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.

Introduction: extraction everywhere

For anthropologists interested in the global workings of capitalism, there seems to be no way around extraction. From ethnographic engagements with monocrop cultivation (Hetherington, 2020; Li and Semedi, 2021), energy resource extraction (Appel, 2019), labour under digitalised surveillance (Byler, 2021) and beyond, extractivism has emerged as a central conceptual prism to research and analyse contemporary transformations in the logics and operations of capital. Especially when taken beyond its common association with the appropriation of natural resources in rural settings, it has served as a theoretical response to processes of post-Fordist de-industrialisation, financialisation and the rising significance of logistical operations (Arboleda, 2020; Gordillo, 2019; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2019). This extended notion of extractivism includes the many different ways in which capital captures value from nature, social cooperation and other forms of vitality, without contributing to their organisation (Mezzadra and Gago, 2017; Moore, 2015; Tsing, 2015). In this special issue, we build on this conceptual work to scrutinise extractivism's transformations and historicity and to ask how sovereignty figures in this conjuncture. We foreground the forms, scales and temporalities of extractive processes that manifest in the contemporary moment and investigate the kinds of political power that intersect with, enable or emerge from extractivism's logics and dynamics. What emergent forms does extractivism take in the present? What are the histories and genealogies that surface and become manifest in the process? And what forms of sovereign power does it rely on and bring about?

Extraction has in part been understood as a kind of return to or resurgence of a stage of capitalism thought to have been surpassed when, following Marx, accumulation shifted in logic from its moments of original enclosures towards a process of extended reproduction. This latter phase is distinct precisely because of the role that two aspects commonly associated with sovereign power, namely violence and dispossession, play, which recede in importance or acquire a more subtle form and systemic effectiveness within the routine operations of industrial production and associated regimes of labour exploitation. Scholars of contemporary capitalism (Fraser, 2014; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2019; Moore, 2015) however, argue that violence remains a connecting tissue between expropriation and exploitation. Extractivism always implies the presence of powerful agents wielding force and violence in their pursuit of value and wealth.

David Harvey (2003) offers another important explanation for why an extractivist logic of capital accumulation has not simply been operational in a historically demarcated past. This is because of capital's systemic dependence on a constitutive ‘outside’ for seeking solutions to the crisis that capitalism periodically encounters. Building on the works of Rosa Luxemburg ([1913] 2015) and Hannah Arendt (1968), he makes the point that the process of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession needs to be repeated even in more advanced stages of capitalism as the pressures of overaccumulation will necessarily require the integration of new and cheaper land, raw materials and labour power, often through force or oppression; that is, imperialism in short. This idea that some sort of ‘outside’ to capital is necessary or even needs to be created in the first place for the stabilisation of capitalism was further developed by Partha Chatterjee (2004) and Kalyan Sanyal (2007) in the context of post-colonial development. Both authors argued, drawing from Foucault's (2008) observations, that political power changed form also in post-colonies like India, moving away from spectacular manifestations of violence and the promises of popular sovereignty to the arranging of people and things in ways that generate productive and desired outcomes by relying on the mobilisation of interests and competition. In the Indian countryside where primitive accumulation manifests as the looting of land and resources without the concomitant process of proletarianisation, implementing governmental policies from above under the guise of development and applying pressure on the machinery of welfare governmentality from below for making demands for benefits characterise the relations that the post-colonial state and capital form with their outside. By contrast with Giorgio Agamben (1998) and the anthropological focus on the realm of citizenship and related politics of spatial bordering that his work has inspired then, these two authors reject the claim that biopolitical exclusion and segregation of particular (racialised, dehumanised) populations by sovereign power is the necessary outcome of extractivism.

