Sovereign excesses? Portraying postcolonial sovereigntyscapes

Sidaway, James D.

doi:10.1016/s0962-6298(02)00082-3

Cited by 123 publications

(54 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…American courts that had long been considering questions of constitutional rights were drawn closer than before. Justice Burger aside, this fact of sovereignty is, in fact, anything but inherent or obvious and, as has already been noted, is the point of rich debate within political geography (Newman 1998;Sidaway 2003;Fluri 2011;Dodds 2013)…”

Section: Expanding the Bracket: American Legal Decisions In The Suprementioning

confidence: 95%

Lines that Matter: Reading the Charter at the Canada-US Border

Labove

2017

SSRN Journal

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Border studies and critical geographies of the border have been influential at calling attention to the structures of power and limits to rights at border sites. In North America, significant research has been conducted investigating the US Department of Homeland Security and its role in the securitization of migration within the United States. In Canada, border studies has enjoyed a long history within academic discourse, but the border too often becomes simply a stand in for the US-Canada relationship. This thesis emerges from a desire to look at the border from the North, and to consider the processes and institutions undergirding border work in Canada. Specifically, I take as my To answer these questions, I consider how judges and lawyers make brackets to organize and make sense of information that then defines a field of possible action. I look to three cases at the border that have been heard by the Supreme Court of Canada since the adoption of the Charter in 1982. Each of these cases represent a constitutional question based in the Charter. I use these three cases to offer a thorough accounting of border work considering customs work at the port of entry, and deportations that occur well within Canada. I argue that far away from public scrutiny, laws are dusted off, legal acrobatics are performed in courtrooms, and judges are making decisions that quietly change how borders function and how we understand borders as a legal space. My study of these courtrooms reveals that judges and lawyers are implicated in the work of making and effectuating borders.

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Section: Expanding the Bracket: American Legal Decisions In The Suprementioning

confidence: 95%

Lines that Matter: Reading the Charter at the Canada-US Border

Labove

2017

SSRN Journal

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“…As the 'other' to internationally recognised sovereign states, geopolitical anomalies such as the governmentsin-exile being examined here are thus conventionally framed as lacking international status and external legitimacy. Paying attention precisely to the narratives and practices of legitimacy enacted by SADR and TGiE therefore contributes to the challenging of enduring binary logic of distinctions such as weak/strong sovereignty or positive/negative sovereignty (Jackson, 1990;Sidaway, 2003).…”

Section: Rethinking Legitimacymentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing legitimacy without legality in long term exile: Comparing Western Sahara and Tibet

Wilson

McConnell

2015

Geoforum

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While scholars agree that political legitimacy, or the legitimacy to rule, is sought by governing authorities, the concept itself is often considered to be problematically vague. This article explores how the very ambiguity of the concept of legitimacy may make it 'good to think with'. Calling into question two problematic assumptions in discussions of legitimacy -whether legitimacy is the prerogative of state authorities, and whether legality is a necessary basis from which to make claims for legitimacy -this article uses the cases of two exiled governing authorities, for Western Sahara and Tibet, to examine how legitimate government can be produced in the absence of full legality as a recognised sovereign state. Attending to similarities and differences between these governments-in-exile we trace the sources of political legitimacy in each case and the techniques through which legitimacy is constructed in exile. Key to this has been the enactment of forms of rational-legal authority, including the establishment of statelike bureaucracies, the provision of services to their diasporic populations and aspirations to develop democratic structures. With the latter presented as a strategy both of securing internal legitimacy and of being seen to adhere to international norms of 'good governance', legitimacy in these cases emerges not so much as an achieved status, but as a set of techniques of government. We conclude by reflecting on how liminality -both territorially in terms of displacement and legally in terms of lack of full recognition -can counter-intuitively provide creative grounds for producing legitimacy.

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“…Africa, however, figures into such developments only through the control of European powers. In postcolonial Africa, states have often failed to manage this same spatial hegemony (Herbst 2000;Sidaway 2002). On Zanzibar today, maps remain inaccurate in comparison to GPS data.…”

Section: Capitalist Production Alternative Spatial Logicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plantation Landscapes

Croucher

2014

Capitalism and Cloves

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From the sea the island [Zanzibar] presents the appearance of an unbroken forest of cocoanut, mango, and other trees, with the clove plantations on the hills forming the background; the island is intersected by paths and green lanes in every direction, affording a neverending variety of pleasant rides and walks. The country-houses of the Arab proprietors, and the huts of their slaves, are thickly dotted over the surface, surrounded with gardens and fields. The hedge-rows are formed covered with flowering creepers, chiefly varieties of jasmine and wild pea. The hedges are formed of a species of laurel, wild orange, lime, and other evergreens; and pineapples grow everywhere in profusion. In many parts are glades of undulating-grass land of park-like appearance, dotted with gigantic mango trees…. The ponds are covered with rushes and white and blue lilies; and the air is perfumed with the blossoms of the mango and clove. (Rigby 1861, pp. 2-3) So wrote Lieutenant Colonel C.P. Rigby, consul and British agent at Zanzibar in 1861, laying out one potential gaze over the clove plantation landscape of the island of Zanzibar. The landscape depicted is an African one, but one that emerges-is given "density of meaning"-through material referents to a very English kind of landscape. By producing this relation, European commentators of the nineteenthcentury to were able to produce a certain kind of mastery over the landscape, while also providing a clear relationship for metropolitan reading publics (Pratt 1992, p. 204). As should become clear through this chapter, this is just one of the complex ways through which landscape on Zanzibar has been perceived. Examining the variety of landscapes in existence, at levels of practice and through scopic regimes (sensu Jay 1988), demonstrates the complex ways in which clove plantations may be placed within capitalism, colonialism, East African cultural practices, and modernity.At the time Rigby was writing, Zanzibar was increasingly under the influence of British imperialism. Although still under the autonomous rule of the Sultanate, within the next 40 years, a British administration had largely taken control of the governance of the islands (Bissell 2011). Narratives of Zanzibar could be seen to be still part of a "contact zone"-an initial period of spatial and temporal copresence of different groups previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures (Pratt 1992, p. 7). British colonial and other European economic interests

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Sovereign excesses? Portraying postcolonial sovereigntyscapes

Cited by 123 publications

References 40 publications

Lines that Matter: Reading the Charter at the Canada-US Border

Lines that Matter: Reading the Charter at the Canada-US Border

Constructing legitimacy without legality in long term exile: Comparing Western Sahara and Tibet

Plantation Landscapes

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