Course Schedule

Introducing basic concepts

1. Course Intro-
   
   
   
   
   1. The inevitability of the nation state
      
      
      
      
      1. Why we need new ideas about sovereignty- resources, water, and land
      
      
      2. In class writing- what is sovereignty?
      
      
      
      
   
   
   
   

Early Adventures in Sovereign Land Claims: The God King and Son of Heaven

2. Early Kings- Foundations, Violence, and “Superstition”
   
   
   
   
   1. Graeber, D., & Sahlins, M. (2017). On Kings. Hau Books. [Introduction, Ch. 1]
   
   
   
   

2. 
   
   
   
   1. Sima Qian. (2007). The First Emperor. Oxford University Press. [Introductions, Ch. 1 and 5]
   
   
   2. Mus, P. (1933). [1975] India Seen from the East: Indian and indigenous cults in Champa. Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University.
   
   
   
   


3. China – Queens, Emperors, and Nomads
   
   
   
   1. Lewis, M. E. (2007). The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. [pp. 1-29;178-205; Geography of Empire; Religion].
   
   
   2. MacKay, Joseph. 2020. Imperial Chinese Relations with Nomadic Groups. In, Nomad-State Relationships in International Relations: Before and After Borders. Edited by Jamie Levin. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 197-216. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28053-6.
   
   
   
   


4. Southeast Asia- Devaraja to Chakravartan
   
   
   
   1. Heine-Geldern, R. (1942). Conceptions of the State and Kingship in Southeast Asia. The Far Eastern Quarterly, 2(1), 15–30.
   
   
   2. Day, Tony. 2002. Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. [Ch. 1 & 3]
   
   
   
   

2. Sovereignty and Religion
   
   
   
   
   1. McAllister, C., & Napolitano, V. (2021). Political Theology/Theopolitics: The Thresholds and Vulnerabilities of Sovereignty. Annual Review of Anthropology, 50, 109–124. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-101819-110334
   
   
   2. Yongqian, Su, and Kathryn Henderson. 2017. “An Exploration of the Queen Mother of the West from the Perspective of Comparative Mythology.” Journal of Chinese Humanities 3 (1): 72–90. https://doi.org/10.1163/23521341-12340044.
   
   
   3. Thompson, A. (2016). Engendering the Buddhist State: Territory, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Inventions of Angkor. London: Routledge. [Introduction Presis 2, pp. 2-18; Chapter 2, 71-110]
   
   
   
   

Sovereignty and Europe

6. European model of sovereignty and modernity
   
   
   
   
   1. Bodin, Jean. 2009. On Sovereignty: Six Books of the Commonwealth. Oxford: The Alden Press. [Book 1]
   
   
   2. Croxton, Derek. 1999. “The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Origins of Sovereignty. The International History Review 21 (3): 569–91.
   
   
   3. Lopez, Julia Costa, Benjamin De Carvalho, Andrew A. Latham, Ayse Zarakol, Jens Bartelson, and Minda Holm. 2018. “Forum: In the Beginning There Was No Word (For It): Terms, Concepts, and Early Sovereignty.” International Studies Review 20 (3): 489–519. https://doi.org/10.1093/ISR/VIY053.
   
   
   
   


7. Sovereign Exception and the Nomos of the Earth
   
   
   
   1. Schmitt, C. (1950). The Nomos of the Earth: in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Telos Press Publishing. [Part 1: pp. 42-86]
   
   
   2. Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press. [pp 1-67- Introduction and Part 1]
   
   
   3. Lee, Seung Ook, Najeeb Jan, and Joel Wainwright. 2014. “Agamben, Postcoloniality, and Sovereignty in South Korea.” Antipode 46 (3): 650–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12070.
   
   
   
   

8- Mid-Term Exam-

        Short answer essays dealing with the framing of the course and main concepts

Sovereignty and Colonization  

9. Mainland Southeast Asia –  Sovereign Thailand
   
   
   
   
   1. Thongchai, Winichakul. 1994. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. [Intro, Ch. 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7] 
   
   
   
   

10. East and South Asia
    
    
    
    
    1. Chen, Edward I-te. 1970. “Japanese Colonialism in Korea and Formosa: A Comparison of the Systems of Political Control.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 30: 126–58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2718768.pdf.
    