Following on from this important debate, this special issue explores the links between sovereignty and extractivism in the expanded sense by developing an anthropological understanding of how capital and political power relate to and constitute their ‘outsides’ in the contemporary moment. Our contributors ask questions and generate new insights with regards to how capital advances in relation to sovereign logics, techniques and forms through ethnographic enquiries into the legal, extra-legal, territorial and volumetric capacities and powers employed in zones and frontiers where nature, resources and labour power are appropriated and restructured. A central argument emerging from the articles is that sovereignty manifests as a space-making power, across different scales, that delineates and crafts various sites and zones of contemporary processes of extraction as an ‘outside’. We understand this ‘outside’, however, not only from the structural point of view of capital accumulation or simply in terms of its function for the stabilisation of capitalism. Rather, the authors show this ‘outside’ to be 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. Instances of genocide and histories of colonialism continue to reverberate and make landscapes, bodies and subjectivities amenable to extraction. 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.

Sovereignty's law-making powers, presumed, required and mobilised in complex ways for the realisation of extractive projects, bridge the economic and symbolic dimensions of extractivism. The authors of this issue show that several rules, regulations, treaties or legal arrangements that help to organise a particular extractive relation in the present are either historically rooted in or emerged against the background of colonial, fascist or genocidal formations and events. Sovereign violence is therefore congealed in the ‘outside’ through law and law-making. At the same time, these legal forms almost always create complex entanglements with governmental techniques and interventions to pose new questions concerning the relations between governmental and sovereign forms of power, which has long been debated in relation to security politics and border regimes (Butler, 2004).

This special issue thus gathers around a shared, and historically and geographically differentiated political and economic moment that, if we were to reduce it to a few key terms, can be summed up by a financialised supply-chain capitalism and the international governance of statehood in the wake of decolonisation and European integration. The predominant role of supply-chain capitalism and the way it re-arranges and re-organises spatial and social relations are particularly relevant in the cases of tin mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Timo Makori) and the retail-driven zoning of agricultural production in Southern Italy (Irene Peano). Both highlight the emergence of particular spatial architectures and infrastructures that work to control, govern and extract value from various mobilities. Yet, these forms also resonate with and bear the traces of longer histories of colonial and imperial governance, something that Alice von Bieberstein also foregrounds in the context of a historically Armenian neighbourhood in Eastern Turkey. Focussing on an urban renewal project planned and implemented in this neighbourhood by the local municipality in collaboration with various state institutions, she further identifies a kind of neo-mercantilist investment in extraction that buttresses the illiberal remaking of the state under the generalised conditions of international financialisation. Andreas Streinzer points to the economic, fiscal and political architecture of the Eurozone also in the context of financialisation. This relates extraction to international governance and the construction and recognition of sovereign statehood that also appears in Makori's work on due diligence programs in eastern Congo. Similarly, geopolitical in its scale, the analysis of Fırat Bozçalı shows forms of spatiality in the context of a contestation of state sovereignty that actually decouple historically rooted and entrenched links between nation-state sovereignty, fixed and bounded territoriality and regimes of extraction through taxes and levies. The author thereby reveals that political power, while striving for hegemony, must itself not be extractive.

One key characteristic of the overall conjuncture observed by all contributions is that the extraction of value from nature and social cooperation necessarily becomes entangled with a renewed but differentially figured significance of sovereign capacities, functions and actors. Some of the contributors (Makori and Streinzer) attribute this to the strategic restoration or deployment of national economy or at least some of its activities, sites and functions for the purposes of transferring wealth to transnational capital and political bodies. Others (Peano, von Bieberstein, Bozçalı) trace the entrenchment of the nation-state under extractive processes within the scope of an expansive biopolitical governmentality predicated on, among other things, the tactical suspension of law, management of vital processes such as movement and circulation, and differential attribution of humanness. In all these cases, the term sovereignty comes to capture a diagram of forces able to fragment, re-arrange and re-make space in relation to different authorities and governmental infrastructures in order to enable extraction.

In what follows, we wish to highlight what appears to us as several important insights arising from the collection of articles assembled in this issue. These can be divided into five points: (a) a post-liberal political and economic landscape where the nation-state expands its direct investment in and control over extraction; (b) emergent spatial forms of sovereignty, (c) the governmentalisation of sovereignty in the context of Eurozone and postcolonial international governance; (d) the appearance of new archives of imperial and colonial governance, and (e) lastly, visions of a non-extractive relation between sovereignty and territory.

