CfP: Impunity, Complicity, and the Exception: Rethinking Arenas of Sovereignty Beyond the State

Call for Papers: American Anthropological Association (AAA), 19-23 November, 2008
Proposed Session: Impunity, Complicity, and the Exception: Rethinking Arenas of Sovereignty Beyond the State
Co-Organizers: Haley Duschinski (Ohio University) and Ken MacLean (Clark University)

Sovereignty, Agamben reminds us, resides in the exception - a double-movement that exempts the sovereign from the field of rule andthen defines the parameters of "bare life," i.e. those who can bekilled but not sacrificed. It is this "state of exception," he argues,which defines what forms of human life the sovereign will protect andthose it will not. In recent years, a significant body of scholarship has emerged around this provocative re-definition of sovereignty,which intersects and productively extends prior work by Schmitt,Arendt, and Foucault, among others. This critical engagement with the question of how sovereign power is operationalized has refocused attention on the continued relevance of the nation-state and its boundary-making practices in the globalizing present. However, many questions remain as to the applicability of Agamben's insights in other cultural contexts given the constitutive role Western political philosophy, jurisprudence, and historical experience plays within his arguments regarding sovereignty. This panel explores these concerns by turning an anthropological eye towards the making and unmaking of impunity specific local contexts in Central America, Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
Impunity, in human rights discourse, refers to a condition in which those responsible for ordering or carrying out acts of violence are immune to or exempt from punishment. The guilty parties are, quite literally, placed outside the law because the state is either unwilling or unable to prosecute them for their actions. To better understand this from an anthropological perspective, we approach impunity as a set of cultural practices that categorizes certain populations as being excluded from the domain of citizenship and thus, to varying degrees, expendable. At the same time these practices also define their mirrored other: the formal and informal security forces that enact state-sponsored forms of violence and, in doing so, demarcate the boundaries of "bare life." Together, these practices help produce culturally specific regimes of impunity that raise challenging questions concerning how zones of exception—the space between nature (zoe) and culture (bios)—are constituted, maintained, and challenged in other settings of sovereign power.
The papers on this panel address a series of questions that seek to elucidate and expand Agamben's work on sovereignty by examining what happens when the foundational categories and their concomitant cultural practices are "provincialized" and "internationalized" in contemporary arenas of sovereignty. In what ways do existing international human rights, humanitarian, and refugee frameworks structurally produce or reproduce regimes of impunity at both the sub-national and transnational scales? Do these "zones of exception," which may or may not be spatially contiguous with existing political boundaries, differ from those described by Agamben? What changes when the primary focus of our attention broadens or shifts to include corporations, international financial institutions, private security firms, and/or third-party states that are complicit in human rights abuses? In what ways do contemporary efforts to assert regulatory authority over entities that produce their own "state effects" challenge us to rethink what sovereignty is becoming?
Please send abstracts (250 words) to Ken MacLean (KMacLean@clarku.edu) or Haley Duschinski (duschins@ohio.edu) by March 15, 2008.