States,subjects and sovereign power: Lessons from global gun cultures

Abstract

This article examines demand for guns for personal protection in the USA, South Africa, and India. To make sense of pro-gun sentiment across these different contexts, I argue that gun owners and carriers who arm themselves for personal protection represent a particular kind of ‘responsibilized’ subject. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of sovereign power and governmentality, I develop a theory of the ‘sovereign subject’. This is a political rationality marked by private individuals’ capacity and desire to perform sovereign functions that the state has typically monopolized, specifically the exercise of legitimate, lethal violence. I conclude the article by suggesting four characteristics (historically precarious state monopoly on sovereign power; legality of civilian use of guns; preponderance of criminal guns; and US influence) that may encourage demand for guns in high-crime societies.

Keywords

Foucault guns police and policing responsibilization self-defense

Introduction

Americans own as many as one-third of the world’s guns, and over eight million Americans have licenses to carry guns concealed. While scholars have explained the USA’s exceptional gun culture by pointing to the cultural heritage of rugged individualism, the legal legacy of the Second Amendment, and the American federalist structure that favors gun rights over gun control initiatives (Goss, 2008; Kahan and Braman, 2003; Melzer, 2009; Simon, 2002, 2004), the appeal of guns as personal protection tools is not confined to the USA. This article juxtaposes the US experience alongside two other countries where millions of residents also have gun licenses—South Africa and India—to start a conversation about gun cultures that rethinks US exceptionalism.

While people may use guns for hunting or target shooting, this article focuses on gun-toters who own or carry guns¹ for self-protection purposes and who practice an active kind of gun use insofar as the gun is there—on their hip, or at the bedstand—at all times, ready to be deployed. This article argues that these gun-toters are embedded in the contemporary contradictions, insecurities, and paranoias endemic to so-called ‘high-crime societies’ (Garland, 1996, 2000; Simon, 2007). The goal of this article is to unpack how guns are championed as a particular kind of ‘solution’ to the perceived threat of crime and low confidence in state apparatuses.² Not all people in the USA, South Africa and India own or carry guns (in fact, they are in the minority in each country), and especially in South Africa and India, there are vibrant gun control movements. In addition, local context (particularly fears of crime embedded in histories of racial segregation, colonialism, and slavery) plays a critical role in shaping how guns figure as the ‘solution’ to problems of crime and insecurity. Yet, the embrace of guns by some Americans, South Africans and Indians as a response to concerns about crime and social insecurity suggests a need to theorize how high-crime societies may breed support for guns as tools of personal protection.

To make sense of pro-gun sentiment, I argue that gun carriers are suggestive of a particular kind of ‘responsibilized’ social actor (Garland, 1996; O’Malley, 1992). Responsibilization is a term that scholars of neoliberalism³ have used to describe the reorganization of collective responsibilities as private duties: private organizations and individuals are increasingly sanctioned to perform duties that previously fell under the purview of the state. This article theorizes a specific kind of responsibilized subject, the ‘sovereign subject’, which is marked by private individuals’ capacity and desire to perform sovereign functions (particularly the execution of lethal and legitimate violence) that the state has typically monopolized.

I provide a theoretical analysis of this sovereign subject by turning to Foucault’s analyses of governmentality and sovereign power in Security, Territory, Population (2009), Birth of Biopolitics (2010) and Discipline & Punish (1995). I argue that gun users participate in the sovereign power of the state: rather than a reclamation of natural rights (as ‘sovereign citizens’, the language gun advocates tend to emphasize), gun use for self-protection suggests a form of subjectivation in which governmentality works through sovereign power. I emphasize that gun users are sovereign subjects, constituted both by their own capacities to wield sovereign power and by the state’s shaping (both legitimating and limiting) of these capacities.

This article first presents vignettes from the USA, South Africa, and India to bring into focus civilian demand for guns for self-protection. I then outline a commonality across these societies: the emergence of private security as a response to insecurity. After that, I turn to Foucault’s theoretical frameworks on subject formation, sovereign power, and governmentality to analyze gun-toters as ‘sovereign subjects’. I conclude the article by exploring questions of generalizability raised by the proposed framework.

The USA

In August of 2011 my neighbor’s house was broken into while she was home with her infant son. The intruders attempted to attack her and her child; however, SPD [Sanford Police Department] reported to the scene of the crime and the robbers fled. My wife saw the intruders running from our neighbors. I and my neighbors formed ‘Neighborhood Watch Program.’

(George Zimmerman, Written Statement to police, 26 February 2012)

In February 2012, George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in a Florida gated community called the Retreat at Twin Lakes. Gated communities are popularly associated with safety and security—a ‘haven in a heartless’ world. Yet, in late 2011 and early 2012 in the Retreat at Twin Lakes, a recent wave of break-ins had gripped the community and created an atmosphere of fear (see Francescani, 2012; Simon, 2010). In the months prior to killing Martin, Zimmerman had taken a proactive role in his community’s well-being: he was a member of his neighborhood patrol group, and he also purchased a firearm and carried it concealed on his person, like over one million other residents of Florida. The 911 call that Zimmerman made prior to shooting Martin suggests that Zimmerman was growing frustrated at crime in his community: ‘these assholes always get away’.

