996): 152-163. Aboriginal peoples in Australia have struggled for sovereignty, most recently the 1992 Mabo Case, which declared the long-held terra nullius to be invalid and recognized Aboriginal land claims before British settlement, and subsequent legislation enacted to establish Native title claims. See Ann Curthoys, Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003. For an important collaboration that brings together Native and Pacific discussions of indigenous cultures, see See Vicente Diaz and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, eds., Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge, a special issue of The Contemporary Pacific, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall 2001.[↑]
5. The Asian-African Conference, convened upon the invitation of the Prime Ministers of Burma, Ceylon, India, Indonesia and Pakistan, met in Bandung in April, 1955. In addition to the sponsoring countries, the following 24 countries participated in the Conference: Afghanistan, Cambodia, People’s Republic of China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, State of Vietnam, and Yemen. The Asian-African Conference considered problems of common interest and concern to the countries of Asia and Africa and discussed ways and means by which their people could achieve fuller economic, cultural and political co-operation.[↑]

6. The Ten Principles of Bandung were:

   1. Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
   2. Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.
   3. Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations large and small.
   4. Abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country.
   5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
   6. (a) Abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defense to serve any particular interests of the big powers. (b) Abstention by any country from exerting pressures on other countries.
   7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression of the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country.
   8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, such as negotiation, conciliation, arbitration or judicial settlement as well as other peaceful means of the parties own choice, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
   9. Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.
   10. Respect for justice and international obligations.

   [↑]

7. The so-called “anti-globalization” movement—less than a decade old and manifested in the popular demonstrations at the Seattle WTO meetings or the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil—has yet to capture the attention of political science, though sociologists have begun to ask if “anti-globalization” may constitute a new transnational social movement. Best understood as “counter-capitalist” or “anti-corporatist,” members of the “anti-globalization” movement protest the excesses of unregulated global corporate capitalism, and it includes single-issue groups focused on local agriculture as well as larger-scale transnational coalitions for global environmentalism. At this point, it even includes groups whose imperatives may appear nationally at odds, e.g. U.S. trade unions who object that their jobs are undercut by corporations moving their manufacture to locations with tax holidays and lower wages, and labor groups asking for the greater protection of labor rights and human rights among workers in the maquiladoras, or in the export industry zones. Yet a common target of protest supercedes the inconsistencies held by the various groups: the presumption of economic integration that demands the merging of all countries within a single model of development and into a single, centralized system. Though heterogeneous and even ununified, most participants in the movement propose a case for localization. Localization is a critique of centralized decision-making in the metropolitan headquarters; the case for localization argues that local politics and decision-making must be empowered by actively favoring the local—whether local agriculture, Malaysian arguments against deforestation, or Venezuelan management of its oil industry—it argues for local democratic control of economic processes, and the redistribution of its benefits. The “anti-globalization” movement affirms a vision of global justice in which the powerful will respect the unpowerful, in which the essential needs of all people could be met, with fair distribution so that the poor as well as the wealthy, can sustain growth. See James Harding, “Counter-Capitalism: Globalisation’s Children Strike Back,” Financial Times, September, 2001; Vandana Shiva, “Ecological Balance in an Era of Globalization,” in Principled World Politics: The Challenge of Normative International Relations, Paul Ruiz and Lester Edwin J. Wapner, Eds. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.[↑]