Description
The potential Sino-Taiwan War overshadows the discussion on Sino-U.S. relations, but the discussion has failed to grasp similar exclusive inclusions of specific communities in the international order, such as Kashmir or Kurdistan, inter alia. To address this gap, I propose the interpretative framework of a political theology of the international order (Bain, 2020), combining Schmitt’s concepts of sovereignty and katechon (Schmitt, 2005; Schmitt, 2011) with the state of exception and homo sacer (Agamben, 2005; Agamben, 1998), and propose populi sacri, i.e., states that can be invalidated without violating international norms. I examine its production populi sacri during the stages of the Cold War, the 1990s, and the 21st century. I argue that populi sacri revealed the sovereignty of the international system, which exercises sovereign power by deciding on their being in the state of exception. I interpret how populi sacri has been a constitutive element of the post-World War II international order through the role of the katechon, i.e. that which withholds the apocalypse. Populi sacri can help to re-evaluate the rises and falls of world orders, by shifting the focus from the powerful to the ignored in the evolution of international order.
