La ricerca in Cattolica

Cultures of sovereignty, transformations of democracy and dynamics of power in the global age

Milano, 2020 - 2023

During the last three decades in the human and social sciences, the processes identified as «globalization» has often been considered as the main cause of the crisis of the «sovereignty». However, in the reflections about the «crisis» of the sovereignty, three different readings have emerged. Those readings insisted on the importance of specific dynamics, although often connected to each other. Regardless of the results to which they came, many readings dedicated to the role of states, to their crisis or their survival, tend to proceed from a ‘monolithic’ view of «sovereignty», predominantly built on the model of the modern European state.

Relevant contributions have provided useful indications to take an alternative route, showing how «sovereignty», far from disappearing, has been restructured beyond the horizon of territoriality and the borders of the state. In a similar perspective, recent historiography has tried to delineate an alternative and less linear genealogy of sovereignty. Precious elements also came from the Foucault project of studying power «outside the Leviathan model» and its notion of «governmentality». Moreover, an important contribution to rethink the monolithic image of sovereignty came from some scholars that consider sovereignty as a social construction and therefore interpret it not as an ‘essence’ or a monolithic structure, but as the outcome of the process by which ideas build the representation of reality, the rules, norms, values and institutions. In this sense, it would be essential to recognize different «cultures» of sovereignty, so like certain representations of reality, internalized (in different levels) by the actors, who establish criteria with which states interpret the international community and their own ‘material’ interests, and from which specific behaviors arise.

The present research project intends to move within this image of sovereignty, with the aim of reconstructing the transformations in the cultures of sovereignty. The main hypothesis that underlies this research project is that sovereignty is also the cultural product of an interaction between political subjects. For this reason, the transformations of the State do not only involve the bureaucratic ‘machine’, the relations between government institutions and economic subjects, or relations with other States in the international arena, but also concern the cultural modalities in which these dynamics are conceptualized and organized. The objective of the survey is therefore to reconstruct the cultural process with which the State is produced, defined and constantly redefined in the course of interaction between domestic and international political subjects.

Starting from these premises, the research intends to develop along two main lines. In the first place, it is designed to outline a historical and conceptual rethinking of modern sovereignty, seeking three specific purposes:
to outline a new conception of modern sovereignty, more articulated than its traditional identification with the state model, and therefore to reinterpret the sovereignty and its exercise in the light of the new spatial assemblages, in which the global, national, state and local dimensions assume from time to time new configurations (with unprecedented forms of cooperation between public and private authorities);

  • to study the anthropological implication of the political power categories, such as sovereignty, the discourse of ancient law, the relationship between rule and life in German Romanticism and in the biological discourse;
  • to reflect on the relationship between sovereignty and law (thanks to a rereading of the definitions that it finds in Hobbesian discussion), the distinction between legal sovereignty and political sovereignty, the history of the disciplines between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with attention to the relationship between law and social sciences.

In the second place, the project aims to investigate the consequences that the transformation in the cultures of sovereignty implies on the structures of contemporary democratic systems. It develops along three lines:

  • the study of the relationship between the change in the cultures of sovereignty and the transformations of democratic regimes, examining the time frame of the last thirty years;
  • the study of the shift in the cultures of sovereignty in relation to the definition of the rights and duties of citizenship (particularly, the experience of the so-called ‘immigration daughters’);
  • the reconstruction of the most profound aspects of the neoliberal project, the analysis of the debate about its crisis, the investigation of the radical reformulations which the concepts of institution and institutionalism can meet within the emergence of these new forms of democratization;
  • the rescue of knowledge, concepts and categories, that allow us to think about the contemporaneity and the «post-state world». 

Gruppo di lavoro:

  1. Silvio Cotellessa - Faculty of Political and Social Sciences
  2. Chiara Continisio - Faculty of Education
  3. Luca Pietro Azzaro - Faculty of Political and Social Sciences

Partner:

  1. Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Coordinator);
  2. Università degli Studi di Padova;
  3. Università degli Studi di Bologna;
  4. Università degli Studi di Salerno.

Sede: Milano

Area Scientifica: scienze politiche e sociali

Responsabile scientifico: Prof. Damiano Palano

Periodo di svolgimento della ricerca: 2020 - 2023