Vernacular Sovereignties

Indigenous women continue to be imagined as passive subjects at the margins of political decision-making, but they are in fact dynamic actors who shape state sovereignty and domestic and international politics. Manuela Lavinas Picq uses the case of Kichwa women successfully advocating for gender parity in the administration of Indigenous justice in Ecuador to show how Indigenous women can influence world politics.

In Islands of Sovereignty, anthropologist and legal scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn offers a new interpretation of the transformation of US borders during the late twentieth century and its implications for our understanding of the nation-state as a legal and political form. Kahn takes us on a voyage into the immigration tribunals of South Florida, the Coast Guard vessels patrolling the northern Caribbean, and the camps of Guantánamo Bay—once the world’s largest US-operated migrant detention facility—to explore how litigation concerning the fate of Haitian asylum seekers gave birth to a novel paradigm of offshore oceanic migration policing. Combining ethnography—in Haiti, at Guantánamo, and alongside US migration patrols in the Caribbean—with in-depth archival research, Kahn expounds a nuanced theory of liberal empire’s dynamic tensions and its racialized geographies of securitization. An innovative historical anthropology of the modern legal imagination, Islands of Sovereignty forces us to reconsider the significance of the rise of the current US immigration border and its relation to broader shifts in the legal infrastructure of contemporary nation-states across the globe.

These texts will be of interest because they represent a kind of writing - at the intersection of ecclesiastical and secular power, drawing on the whole range of medieval Latin learning, yet written in vernacular verse - that is not found elsewhere in the European Middle Ages. In addition, they may be of use in teaching since, although relatively short, they illustrate a great number of characteristic medieval ways of writing and can be linked to a number of quite remarkable historical figures.

Sound Relations delves into histories of Inuit musical life in Alaska to trace the ways in which sound is integral to self-determination and sovereignty. Offering radical and relational ways of listening to Inuit performances across genres--from hip hop to Christian hymnody and traditional drumsongs to funk and R&B --author Jessica Bissett Perea shows how Indigenous ways of musicking amplify possibilities for more just and equitable futures.

What if we understood the idea of family as central to representing alternative forms of governance as expressions of racial deviance? In The Politics of Kinship, Mark Rifkin shows how ideologies of family, including notions of kinship, recast Indigenous and other forms of collective self-organization and self-determination as disruptive racial tendencies in need of state containment and intervention. Centering work in Indigenous studies, Rifkin illustrates how conceptions of family and race work together as part of ongoing efforts to regulate, assault, and efface other political orders. The book examines the history of anthropology and its resonances in contemporary queer scholarship, contemporary Indian policy from the 1970s onward, the legal history of family formation and privacy in the United States, and the association of blackness with criminality across US history. In this way, Rifkin seeks to open new possibilities for envisioning what kinds of relations, networks, and formations can and should be seen as governance on lands claimed by the United States.

The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is celebrated as a landmark global framework for achieving gender equality in peace and security governance. Its power is visible in two decades of United Nations resolutions, national action plans, regional initiatives, and countless activist, academic, and philanthropic projects. Yet despite this vitality, it is haunted by failure, as a lack of political will and stubborn patriarchal resistance frustrate its promise. This book offers a groundbreaking critical account of the WPS agenda, exploring its evolution in relation to the wider politics of global governance and feminism. Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd argue that WPS is not a settled, cohesive policy but a field in flux, defined and disrupted by a growing number of national, supranational, subnational, and transnational agents who in turn act on an expanding catalogue of threats, from climate change to homophobia, challenging traditional boundaries of peace and security. Kirby and Shepherd reconceptualize WPS as a “policy ecosystem,” tracing interaction and contestation around the agenda across levels from the UN Security Council to military alliances to feminist activists. They combine analysis of a vast dataset of policy documents with key informant interviews and close readings of diplomacy, statecraft, the politics of indigeneity, counterinsurgency, antimilitarism, human rights, and the arms trade across the first twenty years of WPS. Far-reaching and incisive, Governing the Feminist Peace poses a provocative question: What if we abandoned the idea of the WPS agenda as a unified political project altogether?