Post-liberal economic governance

The debate on the relation between capital and state power and between a globalised capitalist system and the international system of states is an old one, pivoting around questions of contingency and necessity, unity and contradiction (Wallerstein, 1974; Arrighi, 1990; Callinicos, 2007; Negri and Hardt, 2001). Anthropologists, by way of ethnographic engagement with the process and effect of the concrete appropriation of natural resources, have attended more directly to the intimate relation between the nation-state and extraction, noting how the management of natural resources became not only a right but also important in legitimating modern regimes of political power, working to underwrite claims to progress and efficiency while symbolically and performatively tying the (sovereign) populace to territory as the ground of collective wealth (Ferry and Limbert, 2008; Gilberthrope and Rajak, 2017; Hansen, 2021).

From the perspective of capital, on the other hand, sovereignty has figured as a presupposition. Capital requires territorial sovereignty to secure the legal guarantees and long-term infrastructures necessary for investment, and even more so for extractive ventures (Emel et al., 2011). Nation-states set up property legislation and provide the legal framework for guaranteeing contractual obligations. They partake in the regulation of trade and (re)distribution; they extract taxes and levies. And yet, while there is a long history of the nation-state's relation to extraction, what comes out in this special issue is something else, especially in the contribution by von Bieberstein. She identifies a post-liberal shift in economic governance that has also been described as neo-mercantilist, once more suggesting a return, in the wake of neoliberalism, of an earlier, pre-liberal relation between political power, land and wealth. What the author traces in the context of an urban regeneration scheme in Turkish Kurdistan are not the contours of a liberal state concerned, as Foucault put it, with not governing too much. This is not a state that leaves the planning and implementation of extraction solely to private market actors in line with liberal principles that would strictly locate economic rationality within the market and its price mechanism. What we are dealing with here is also not a matter of partnership or ideological alignment involving various public and private entities, something that has come out in recent ethnographies on real estate, infrastructure and finance (Mattioli, 2020; Searle, 2016; Folch, 2019). What lies at the centre of von Bieberstein's article is rather how authoritarian statecraft is built on the break-up, fragmentation and re-distribution of sovereign powers, manifesting as the ability and right to override property rights and to remake space free from regulatory constraints or checks. Importantly, she analyses this re-articulation of sovereignty not as primarily market-driven but as internal to an authoritarian remaking of statecraft intimately tied to extraction. The move from spatial abandonment to a new enclosure both relies on sovereign powers, but also proceeds through its internal re-organisation at the service of authoritarianism in a way that seconds or shadows the production of (state) capital's ‘outside’.

Emergent spatial and territorial forms

In recent debates on sovereignty, the earlier diagnosis of an erosion or ‘waning’ of sovereignty (Brown, 2010; Ferguson and Gupta, [2002] 2005; Ong, 2006), proceeding from a recognition that territoriality as sovereignty's primary mode of geographical organisation has been weakened by global flows of capital, information and people (Agnew, 2005), has been left behind. While no longer yielding assertions of a ‘weakening’ of sovereignty, this reconsideration has not lessened an interest in how (state) sovereignty has been decoupled from or at least entered more complex relations to territoriality (Bryant and Reeves, 2021; Bryant and Hatay, 2020; Billé, 2019, 2020). Within anthropology, scholars have paid particular attention to the re-assertion and fortification of state sovereignty through securitisation, policing and lawfare strategies, with an attendant spatial focus on borders and spaces of detainment as the sites where sovereignty becomes violently resurrected.

This special issue's concern with extraction under the sign of sovereignty yields analyses of different spatial forms precisely because its points of departure are sites of extraction and not militarised national borders. What territorial and volumetric spatial forms ground and emerge around extraction and how might these help us re-conceptualise the ‘outside’ in a way that differs from its modern, colonial and imperial predecessors, which anthropology has long laboured to deconstruct? We build on the work by scholars of extractivism, who have highlighted the emergence of industrial and logistical hubs, special economic and maritime zones and freight or supply routes and related corridor economies (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2015; Chalfin, 2015; Appel, 2019; Dey and Grappi, 2015). Thus, even when we discuss the re-emergence of a – post-liberal – nation-state sovereignty as above, doing so around sites of extraction does not result in a renewed assertion and claim to control over the bounded, imagined expanse of national territory as the locus of this sovereignty, one which would figure the outside in its older imperialist frontier imaginary. The ethnographic cases discussed here make the point that forces of sovereignty are situated in relations and assemblages and that stretches of national space enter into and emerge from non-state or international actors and entities.