Zimmerman made the 911 call to alert police of a suspicious male in the area. Martin, an African American 17-year-old, was wearing a hoodie and was walking back from a convenience store with Skittles and Arizona Ice Tea. He was visiting his father, who lived in the neighborhood. Police told Zimmerman to desist following Martin, but Zimmerman followed him anyway. What happened next remains unclear, but we do know that there was a scuffle that resulted in a bloody nose for Zimmerman and death for Martin. Another 911 call recorded the gunshots and scream of an unidentified male. Zimmerman alerted police of what had happened, and he never denied that he killed Martin. Police initially chose not to charge Zimmerman with murder; they deemed that under Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, Zimmerman had committed justifiable homicide, not felonious homicide.⁴ Months after shooting Martin in the chest, however, Zimmerman was arrested and charged with second-degree murder under public outcry to hold Zimmerman accountable for Martin’s death.

During the much-anticipated trial, prosecutors maintained that Zimmerman was acting as a ‘wannabe cop’, not only because of his decision to pursue Martin but also because his actions emulated the deeply embedded practices of racial profiling that plague the US criminal justice system (Harris, 1999). Meanwhile, the defense team argued that Zimmerman had followed Martin because other African Americans had victimized the neighborhood, essentially admitting to racially profiling Martin. Nevertheless, the jury found that the state had not proven that Zimmerman had not killed Martin in self-defense, and he was found not guilty. In other words, despite Zimmerman’s decision to follow Martin, jurors reasoned that Zimmerman had lawful cause⁵ to fear for his life and kill Martin.

Zimmerman’s actions have brought attention to new US laws that allow gun carriers to act more like police. Since the 1970s, American gun culture has been transformed through (1) a vast increase in the legal ability to carry a gun as an everyday protection tool (now all 50 states allow some form of concealed carry); (2) an actual increase in the carrying of guns (over eight million Americans have licenses to carry a gun concealed, according to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) (2012)); (3) a vast increase in the ability to use a gun for the protection of self and others as well (since 2005, dozens of states have adopted Stand Your Ground laws like Florida’s); and (4) increasing public support for guns as tools of self defense (Gallup polls have shown increased support for public access to handguns since the late 1960s; in December 2012, after the Newtown, CT, school shootings, 74 percent of respondents opposed a handgun ban—the largest percentage ever recorded by Gallup). Americans’ legal capacity to exert lethal force thus extends beyond a personal right to self-defense: in addition to protecting themselves, they can now intervene in crimes and, in the case of Zimmerman, even follow suspected criminals.

South Africa

I am acutely aware of violent crime being committed by intruders entering homes with a view to commit crime, including violent crime. I have received death threats before. I have also been a victim of violence and of burglaries before.

(Oscar Pistorius, Court Statement, 19 February 2013)

As the Zimmerman case unfolded, South African Oscar ‘Blade Runner’ Pistorius made sports history in the 2012 Summer Olympic Games when he became the first athlete to compete in the Olympics with prosthetic legs. Yet almost exactly a year after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, Pistorius would join Zimmerman as the infamous face of self-defense when he shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, on 13 February 2013, claiming that he mistook her for a home intruder. He shot her four times through a bathroom door in his house as she sat on the toilet. He has since been indicted for pre-mediated murder, though he claims ‘private defense’.

Pistorius has explained his actions, like Zimmerman, by reference to fears of crime and suspicions surrounding the efficacy of public law enforcement. While his actions may have been unusual, his feelings about crime and insecurity are commonplace: problems of crime and police inefficacy have emerged at the core of post-apartheid South Africa. The apartheid system, based on coercive forms of racial segregation, contained the problem of crime to Black areas. Yet, as Super (2010: 180) describes,

As apartheid started to be dismantled in the 1980s, the fairly low rate of crime in the cities and white neighbourhoods started to increase … this was because the pattern of exclusion and segregation, based on apartheid principles, of separating likely victims (whites) from likely offenders (poor blacks), had, until this point, been a primary method of crime control.

The emergence of the post-apartheid South African state in 1994 marked the death knell of ‘exclusion and segregation’ as the ‘primary crime control method’, according to Super (2010: 180).

