When Jeremiah Heaton, of Abingdon, Virginia, drove his rental car to a border region between Egypt and Sudan in June 2014 to lay claim to the territory of Bir Tawil—renaming it the Kingdom of North Sudan—to realize his seven-year-old daughter Emily's dream of becoming a princess, he laid bare the preposterousness of the sovereign claim. Against hubris like Heaton's, Competing Sovereignties cautions that the qualities of modern legal and political sovereignty are ‘not present in all of us’ (35). Sovereignty requires, Richard Joyce reminds us, ‘a relation to community and law’ (92).
Yet the ‘sovereign position’ is, nonetheless, ‘open to any entity capable of speaking for a community and determining its law’ in Competing Sovereignties’ account (49). As such, the concept may sustain ‘rival sites of authority’ at ‘places other than the state’ (39, 139). The ‘effectiveness’ of the nation state as a ‘realisation of modern sovereignty’ ought not to be ‘confused with [the] exclusivity’ of that version, Joyce argues (49). On the contrary, ‘assemblage[s]’ as different as the World Trade Organisation and ‘local communities in India’ lay valid claim to sovereignty, Joyce maintains, although Heaton may have some more work to do (93, 49).
Post-foundational thought (using Oliver Marchart's term) is sometimes accused of being woolly. There could not be less apt a descriptor for Competing Sovereignties. Richard Joyce works his sentences, it seems, with the sharpest of tools; the result is a monograph as precise as they come. It opens with generalized crisis—with the nation state ‘threatened by a multitude of challenges’ (1). It closes with ‘particular challenges’, of which disputes over Indian patent law and the control of traditional knowledge are exemplary (256). Both are laced with ‘an operative crisis’ of sovereignty ‘in which the capacity to call it into question is embedded in what it is’ (99). In between, the book pursues ‘rigorous fidelity’ to the canonical political, philosophical and legal texts with which it deals, while advancing readings of quiet audacity (45).
Noteworthy among those texts, in Part 1 especially, are works by: Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and Francisco de Vitoria. More significant than any of these writers, however, is the trio of textual mentors who reappear at every turn, the influence of which, and the particular borrowing from each, are announced up front: ‘Jacques Derrida on sovereignty, Jean-Luc Nancy on community, and Peter Fitzpatrick on law’ (3).
Together, this combination of texts equips Joyce to demarcate the ‘Position’ of Part 1 of the book (Part 2 being titled ‘Relation’). That position pivots on the ‘impossibility’ of the ‘absolute self-positing’ with which the sovereign is identified: its claim, that is, to suffice as an originator of unconditional and rightful power (62, 74). The international legal project of sustaining law between sovereigns would appear to be doomed from the start, in so far as it depends on and repeatedly affirms this claim.
International law is not doomed, however, in Richard Joyce's account; on the contrary, ‘law grounds sovereignty by what it brings and by what it lacks’ (99). This sounds obtuse, but becomes far less so as the book unfolds. As Joyce explains, law, community and sovereignty sustain one another in rivalry. ‘[C]ommunities of law depend on [a]… sovereign to cut through the changefulness of both community and law in order to render, for the time being, binding, determinate decisions’, Joyce writes (116). Yet ‘law and community both demand and undermine the claim of an autopositioned sovereign’ (140). At times, it seems as though Joyce could be restating the condition of ‘unending referral’ mapped by Koskenniemi in From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument, albeit with some thoughtful and significant attenuation.
At around page 116, however, Joyce does some ‘cut[ting] through’ of his own. Suddenly (yet with much helpful foreshadowing), we are no longer amid talk of ‘groundless origin[s]’ in the generic (98). Instead, it is on Article 64 of TRIPS (the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) that we are invited to focus. The provision made for dispute settlement in that Article is among the materials from which Joyce discerns a non-derivative ‘right to determine law’ (132) vested in the World Trade Organisation (WTO). He locates comparable authority among local and indigenous communities in India, manifest in their traditional knowledge claims. In both instances, ‘the form of claim gives some clue’, Joyce argues, ‘to its radical nature and the conceptual challenge it poses to the sovereign claim of the state’ (134).
It is this ‘conceptual challenge’ that the second half of the book—on ‘relation’—elaborates. The ‘idea of the state as an empirical fact which precedes its relation to other states is wrong’, Joyce contends (189). Because of its constitutive relationality, ‘the sovereign claim must always be challenged, and must always provoke challenges’; it possesses no ‘fixed or settled content’ (190). In highlighting this, Joyce wants us ‘to think in a more complex way about debates in which the sovereignty of the state appears to be in decline’ and to be more attentive to ‘competing claims’ to law, power, authority and resources (193). Joyce is pursuing a ‘more flexible and dynamic notion of modern sovereignty than the one provided by standard accounts of international law’ (256).
Flexibility and dynamism carry a positive valence, but they also carry certain perils, of which Joyce is mindful. The sense of open-endedness that Joyce evokes is not benign. It is riddled, irredeemably, with ‘tension’ which one might aspire to ‘understand’ and ‘work with’, but not resolve; there is no way out of the ‘clash between different ways of life’ (31, 22).
Even so, Competing Sovereignties does seem to betray a hunch that bad things mostly come in sovereign packages. Among forms of power, those that rest on some claim to the absolute are clearly those with which the book is most uneasy. Power that articulates closely with the flexible, the dynamic and the contingent—that of finance capital, for instance—seems likely to be in for a much smoother ride in the universe that Competing Sovereignties sketches. Also, for all its insistence on irresolution, there lingers in the book a sense that ‘law’ poses some puzzle that can be solved, once and (more or less) for all. It is as if restlessness itself might be determinative—of law's predicament, condition, promise, for all time and all people—if only our consciousness of it could be properly awakened. The ‘impossibility’ of which Joyce writes remains, somehow, transcendently possible, indeed unavoidably so.
Perhaps Competing Sovereignties shows us that sovereignty is never more pivotal to the juridico-political imagination than when it is being called into question amid complexity. At seven years old, in Abingdon, Virginia, Emily dreams already of rulership; she knows her dream to be fanciful, and yet she dreams still.