As territorial investment is routed via extraction and its inherent dynamics of spatial differentiation, the spatial figures and forms that emerge in this special issue – agro-industrial zones and related networks of encampments, areas of urban regeneration, supply-chains and smuggling corridors – thus also complicate the association with exception and negativity that have dominated conceptual thinking on spaces of sovereignty in the wake of Agamben even though they do not disappear. This comes out most distinctly in the article by Peano who discusses the role of encampments for the operation of agro-industrial zones in Southern Italy. As spaces of social reproduction as well as for the differential attribution of humanness, these encampments are not simply spaces of a sovereign ban, but crucial for the capital's operation of surplus-labour extraction. Peano's contribution shows that the production of ‘outsides’ relies on the material and symbolic aspects of labour relations whose force and effectiveness are driven by histories of colonial, racialised violence in a way that speaks to Agamben's arguments, but through the lens of political economy.

Governmentalising sovereignty through responsibilisation

It was in the wake of Agamben's reconceptualisation of sovereignty as a matter of deciding on the state of exception and the broader political developments after 9/11 that the historicities of sovereignty and governmentality as distinct modalities of power as well as their relation were increasingly discussed. For Agamben, sovereignty takes the form of a power to delineate spaces that are then evacuated by the protective workings of the law, exposing those relegated to these domains to violence and precarity. These spaces and their respective populations appear under the sign of the negative, marked by a withdrawal of the law and the loss of (citizenship) rights. Yet, Judith Butler (2004) was quick to remark that the domain opened up by this withdrawal, in the context of the US’ global ‘war on terror’, is in turn colonised by governmentality as an extra-legal field of policy, one that turns law into a tactic and resurrects sovereignty as ‘rogue’ power.

We find evidence of these dynamics in some of the contributions to this special issue too, such as in the agro-industrial production zones discussed by Peano, which, as other special economic zones, are exceptional with regards to certain national legal frameworks, while at the same time saturated with various rules, standards and protocols set up and implemented by a heterogeneous network of actors. At first sight, this is also what we appear to encounter in the context of a due diligence policy, implemented by a state-NGO consortium, for responsible supply-chain provision in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Given the discursive ghost of the ‘failed state’, this can easily be read as schemes and strategies of governmentality coming to fill the space left by an absence of sovereignty. And yet, Makori draws our attention to the question of international governance and hegemonic criteria for recognising ‘statehood’. He shows how the due diligence policy effectively mobilises and employs the state to securitise artisanal extraction and supply, thereby strengthening state capacities for surveillance and (il)licit tax collection. Within a broader context of the problematisation of sovereignty and statehood in the wake of decolonisation, sovereignty emerges as a governmental strategy of responsibilisation within an international system of governance, supply-chain capitalism and financialisation. Responsibilisation here refers to the transfer of a portion of on-the ground operations of extraction, as well as the politics of security and accountability attached to them, to an actor or entity, in this case the Congolese state, for facilitating the valorisation of resources.

The way financialisation has affected statecraft is also central to the discussion of the Eurozone crisis shared by Streinzer. Here, too, sovereignty is hinged to financial solvency and debtor credibility (Bear, 2015). Engaging closely with assemblage theory, Streinzer shows how, in the face of a debt crisis and by means of strategies of ‘calculative bordering’, ‘Greece’ was constructed as a sovereign nation-state with extractive control over a distinct and contained national economy and therefore able to reroute productive forces towards the servicing of sovereign debt. Again, sovereignty emerges as the object of a politics of responsibilisation that serves and enables extraction within a context of European integration and financialised capitalism. It works to obscure realities of relational inequality and dependence, also by suggesting and animating what sovereignty has been (mythically) associated with: autonomy, supreme authority and effective political agency. What both Streinzer and Makori point to, is how within a postcolonial/Eurozone international order structured by relations of sovereign inequality, the ‘sovereign nation-state’ becomes itself a spatial figure central to extractive bordering practices.

