Sovereignty Without Territoriality Analysis

In order to determine a framework of understanding the relationship between sovereignty and territory, I shall begin by critically examining Arjun Appadurai’s thesis on Sovereignty without Territoriality. Working with his method of study, I wish to understand some of the existing representations of localities encircling the notion of sovereignty. Appadurai takes a closer look at one dimension of the modern nation form, that of ‘territoriality’ where his initial argument begins with an agreement with Benedict Anderson that the nation is indeed an “imagined community .” Thus, it is this imagination that will further push us beyond a mere understanding of the ‘nation.’ He traces the principle concept of the nation-state to be associated in the

One, locality rooted in social formations and structures which are bound by lived material or cultural strands is positioned as a challenge to existing orderliness of established notions of nation-states. And two, the human movements which are core to globalization and economy innate to the contemporary world also pose as challenges to the idea of the nation-state. Appadurai identifies these challenges to the nation-state to be rooted in the formation of the entity of ‘translocalities.’ What do these ‘translocalities’ recreate that pushes the nation-state to curtail the dimensions of its meanings? First, the act of producing localities in human societies is a collective constitution in the sense that “the commitments and attachments that characterize local subjectivities are more pressing, more continuous, and sometimes more distracting than the nation-state can afford” (Appadurai 338). These attachments are often closely linked to their lived and spatial memories which are “at odds with the needs of the nation-state for regulated public life”

The spatial boundaries of the nation can be differently reasoned from the space of the nation itself, such that the latter fits in the discourse of belonging, while the former will purvey on terms of integrity, defence and surveyability. The existing state apparatuses often resort to disjunctive legalities with territories, especially along the nation’s fringes, in order to sustain loyalties to the nation-state. And this is not a new observation as such examples are seen within the Indian nation-state as well. Globalization features a host of tensions materializing through an increase of liberalized borders on one hand and developing technologies of fortifications on the other. In addition, the security of the subject as against the movement of capital because of arising differences of interest between the nation and the globalized market. In the rising tensions across national and global markets, these very tensions find their nesting grounds in the new walls that fortify border territories of nations. Even as the bricks of the Berlin wall were being dismembered, buildings of newer walls were underway in the United States along its Southern border with Mexico or even the Israeli wall winding through the West Bank. Even so, there are nations that maintain cruder forms of walling in order to deter movements of refugees and migration from poorer countries, or