Description
While the ‘turn’ to history in IR has dislodged state essentialism and emphasised the constitutive role of violent nonstate actors (VNSAs) in contested processes of state formation, studies on the mutual constitution between states and VNSAs have so far left unquestioned the temporal frameworks of such processes. By drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on time in IR, this article advances the investigation of the temporality of history and claims that the history/sovereignty nexus is a key site of the aporetic tension between history and theory in IR. To develop this claim, I showcase how the problems of historicity and sovereignty play out in the context of Italian state formation. First, I show how authoritative claims reproducing the ‘time of the state’ work to temporalise the non-state while simultaneously reinstating the state’s legitimate claim to the monopoly of violence as the condition of possibility for progressive time. Second, I show how the Sicilian mafia embraced, reproduced, and contested such temporalizing histories through the temporal figuration of nostalgia. This analysis exposes how, through this very process of contestation about ‘history’, the form of sovereignty is reproduced as the organising temporal principle of politics.