Other archives of imperial and colonial governance

Yarimar Bonilla (2017) and others (Hansen, 2021; Benton, 2010) have proposed to unsettle this mythic conception of sovereignty as autonomy, supreme authority and effective political agency, traditionally traced back to the Peace of Westphalia, by historicising and provincialising it as an uneven and fragmented performance. This task, according to Bonilla, also involves recognising the non-sovereign nature of most political and intimate relations, and the negotiated forms of autonomy and interdependency. Relatedly, Kerem Nisancioglu (2020) argues that turning sovereignty into a question of international or external recognition, thereby mobilising the myth of autonomy and independence, has worked to obscure and erase the histories and enduring relations of dependence and inequality. In a way, this is what we see at work in the context of both Greece and eastern Congo outlined above. Responsibilisation requires and builds on the recognition as a bordering technique that proceeds to enable and reproduce extractive relations. By revisiting the episode of colonial dispossession in the Powhatan Confederacy by the Virginia Company in the 15th century, Nisancioglu puts forth an alternative theory of sovereignty that rests on three important points. First, sovereignty is not an outcome of European inter-state relations that culminated in the Westphalian Peace but instead has peripheral origins. The links or ‘associative chains’ between authority, territory and population are often produced first in zones of sacrifice, abandonment and marginalisation. Second, dispossession precedes the sovereign. Putting humans and nature to work for the accumulation of wealth and power is the necessary step for enacting sovereign powers. And finally, colonialism (or imperialism and nationalism) is not an event but a structure. It entails an ordering of the world tied to deciding on who is and who is not recognised, as well as, who is and who is not capable of self-rule.

This history carries weight, which Thomas Blom Hansen (2021) captures by the term ‘minor’ sovereignty. Hansen calls for a truly global account of sovereignty which entails looking not at Western Europe, but at colonial territories. It would bring to light forms of dependency, subordination and tutelage involving complex and transient arrangements of legal and symbolic forms of rule and legitimacy and equally complex arrangements of racialised property relations. Two contributions of this special issue in particular can be considered contributions to this global account. Von Bieberstein recounts the comprehensive program of dispossession targeting the Ottoman Armenian population as part of the Armenian genocide of 1915–1916. Yet, the concrete articulation of racialisation and its relation to emergent forms and relations of property in the late Ottoman Western Armenia/Northern Kurdistan also differs significantly from the stories and insights gleaned from those (settler) colonial settings more commonly in the focus of scholarly enquiry, including that of Hansen himself. Peano equally takes us to an unlikely peripheral setting when thinking of a truly global account of sovereignty, in this case Southern Italy. Her discussion on the contemporary agro-industrial production regime is complemented by a genealogy of its spaces of containment of labour forces going back to the late 18th century and the long history of projects of land reclamation, reform and colonisation in the region. Von Bieberstein and Peano thus point to realities of recursion in relation to the complex governance of land, resources and (dehumanised) populations, thereby broadening our archives of sovereign formations shaped in relation to distinct trajectories of racial capitalism. Both authors show how sovereign practices of space-making for extraction always mobilise and rework historical registers of racialisation and de-humanisation that relate, materially and symbolically, to particular groups and regions.

Visions of a non-extractive relation between sovereignty and territoriality

Bonilla (2017) and Hansen's (2021) reconsideration of sovereignty is also a scholarly project of decolonisation. This project proceeds, in a first step, by working through the emergence of sovereignty in the colonial encounter as outlined above. But it also takes the form of a recognition of forms of survivance that manifest as enduring, nested forms of Indigenous sovereignty in the wake of policies of elimination (Simpson, 2014). These forms, as Audra Simpson (2011) emphasises, reside in the geopolitical and not the biopolitical, in charters and treaties, in complex forms of Indigenous jurisdiction and authority.

