Insurgent Rule as Sovereign Mimicry and Mutation: Governance, Kingship, and Violence in Civil Wars

Abstract

This article uses the case of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to make a conceptual argument about sovereignty. Despite its aura of natural order, sovereignty is ultimately self-referential and thus somewhat arbitrary and potentially unstable. At the heart of this unsteadiness, we posit, lies the paradox between the systematic tenets of rational governance and the capricious potential of sublime violence. Both are highly relevant to the LTTE case: the movement created de facto state institutions to mimic governance, but simultaneously deployed an elaborate transcendental register of sacrifice, meaning, and intractable power wielded by a mythical leader. To capture this paradox, we connect the literature on rebel governance with anthropological debates about divine kingship. We conceptualize sovereignty as a citational practice that involves the adaptation, imitation, and mutation of different idioms of authority: political and religious, modern and traditional, rational and mythical. Understanding sovereignty in this way debunks the idea that insurgent movements are merely lagging behind established states. As sites of mimicry, bricolage, and innovation, they transform the way sovereignty is practiced and understood, thus affecting the frame that sovereignty is.

“Homeless” Deities and Refugee Devotees: Hindu Temples, Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora, and Politics in the United Kingdom

“…It unleashed extreme forms of violence over its subjects and controlled civil organizations in the north and east of Sri Lanka. It was organized around its leader, Prabhakaran, who was accorded attributes befitting a god (Klem and Maunaguru 2017; Thiranagama 2011). Annual rituals, such as Maavirarnaal, or “Martyrs’/Heroes’ Day,” were established to celebrate the valor of the LTTE's dead fighters.…”

“…An illustration of this reassertion of power in moments of vulnerability is evident in the interaction between Hindu temples and the LTTE. The LTTE, during the thirty years of civil war, emerged not only as a strong militant group but also became a “de facto sovereignty” (Hansen and Stepputat 2006) in the north and east of Sri Lanka by establishing its own institutions in the territories it controlled until it was defeated in 2009 (Klem and Maunaguru 2017). An experiment in a totalizing modern sovereign project, the LTTE was able to control all civil, social, and political powers within their territory (Thiranagama 2011).…”

Tactical dissonance

“…In Transnistria, Moldova, a truncated “performative sovereignty” manipulates ideologies of sovereignty to create a “peoplehood” that aspires to external recognition yet does not depend on it (Bobick 2017, 159). Similarly, a “laboratory of sovereign rule” in Sri Lanka reworks articulations of sovereignty through “mimicry and mutation,” hinging on a paradox between sovereignty expressed as orderly regulatory governance with bounded territorial rule, and the projection of a capricious, unsettled form of mythical violence embodied in the cult of the Tamil rebel leader Prabhakaran (Klem and Maunaguru 2017, 630). These articulations draw both on forms of territorialized disciplinary sovereignty and on sovereignty's roots in divine kingship and spectacular violence.…”

The Politics of Order and Disturbance: Public authority, sovereignty, and violent contestation in South Asia

“…But in doing so, they also tweak and transform the registers that they are adopting. 62 While the deployment of strategic and disciplinary violence is centrally important, 63 there is more to rebel projects than political order. It would be overly mechanical to boil rebel governance down to a cold project of coercion paired with a rational calculus of people accepting extortion/tax, duress/rules, and abduction/recruitment in exchange for protection (and the promise of welfare and representation).…”