Abstract
Introduction
In her book Sovereign Attachments (SA) Shenila Khoja-Moolji brilliantly displays how affect, gender, and Muslim identity intersect in diverse ways in Pakistan to create rival conceptions of sovereignty. She shows in detail how the Taliban and the Pakistani state both deploy specific narratives to legitimate their claims to exercise violence. Such legitimation claims constitute claims to sovereignty. Contrary to the Weberian perspective, sovereignty is thus not a juridical condition that lends itself to simple observation in terms of bureaucratic administration or legalization of procedures, nor is it beholden to a single actor that holds the monopoly of violence. 1 For Khoja-Moolji sovereignty, as an assemblage of legitimation, affective feeling, and relationships, must be constantly renegotiated. Her book thus ‘unveils the complicated imbrication of sovereignty by highlighting how scripts of gender and Muslimness become the very means through which sovereignty is performatively iterated in Pakistan (SA, 3)’. 2
The Pakistani state faces the task of linking individuals through affective ties to the territorially defined state. Sovereign statehood implies spatially limited authority claims, constrained by mutually recognized borders, while recognizing no higher authority beyond such borders. Ideally the community of that state identifies itself as a unique nation. Benedict Anderson’s depiction of the nation as an imagined community remains apposite in indicating the fluidity of how such community can be defined. 3 The state and nation must thus be made manifest and grounded in feelings of longing and loyalty, even to the point of a willingness to sacrifice oneself or loved ones. 4 In so doing the Pakistani state advances a phantasmagoric ideal of absolute sovereignty over its own territory.
The Taliban, by contrast, seek to transform ‘the Muslim community (ummah) into sovereign space, and control it by defining the correct practice of Islam’ (SA, 4). While Khoja-Moolji concentrates on the Taliban, she notes that the Taliban are not alone in challenging the Pakistani’s state narrative. Religious scholars (ulama) provide yet other views on the relation of Islam, community, and authority. And the shadow of American imperial power likewise confronts the notion of absolute state sovereignty.
But for all the differences between the Taliban’s and the state’s competing claims to authority, Khoja-Moolji deftly shows how both tap into a shared meta-narrative regarding the roles of women and how both parties seek to mobilize women for their objectives. In the second part of the book, she delves deeply into how women figure in various roles as ‘ideal women-subjects for the khilafat- and nation-building projects, respectively’ (SA 25). Feelings of kinship, religious sentiments, masculine hierarchies are constructed and reconstructed to create a specific attachment between individuals and the claimant of sovereign power.
Both the Pakistani state and the Taliban seek to mobilize women in their projects by emphasizing the notion of the mourning mother. For the state this has meant highlighting grieving mothers at the funerals of sons, brothers, and fathers to emphasize the transgressions of the Taliban. As a startling example of such state tactics SA commences with the Taliban attack on the army public school in Peshawar. The Taliban in turn emphasize mothers whose children have been killed by the state. In their rival script women are affective victims, in which the ‘mothers – and daughters – await the mujahidin rather than the state’ (SA 192).
But in this continuously contested social landscape women do not acquiesce as passive bystanders in accepting dominant scripts. Against both narratives, melancholic mothers advance a distinct perspective in which the departed are not forgotten and dispensed of as sacrifices for either the state or Taliban. Melancholy is, indeed, transformed into a refusal to grief, or to accept conditions as they are. ‘Instead of renouncing the loss and detaching from it, melancholia is a relationship to the lost object that offers political potential’ (SA, 185).
Such competing appeals to affect and sovereignty are hardly isolated from geostrategic factors. Sovereignty claims occur against the backdrop of the material reality of the U.S. empire. The ability of the United States to use drone strikes, to enter Pakistan’s air space and apprehend individuals, and the multiple ways in which imperial power can be deployed, serve as constant reminders that the idea of absolute sovereignty remains phantasmagoric.
It is important to recognize the broad relevance of SA to the understanding of international relations. As Khoja-Moolji points out, the mobilization of affect, the creation and use of hierarchies of masculinity, and the modalities of religious interpretation, are salient in many postcolonial contexts (SA, 25). 5
It is here, however, that she might sell her argument a bit short. Although, no doubt the post-colonial context presents unique challenges, one might suggest that the interplay of these processes is at work in all instances. Western, Asian, African conceptions of sovereignty also arise from historically contingent performative processes. 6 Thus, the methodology she deploys in examining the Pakistani case might be deployed in myriads of countries that are postcolonial or not postcolonial. As she notes, the mobilization of mourning to channel grievances away from the state has been used in countries and instances that are diverse in time and space, such as Nicaragua and the United States, and they provide familiar tropes in many other instances as well (SA 181).
