Description
This paper rethinks the idea of state personhood by focusing on the fusion of leader and state in highly personalized regimes. Classical constructivist accounts treat the state personhood as an analytical tool. This paper is building upon the debate on state personhood, internal and external referential logic in ontological security studies, and the state-society complex. It argues that in certain contexts, state personhood leads to the emergence of the sovereign-self. The sovereign-self is a fused unit in which the personal identity of an authoritarian leader and the collective identity of the state become mutually constitutive. Through the mechanisms of absorption (the leader internalizing national traumas, myths, and missions) and projection (the transference of personal existential woes such as mortality, ambition, and legacy onto the state), the sovereign-self becomes a new fused unit of analysis, distinct from individual leader or the state. Drawing on the cases of Russia and Serbia, the paper traces how Vladimir Putin and Aleksandar Vučić discursively merge their biographies with the state’s historical trajectory, embodying the nation’s endurance and destiny. In doing so, it re-embeds state personhood in the lived, affective, and biographical processes of embodiment and agency, contributing to recent debates on state personhood.
