Sovereign extractions, extractive sovereignty

Abstract

Within the broader context of a financialised supply-chain capitalism and the international governance of statehood in the wake of decolonisation and European integration, this special issue asks how sovereignty figures in relation to extraction at this conjuncture. In this introduction, we outline the issue's conceptual framework. We argue that sovereignty manifests as a space-making power, across different scales, which delineates and crafts various sites and zones of contemporary processes of extraction as various kinds of ‘outside’. We understand this ‘outside’ not only from the structural point of view of capital accumulation or simply in terms of its function for the stabilisation of capitalism. Rather, we understand it as shaped and saturated by symbolic investments and determinations, through discursive formations, fantasies and patterns of racialisation and dehumanisation, which assist the operations of extractive capital but which may also feature histories and genealogies not reducible to the logics of capital. But we also take distance from an Agambenian take on the ‘outside’, which would figure its sovereign dimension in terms of negativity, as a withdrawal of the law and a form of abandonment. Our interest lies in tracing the mutual articulation and implication of (genocidal, colonial, imperial) violence and capitalist extractions of value and wealth as they intersect, often conjointly, at times in tension, in the crafting and delineation of space.