Putting on a Show? The Sovereignty of De Facto States Between Performativity, Performance and Virtuality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
De facto states are widely seen as temporal anomalies of the international system, and, in state-centric literature in particular, as entities lacking ‘real’ sovereignty that are simply putting on a show, pretending to be something they are not in the hope that faking it may one day lead to international recognition. Critically engaging with recent literature on de facto states as well as debates on performativity/performance, this article rejects as misguided the dichotomous ontologies of fake versus real. Instead, I argue that the most prominent examples of de facto states, that possess both internal and arguably also a considerable degree of external sovereignty, demonstrate that statehood is not the linchpin of the international system it is made out to be. Drawing on Bergson and Deleuze, I suggest that the sovereignty – of de facto states and beyond – should be understood as virtuality, where past and present are contemporaneous, and where sovereignty as virtual may or may not be actualised in statehood, thus posing for discussion a novel framework that elegantly disentangles sovereignty and statehood. The analytical promise of such an approach, in conclusion, is illustrated in a brief discussion of Iraqi Kurdistan and Taiwan.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".