A rich examination of the securitization of the everyday lives of the citizens of Cairo and how to build a more equitable urban order Until the year 2000, Cairo had been a model megacity, relatively crime free, safe, and public facing. It featured a thriving public culture and vibrant street life. In recent decades, however, the Egyptian state has accelerated a wholesale dismantlement of public education and public sector jobs and reversed the modest land reforms of the Nasser era. As a result, the vast majority of Cairo’s people have been forcibly deprived of their social rights, social goods, and educational capital. Eschewing the traditional focus on top-down regime and state security, the contributors to this volume, who represent a wide array of academics, activists, artists, and journalists, explore how repressive policies affect the everyday lives of citizens. They show the ways in which urban security crises are politically fashioned and do not emanate from the urban social fabric on their own: city crime, violence, and fear are created by specific means of extraction, production, and control. Another kind of city can live again. But how? By tackling a range of issues, including public health, transportation, labor safety, and housing and property distribution, Cairo Securitized unsettles simplistic binaries of thug and police, public versus private, and slum versus enclave, and proposes compelling new ways in which securitizing processes can be reversed, reengineered, and replaced with a participatory and equitable urban order. Contributors: Sara Soumaya Abed African Leadership Centre, Kings College London Zeinab Abul-Magd Oberlin College, USA Mohamed Ahmed Political Scientist and historian, Cairo Egypt Rania Ahmed Independent Researcher, Cairo Egypt Nicholas Simcik Arese University of Cambridge, UK Ahmed Awadalla activist, blogger at Rebel With A Cause, Berlin Germany Ahmad Borham The American University in Cairo, Cairo Egypt Miguel A. Fuentes Carreño University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Roberta Duffield Scholar on urbanism, public space, Cairo Egypt Momen El-Husseiny The American University in Cairo, Cairo Egypt Mohamed Elmeshad SOAS, London UK Ifdal Elsaket Netherlands-Flemish Institute, Cairo Egypt Mohamed Elshahed Independent Writer and Curator, Mexico City Amy Fallas University of California Santa Barbara, USA Tina Guirguis University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Elena Habersky The American University in Cairo, Cairo Egypt Hanan Hammad Texas Christian University, USA Hatem Hassan Impact Justice, Pittsburgh, USA Amira Hetaba Federal Government of Lower Austria, Austria Deena Khalil The American University in Cairo, Cairo Egypt Omnia Khalil City University of New York, USA Sabrina Lilleby University of Texas, Austin, USA Paul Miranda Nonviolent Peaceforce, South Mosul, Iraq Mostafa Mohie American University in Cairo, Cairo Egypt Laura Monfleur University François-Rabelais, Tours, France Aya Nassar Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Nora Noralla human rights researcher, Berlin, Germany Aly El Reggal Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence Italy Afsaneh Rigot Harvard University, Cambridge USA Yahia Saleh Malmö University, Sweden Bassem al-Samragy political analyst at the International Criminal Court, The Hague, The Netherlands Yahia Shawkat Technische Universität Berlin, Germany Maïa Sinno Géographie Cités Lab, CNRS / Sorbonne University, Paris France Mark Westmoreland Leiden University, The Netherlands

Confronting a debt crisis, the Belizean government has strategized to maximize revenues from lands designated as state property, privatizing lands for cash crop production and granting concessions for timber and oil extraction. Meanwhile, conservation NGOs have lobbied to establish protected areas on these lands to address a global biodiversity crisis. They promoted ecotourism as a market-based mechanism to fund both conservation and debt repayment; ecotourism also became a mechanism for governing lands and people—even state actors themselves—through the market. Mopan and Q’eqchi’ Maya communities, dispossessed of lands and livelihoods through these efforts, pursued claims for Indigenous rights to their traditional lands through Inter-American and Belizean judicial systems. This book examines the interplay of conflicting forms of governance that emerged as these strategies intersected: state performances of sovereignty over lands and people, neoliberal rule through the market, and Indigenous rights-claiming, which challenged both market logics and practices of sovereignty.