Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World

Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges

Abstract: Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. He is Director of the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and Director of the Center of Documentation on the Revolution of 1974, at the same University. He has published widely on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, and human rights in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French and German.

Access and Property: A Question of Power and Authority

Abstract: In this introduction we argue that access and property regarding natural resources are intimately bound up with the exercise of power and authority. The process of seeking authorizations for property claims also has the effect of granting authority to the authorizing politico-legal institution. In consequence, struggles over natural resources in an institutionally pluralist context are processes of everyday state formation. Through the discussion of this theoretical proposition we point to legitimizing practices, territoriality and violence as offering particular insights into the recursively constituted relations between struggles over access and property regarding natural resources, contestations about power and authority, and state formation.

Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries. The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times*

Abstract: The governmentality of immigration has become a crucial issue of contemporary societies. Ironically, although globalization meant facilitated circulation of goods, it has also signified increased constraints on the mobility of men and women. This evolution has been characterized by the policing of physical borders and the production of racialized boundaries, primarily studied by the social sciences in North America and Western Europe. Anthropological studies highlight the renewed role of the nation-state to impose a surveillance apparatus of the frontiers and the territories, regimes of exception for the detention and deportation of illegal aliens, and a dramatic decline in the right to asylum, sometimes replaced by forms of discretionary humanitarianism. These logics are embodied in the everyday work of bureaucracies as well as in the experience of immigrants.

Beyond Bare Life: AIDS, (Bio)Politics, and the Neoliberal Order

Abstract: It is impossible to contemplate the shape of late modern history — in Africa or elsewhere — without the polymorphous presence of HIV/ AIDS, the signal pandemic of the global here and now. In retrospect, the timing of its onset was uncanny: the disease appeared like a memento mori in a world high on the hype of Reaganomics, deregulation, and the end of the Cold War. In its wake, even careful observers made medieval associations: “AIDS,” wrote Susan Sontag (1989: 122), “reinstates something like a premodern experience of illness,” a throwback to an era when sickness was, by its nature, immutable, mysterious, and fatal. Such reactions make plain how the genesis of the pandemic affected our very sense of history, imposing a chronotope of its own, a distinctly unmodern sense of fate unfolding, of implacable destiny. By unsettling scientific certainties, AIDS also prefigured an ironic, postmodern future. As Sontag intuited, it marked an epochal shift, not merely in the almost omnipotent status of medical knowledge and its sanitized language of suffering, nor even in the relationship with death, so long banished from the concerns of those preoccupied with life and their seemingly limitless capacity to control it. AIDS also casts a premodern pall over the emancipated pleasures, the amoral, free-wheeling desires that animated advanced consumer societies. And, as is often the case when Western self-images of reasoned control face homegrown disruption, the disease was deflected onto Africa as primal other, Africa as an icon of dangerous desire, Africa as the projection of a self never fully tamable.