Deconstructing sovereignty (non-)life, territorial power and the everyday ecologies of hybrid governance

This special issue explores the territorial logics of competing sovereignties and their impacts on social and material infrastructure, deployment of violence and the politico-ecological transformation of bare life, livelihoods and terrain. Although sovereign regimes may aspire to monopolise violence and cultivate legitimacy, such projects are often incomplete or highly contested. Territorial sovereignty, however, continues to be a strong fiction needing repeated (infrastructural) materialisation of exclusive power for governments, despite evidence of their subordination to illicit and private actors’ own political agendas and illiberal uses of violence. The papers demonstrate that illicit or illegal practices seeking to counteract, undermine or supplant formal sovereign authority, are widespread across multiple scales, and involve diverse materialities in the distribution of agency across cities, the countryside, border regions and spaces of production. The introduction pushes the debate on the (il)liberal underpinnings of contested state sovereignty beyond biopolitics: Turning towards the material and territorial conditions of sovereignty highlights how power operates within a more fundamental distinction between ‘Life and Nonlife’. Such an ecological and geological turn acknowledges that the sovereign decision over life must not only include non-human agency but also a critical focus on the categorisation and scalability of the living and the non-living.