Bozçalı's contribution might be seen as most closely following this line of enquiry through a concern with alternative forms of sovereignty – or rather counter- or non-sovereignty – at the territorial margins of the Turkish nation-state. Departing from a recognition of the central role that the control over circulation plays for territorial formations of sovereignty, particularly for its extractive dimensions, Bozçalı considers the relation between what he calls ‘insurgent corridors’, mobile and shifting zones of (Kurdish) guerrilla control in the mountainous region of Turkish Kurdistan, and routes employed by cross-border Kurdish smugglers, intent on avoiding state surveillance and capture. Guerrilla-held corridors thus undermine Turkish state sovereignty claims to territorial control, but importantly without adopting or mimicking its extractive logics. Bozçalı thus presents us with a form of political power that very much resides in the geopolitical and contests settler colonial forms of sovereignty also through spatial tactics of control. But this does not take the form of indigenous sovereignty more familiar from other, Euro-American settler colonial contexts. The territoriality described and analysed is neither fixed nor nested, nor is it invested in extraction like indigenous, nested sovereignty has and often continues to be (Powell, 2018; Cattelino, 2010). Rather, the form he describes is territorially emergent, insurgent and non-extractive in its relation to sovereign power. He thus offers a vision that unhinges presumed links between extraction and forms of political power.

Conclusion

Drawing from the findings and theoretical contributions of the articles that appear in this special issue, this introduction has developed a conceptual frame from which to scrutinise how the capture and generation of value under current forms of extractive capitalism relies on, animates and transforms the shape, appearance and powers of sovereignty. Raising the question of sovereignty from the vantage point of sites and processes of extraction (and challenges against them) responds to the limits of an Agambenian legacy in an anthropological theory that seeks out sovereignty's embodiments, especially in marginal spaces, in the monopoly over decision-making that renders legality and illegality indistinguishable. This special issue's perspective instead rethinks the legacy's fundamental tropes such as exception, negativity and related spatial formations such as encampments, corridors, (supply) chains and zones of urban regeneration as historically and productively related to the logics and operations of extractive capital.

Sovereignty emerges as the term that names the political power necessary to order and border space in order to constitute the ‘outside’ necessary for capitalist extraction. The special issue thereby joins a wide range of other studies in investigating the links between the emergence of new spaces and territories and the fragmentation and multiplication of political forces, logics and mechanisms under extractivism. We emphasise that sovereignty remains potent as a space-making power across different scales, but that it also mutates, including in relation to the authority, territory or legal frameworks of the nation-state, which has not ceased to constitute one of its points of gravity. But ‘sovereign extractions’ also mark the significance of genealogies of violent spaces and formations, relations of responsibilisation predicated on colonial and other histories of hierarchy and inequality, and even shows ways in which the logics and practices that each of these terms corresponds to can come together in unusual ways.

But the reversed perspective, i.e., looking at extraction from the vantage point of sovereignty, also complicates diagnostic certainties regarding neoliberalism by revealing novel constellations of states and markets within systems of international and supranational governance. What we find is not simply a process of expanding marketisation and commodification that sees state sovereignty withdraw to the role of controlling human mobilities and securing public order. Instead we find a renewed and more immediate investment in and dependency on processes of extraction, whether it is to find and buttress authoritarian statecraft or to become recognisable and accepted as a member within an international system of states that is enmeshed with financial markets to such an extent that statehood itself becomes dependent on financial solvency. But confronting these novel forms and arrangements, while at times radically expanding our imagination of what is possible as in the case of Bozçalı's contribution, also always raises the question of the historicity of concrete formations. While some authors tackle the question of historical archives more head on, an engagement with the multiple and often conflicting temporalities of different economic and political forms runs as a thread throughout all the contributions, as they engage with the endurances, resurrections and reverberations of various logics, techniques and relations. Sovereignty therefore also continues to manifest, across the contributions, at different scales and registers, not only as a force of space-making, but also as the discursive effect of its operations. Just as we find extraction everywhere, sovereignty remains mutant.