SA provides an impressive contribution to the field by suggesting methods to study the connections between affect and the claim to sovereign power. For example, her discussion of online and print sources provides the means to study the nature of cultural production more generally. In ‘Managing Affect’ (SA chapter 6), she demonstrates how the state sought to mobilize mothers behind its vision of sovereignty by means of photographs and paintings that depicted ‘the mourning mother’ in the wake of a terrorist attack. The figuration of pietistic mother and child were meant to convey the notion of martyrdom in service of a higher purpose.
All contributors to this forum likewise note the importance and general insights of SA. Shah Zeb Chaudhary welcomes the approach and notes it as a welcome shift from extant studies of sovereignty and one that provides further avenues for research and offers a critical understanding of politics. Too often the emergence of the Western concept of sovereignty is seen as the development of the natural order of things. Consequently, political affiliations or communities that do not fit that natural order are conceived as failed states or under-developed countries. Shifting the emphasis to the study of how sovereignty continuously engages emotion and affect to advance a specific view of who or what the polity and community should be, problematizes that traditional perspective.
Chaudhary observes that it is not just that Pakistan’s desire for sovereignty remains unfulfilled by US intrusion and drone strikes. It is not simply the inability to exercise effective sovereignty that leads to the affective desire to have what Pakistan lacks. Instead, the shift in emphasis that Khoja-Moolji suggests draws attention to how such infringements on sovereignty and the desire for sovereignty are conceived. Pakistan figures therein as the passive object. The desire itself is grounded in the everyday reality of Western domination. If Pakistan has a particular fantasy of sovereignty, it is a fantasy grounded on the terms of the dominant actor. (And we might add it is the reality of the Westphalian state system that creates the contours of what is desirable.)
Chaudhary, furthermore, sees her work as a useful avenue of entry to the study of how conceptions of rationality are at work in international relations. Her work offers a method for studying rationality as a combination of discursive manipulation and performance. We can thus apply this method to empirically examine how constellations of ideas, affects, and histories become objects of attachment. Why is it that some scholars in international relations model the state as a rational actor? What does that mean?
As an example of how SA can shed light on contemporary Pakistan, he discusses how particular inflections of Islamo-masculinity figure in political discourse. In the 2022 election campaign Imran Khan thus invoked the tropes of the meta-narrative that Khoja-Moolji so ably exposed. Opponents were thus denigrated by invoking conceptions of the Islamo-masculinity.
Ali Mian’s contribution to this symposium, like Chaudhary’s, relates Sovereign Attachment to a wider body of literature while distinguishing it from extant approaches. Khoja-Moolji’s work distinguishes itself from the juridical approaches to sovereignty as well as Carl Schmitt’s view of the sovereign as the phantasmagorical entity beyond the law. Nor does her work take a Foucauldian approach that focuses on the state’s penetration of society and institutions. Instead, he sees her work as a fresh approach that convincingly suggests sovereignty is a fantasy that needs to be substantiated by affective labor. He particularly emphasizes Lauren Berlant’s work in which fantasy consists of the utopian ideal but which at the same time confronts the material reality. Mian thus observes that ‘these two sides of fantasy imply that it often invests ordinary, familiar objects with utopic aspirations and dreams of transcendence’.
As the authors of this introduction, Mian highlights the methodological contribution of the book, particularly in her use of historical actors as figures. In so doing she provides a way of showing how particular tropes are advanced in certain embodiments, such as the ‘mourning mother’, ‘the dutiful daughter’, ‘the protective father’. Khoja-Moolji’s use of magazines is particularly useful in demonstrating the ambivalence in affective trajectories in Pakistan after 9/11. For the Taliban, the army and administrators of the state are simultaneously mortal enemies and potential brothers-at-arms.
In his contribution Brannon Ingram notes connections between the Deoband movement in India, which he studied, and Khoja-Moolji’s discussion. 7 His essay draws out several of such connections and in so doing demonstrates how SA provides insights into other cases than Pakistan and the Taliban.
Ingram also situates the book in a broad genre of work in South Asian studies regarding affect and its relation to law, public discourse, and identity. In his own work he observed that ‘Deobandis wrote and lectured copiously on the forms of affect – behaviors, demeanors, and attitudes – appropriate for various spaces’.
However, while Ingram sees parallels, he also notes some differences between the Taliban and Deobandi. Contrary to the Taliban, the Deobandi viewed the realities of British imperial domination as a given for most of the latter 19th century, and thus they developed a view of sovereignty as an interior process to govern one’s spiritual life. This leads him to the general question: ‘How does affect mediate political attachments and estrangements and resonates across multiple sites and spaces, past and present?’
With that in mind, Ingram wonders whether the concept of the ‘public’ is fully developed in SA. Both the state and the Taliban seek to tap into affective registers to link their project to the public and thus gain their support. But who is the public? Moreover, counter-publics will emerge or are already present. He would thus welcome an engagement with Michael Warner’s work allowing one to tackle such issues as: Who makes these videos? Who consumes them? If the webpages that host the videos allow comments, who comments on them? What do they say? Who is ‘turning away’ from official media?
