Deconstructing sovereignty: (non-)life, territorial power and the everyday ecologies of hybrid governance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This special issue explores the territorial logics of competing sovereignties and their impacts on social and material infrastructure, deployment of violence and the politico-ecological transformation of bare life, livelihoods and terrain. Although sovereign regimes may aspire to monopolise violence and cultivate legitimacy, such projects are often incomplete or highly contested. Territorial sovereignty, however, continues to be a strong fiction needing repeated (infrastructural) materialisation of exclusive power for governments, despite evidence of their subordination to illicit and private actors’ own political agendas and illiberal uses of violence. The papers demonstrate that illicit or illegal practices seeking to counteract, undermine or supplant formal sovereign authority, are widespread across multiple scales, and involve diverse materialities in the distribution of agency across cities, the countryside, border regions and spaces of production. The introduction pushes the debate on the (il)liberal underpinnings of contested state sovereignty beyond biopolitics: Turning towards the material and territorial conditions of sovereignty highlights how power operates within a more fundamental distinction between ‘Life and Nonlife’. Such an ecological and geological turn acknowledges that the sovereign decision over life must not only include non-human agency but also a critical focus on the categorisation and scalability of the living and the non-living.
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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.003 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".