de Carvalho Benjamin, Schia Niels Nagelhus, Guillaume Xavier
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway.
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, the Netherlands.
Eur J Int Relat. 2019 Mar;25(1):179-202. doi: 10.1177/1354066118759178. Epub 2018 Mar 9.
The present article investigates how sovereignty is performed, enacted and constructed in an everyday setting. Based on fieldwork and interviews with international embedded experts about the elusive meaning of 'local ownership', we argue that while sovereignty may, indeed, be a model according to which the international community 'constructs' rogue or failed polities in 'faraway' places, this view overlooks that these places are still spaces in which contestations over spheres of authority take place every day, and thus also spaces in which sovereignty is constructed and reconstructed on a daily basis. Local ownership, then, becomes our starting point for tracing the processes of the everyday enactment of sovereignty. We make the case that sovereignty should not be reified, but instead be studied in its quotidian and dynamic production, involving the multiplicity of actors reflecting the active production of the state beyond its presumptive existence as a homogeneously organized, institutionalized and largely centralized bureaucracy.
本文探讨主权在日常情境中是如何被践行、实施和建构的。基于实地调查以及与国际嵌入式专家就“地方所有权”这一难以捉摸的含义进行的访谈，我们认为，虽然主权确实可能是一种国际社会用以在“遥远”之地“建构”流氓政体或失败政体的模式，但这种观点忽略了这些地方仍然是每天都在发生权力范围之争的空间，因此也是主权每天都在被建构和重构的空间。那么，地方所有权就成为我们追溯主权日常实施过程的起点。我们认为，不应将主权实体化，而应研究其日常的、动态的生成过程，这涉及众多行为体，反映出国家超越其作为一个组织同质化、制度化且高度集权的官僚机构的假定存在的积极生成过程。