Ingram admires how the book astutely observes the tension in the Taliban position. On the one hand they contend with the global universalist perspective of God’s sovereignty as universal and timeless. On the other hand, there is the desire to operate within the realities of the Westphalian state system and the desire to create an Islamic state in Pakistan. Given that Khoja-Moolji linked grief and mourning to accepting a given condition, she concludes that the Taliban could not mourn the absence of a khilafat, as this would entail acceptance of that which was not achievable. However, asks Ingram, have the Taliban then moved to melancholy as a means of mobilization?
He concludes with a final observation regarding normativity in Islam. Because Khoja-Moolji focuses on sovereignty as a continuously negotiated set of affective performances, she neglects the juridical normative aspects that operate in legal discourse. Thus, the community of scholars and legal experts, the ulama, gain little attention. However, as his discussion of the Deobandi movement indicates, the ulama provide another actor that figures prominently in the discursive formation of sovereignty.
Together, the three reviews add new layers and interpretations to the already cross-disciplinary approach of SA. They engage with Khoja-Moolji’s method of figurations analysis and think about her conceptual framework beyond the case of the Taliban in Pakistan. Yet, while acknowledging the unique contributions SA makes, the reviewers also invite the author to think through some questions that can generate further openings in studying how individuals identify and interact with state power. Besides Ingram’s questions around the concept of ‘normative Islam’ and how that could be defined, Chaudhary invites us to think about the analytical purchase of figurations in thinking about rationality (not only relationality) and associations of rationality and masculinity.
In her generous response, Khoja-Moolji starts by tracing, for the forum readers, her intellectual journey and how the intersections of affect, sovereignty, and Islam first came about for her while researching her first book Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia, and ultimately were developed further in SA. In so doing, Khoja-Moolji weaves a thread of probing and questioning rather than uncritically accepting frameworks of understanding the role of the state in managing affect and normalizing state violence through producing certain gender figurations and configurations. Gender figurations, as the author explains in her response, are ‘distillations of shared meanings through which we make sense of the world around us’. When deployed in her analysis of sovereignty, figurations are what state actors use to affectively interpellate and bind subjects (the melancholic mother, the dutiful daughter, the innocent child, and so on). Khoja-Moolji shares that while doing the research for her first book, she was ‘increasingly concerned with the narrow figurations of women – not only of girls, and not only in respect to education – that were circulating in Pakistani public culture’ and that in SA, she wanted to understand how and why ‘the state often mobilized kinship feelings and gendered figurations to legitimize its violence and cultivate consent for its actions’. By adding this personal background and further contextualizing the drivers that motivated this study, Khoja-Moolji strikes a balance between explaining the specific empirical focus of her study and keeping an open mind about the potential applications and implications of SA beyond Pakistan.
Indeed, SA contributes to a growing set of scholarship in international relations, critical international relations, and postcolonial thought that contextualize concepts and develop theoretical frameworks that go beyond Anglo-American or euro-centric traditions and case studies. One of the many causes for celebration of SA is precisely the ability to invite international relations students, scholars, and thinkers to think through concepts they might be very familiar with but in contexts that are underexamined and understudied.
Footnotes
1.
Max Weber articulated this view in his essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max Weber, eds. and transl. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78.
2.
On legitimating and manifesting authority by performances see Cynthia Weber, ‘Performative States’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no.1 (1998): 77–95; Lisa Wedeen, ‘Acting ‘As If’: Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no. 3 (1998): 503–23; Luke Roberts, Performing the Great Peace: Political Space and Open Secrets in Tokugawa Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012).
3.
Benedict Anderson, Language and Power (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991).
4.
Winichakul thus speaks of the geobody of the nation. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).
5.
Nivi Manchanda provides another example of how another post-colonial state in the region, Afghanistan, was the product of discursive creation that involved particular representations of tribe, gender, and state. Nivi Manchanda, Imagining Afghanistan: The History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020). See also Gurminder K. Bhambra, ‘The State: Postcolonial Histories of the Concept’, in The Routledge Handbook of Postcolonial Politics, eds. Olivia Rutazibwa and Robbie Shilliam (London: Routledge, 2018), 200–9.
6.
For recent examples discussing the influence of theological interpretation and scientific development on notions of state and sovereignty, see, for example, William Bain, Political Theology of International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Charlotte Epstein, Birth of the State (New York, Oxford University Press, 2021). For scholarship that discusses historical alternatives to the study of sovereignty from a Westphalian perspective, see Hendrik Spruyt, The World Imagined: Collective Beliefs and Political Order in the Sinocentric, Islamic and Southeast Asian International Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Ayse Zarakol, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
7.
The Deobandi movement originated as a Sunni revivalist endeavor in 19th century India. Today it might be the largest transnational Islamic grassroots movement. Dietrich Reetz, ‘Deobandis’, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought, ed. Gerhard Bowering (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 132.