Description
Over the past forty years, IR scholarship has seen concerted efforts to question the rigidity of ‘traditional’ definitions of sovereignty as bound to the internal ‘rationalities’ of centralised state governance. Extensive critical research has drawn attention to the political effects of definitions that posit neat boundaries between intra/inter-state politics, and which have failed to adequately account for the multiplicity of actors, identities and subjectivities that sit at the interstices of such rigid imaginaries of sovereign power.
An area that has received surprisingly little attention in recent attempts to unpack the prevalence of the sovereignty ‘myth’ has been minority nationalisms. These continue to invoke sovereignty as a central political objective and right in struggles for statehood and self-determination. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Sardinia, this paper contributes to ongoing efforts to problematize the sovereign-state ideal through an analysis of ethnographic notes and semi-structured interviews conducted with Sardinian ‘independentists’. Contrary to pervasive depictions in IR of nationalisms as cohesive movements that reproduce traditional definitions of sovereignty, Sardinian activist accounts suggest that minority nationalists do not simply reproduce the binary logic implicit in depictions of the term as necessarily state bound. Using Cynthia Weber’s formulation of the ‘and/or logic’, the paper argues that Sardinian activists’ conceptualisations point to a much more nuanced understanding of sovereignty as a way of doing politics. The paper adopts a Gramscian approach to firstly, situate the term’s use in struggles for political hegemony; and secondly, to highlight the extent to which sovereignty reflects both diverging and converging conceptualisations as a means through which activists can carve out spaces for political manoeuvre and express a unifying critique of Sardinia’s place in the world.
