I still haven’t nailed down what I want to do my project on, let alone articulated a theoretical base or identified my key source material. I was of half a mind to continue the theme I began in last week’s blog (ranting) in this one, except this time complain about the myriad of difficulties in selecting a project. In the end I decided that would be boring (in an academic sense) and pointless. So instead, I have decided to focus on one of the possible avenues I have explored in the search for a project with transnational potential. That is, the concept of ‘sovereignty’.
Any IR scholar worth their salt will have come across sovereignty. It’s a claim by one state over a certain area, peoples, identity or a myriad of other variables. This can have a basis in history or simply reflect who has the bigger guns. However, sovereignty is a term that carries weight beyond the state-centric assertions of nationalist politicians. It’s meaning can be filled with nuance and can be scaled to apply to historical actors, large and small. It is the study of this nuanced meaning of sovereignty that interests me.
My introduction to this more nuanced conception of Sovereignty came over a year ago when I read our own Dr Banerjee’s ‘The Mortal God: Imagining the Sovereign in Colonial India’. I will not describe this book here, suffice to say that it illustrates two things: 1) if I were to choose a topic related to sovereignty, I would have an excellent source to ask for advice, and 2) work on sovereignty requires a (perhaps prohibitively for a project such as mine) large number of sources.
My attention was brought back to this topic recently when I read an article by Akhil Reed Amar, who suggested that the citizens of the American colonies began to re-imagine the British conception of sovereignty in response to their political aspirations. Amar highlights how understandings of ‘sovereignty’ between the empire and its colony gradually separated, which he suggests has consequences for contemporary jurisprudence. Fascinating actors such as the bankrupt farmers of Shays rebellion enter the story tangentially.
If this module has taught me anything it is that the change Amar identified was likely not purely a ‘national’ one. I think a potentially fruitful path of research would be to examine how this new concept of sovereignty came to develop, examining multiple levels of connection between the transnational nodes involved in colonisation and the revolutionary war. An alternative project could examine how and why concepts of sovereignty develop in de-colonial movements. I am inclined to believe a project of such scope would not be possible within the given time frame, so were I to pursue this, I would undoubtedly have to narrow the range of actors I discussed.