    
    2. Kohno, M. (2001). On the Meiji Restoration: Japan’s search for sovereignty? International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 1, 265–283.
    
    
    3. Hansen, Thomas Blom. 2021. “Sovereignty in a Minor Key.” Public Culture 33 (1): 41–61. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8742160.
    
    
    
    

Trade-Sovereignty-Energy: Before (or without) the Kings

11. General Concepts: Founders, Zomia, and the land between the kings
    
    
    
    
    1. O’Connor, R. A. (2003). Founder’s Cults in Regional and Historical Perspective. In N. Tannenbaum &C. A. Kammerer (Eds.), Founders’ Cults in Southeast Asia: Ancestors, Polity, and Identity (pp. 269–311). Yale University Southeast Asia Studies.
    
    
    2. Scott, J. C. (2009). The Art of not being Governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press. [Preface and Introduction]
    
    
    3. Baumann, B. (2020). Reconceptualizing the Cosmic Polity: The Tai mueang as a social ontology. In B. Baumann & D. Bultmann (Eds.), Social Ontology, Sociocultures, and Inequality in the Global South. Routledge.
    
    
    
    

Sovereignty Reconsidered

12. Sovereignty and Contemporary Indigenous Movements [
    
    
    
    
    1. Marisol de La Cadena & Orin Starn. 2007. Indigenous Experience Today (Wenner-Gren International Symposium Series). New York: Berg Publishers. [Introduction and Chapter 7]
    
    
    2. Bauder, Harald, and Rebecca Mueller. 2021. “Westphalian Vs. Indigenous Sovereignty: Challenging Colonial Territorial Governance.” Geopolitics 00 (00): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2021.1920577.
    
    
    3. Mignolo, Walter D. 2021. The Politics of Decolonial Investigations. Durham and London: Duke University Press. [Chapter 14]
    
    
    
    


13. Sovereignty and Territory
    
    
    
    1. Menshawy, Mustafa. 2019. “Constructing State, Territory, and Sovereignty in the Syrian Conflict.” Politics 39 (3): 332–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395718770
    
    
    2. Ginoza, Ayano. 2012. “Space of ‘ Militourism ’: Intimacies of U.S. and Japanese Empires and Indigenous Sovereignty in Okinawa.” International Journal of Okinawan Studies 3 (1): 7–23. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12000/34106 .
    
    
    3. Longkumer, Arkotong. 2020. “Indigenous Futures: The Practice of Sovereignty in Nagaland and Other Places.” In Indigenous Religion(s): Local Grounds, Global Networks, edited by Siv Ellen Kraft, Bjørn Ola Tafjord, Arkotong Longkumer, Gregory D. Alles, and Greg Johnson. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003021513.
    
    
    
    


14. Which Sovereign; Which exception?
    
    
    
    1. Povinelli, E. A. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press. [pp. 30-56; 92-118; Can Rocks Die? Life and Death inside the Carbon Imaginary; The Normativity of Creeks]
    
    
    2. Boelens, R., Escobar, A., Bakker, K., Hommes, L., Swyngedouw, E., Hogenboom, B., Huijbens, E. H., Jackson, S., Vos, J., Harris, L. M., Joy, K. J., Castro, F. de, Duarte-Abadía, B., Souza, D. T. de, Lotz-Sisitka, H., Hernández-Mora, N., Martínez-Alier, J., Roca-Servat, D., Perreault, T., … Wantzen, K. M. 2023. Riverhood: political ecologies of socionature commoning and translocal struggles for water justice. Journal of Peasant Studies, 50(3), 1125–1156. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2022.2120810
    
    
    3. Matthews, Daniel. 2021. “Reframing Sovereignty for the Anthropocene.” Transnational Legal Theory 12 (1): 44–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/20414005.2021.1929022.
    
    
    
    


15. Course Review

16. Final Exam week – no class- Final paper due 5pm Dec 19 (last day of exam week).

Class Participation                                  30%

Midterm exam                                         30%

Final Paper                                              30%

Pop Quiz 4                                              10%