According to a 2012 survey conducted by the South African police, over 50 percent of South Africans are afraid of crime, but the relationship between this statistic and increases or declines in crime rates is elusive.⁶ Rather, as Super (2010: 175) notes, ‘the increase in the fear of crime was directly proportionate to the decline in the belief in the state’s ability to deal with it’. With crime now ‘democratized’ (rates of white victimization have increased and, for some crimes such as burglary, even outpace rates of black victimization), perceptions of state inefficacy have become widespread. Although a sizable proportion of South Africans believe that the police are ‘a legitimate authority that is aligned to their moral values’, ‘for a significant share of the population, there remain fundamental questions about the efficacy of the police’, according to a study by Human Sciences Research Council in South Africa (Roberts and Struwig, 2011: 1). Or, as Super (2010: 179) writes, ‘not only does the public see [crime] as escalating, but popular discourse generally presents the government as being both unable and unwilling to do anything about it’.

In response to these perceptions, some South Africans are turning to guns as the solution—rather than the cause of—violence. Like Pistorius, who announced in his February 2013 court statement that he sleeps next to a 9mm pistol, about three million South Africans own a legally registered firearm, according to Gun Free South Africa, a gun control organization.⁷ To own a gun,⁸ South Africans must prove that they are proficient in the handling of firearms; pass a background check; supply three references; and demonstrate an understanding of the laws governing firearms use. The legal capacity to use a gun for personal protection is governed by common law and the South African Constitution, which guarantees the ‘right to life’. South Africans are able to claim ‘private defence if the original attack is unlawful and life-threatening’ and, similar to Stand Your Ground laws in the USA, ‘the attack need not be directed at the defender’ (Van Der Merwe and Du Plessis, 2004: 292; see also Le Roux, 2010).

As in the USA, it is not clear how many South Africans use guns to defend themselves or others; as Juan De Greef (2000: 233), a proponent of gun rights and member of the South African Gunowners’ Association, notes, ‘The effectiveness of the armed civilian in terms of providing for his own security has never been officially investigated or researched by government.’ Still, coverage of the Pistorius case suggests sympathy with the South Africans who take up arms for personal protection: Lauren Tracey, who studies small arms in Africa with the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, told CNN that ‘the paranoia about being a victim of a house robbery is understandable … victims are relatively helpless against these attacks’ (Fantz, 2013). The UK Guardian, meanwhile, noted ruefully that, ‘For as long as South Africa remains one of the world’s most dangerous countries, however, keeping a gun in the house will remain acceptable or, in some eyes, absolutely necessary’ (Laing and Blair, 2013).

India

I don’t have faith in the police to protect me. There are so many attacks on women these days. It’s everybody’s right to defend themselves. I think all women who are vulnerable should be carrying guns.

(An Armed Indian Woman speaking to the UK Guardian—Burke, 2012)

On 18 December 2012, India captured international headlines when a gang of men raped Jyoti Singh Pandey, a 23-year-old woman, on a bus; her body was so severely beaten that she was airlifted to Singapore for treatment but died 13 days later. While scholars, journalists and pundits debated the meanings and implications of the case, many Indian women responded by turning to self-defense training (Agence France Presse, 2013a) and, for some, firearms: between 18 December and 1 January, the Delhi police received 300 applications for firearms, as compared to 600 applications in all of 2011 and 320 applications in all of 2010. According to Palash Ghosh, a reporter for the International Business Times, women have compromised about one-fifth of gun permit applicants; since the Delhi rape, they are one-third. As he wrote, ‘Declarations by politicians that they will speed the litigation process against violent criminals and beef up police patrols have failed to assuage many women who now seek to take matters into their own hands’ (Ghosh, 2013).

This surge is suggestive of an emergent gun culture in urban India centered on low confidence in police protection. Jason Burke (2012), a journalist from the UK Guardian, recently reported that some members of the Indian middle class are turning to firearms for protection against crime. As one armed Indian woman said, ‘I don’t have faith in the police to protect me. There are so many attacks on women these days. It’s everybody’s right to defend themselves. I think all women who are vulnerable should be carrying guns.’ New gun groups have formed recently with the expressed purpose of addressing crime and insecurity: a software engineer, Abhijeet Singh founded Indiansforguns.com, an online forum where more than 8000 registered users debate gun rights, talk self-defense tactics and make firearms deals. Singh believes that the threat of crime, combined with low police presence, makes gun rights sound policy: ‘If a guy can get [an illegal] katta for 200 [rupees], on what moral grounds can the government deny a law-abiding citizen a license for a gun … [and who faces] all sorts of restrictions and encumbrances?’ (Overdorf and Teng, 2010). In addition, the National Association for Gun Rights India (NAGRI), founded in 2010, has led a number of pro-gun marches and ‘represent the interests not only of our own members & gun owners across India but also those of every Indian citizen by providing a voice to those who are not willing to give up their rights in return for hollow promises’ (NAGRI, 2012).

These ‘hollow promises’ refer to ineffective state initiatives amid increasing concerns surrounding crime and insecurity. Hansen (2009: 169) summarizes the concerns about state efficacy as follows:

Events over the past decade suggest that the awe of the law in India, and its corollary, the sovereignty of the state, are in sharp decline. Successive governments seem unable to curb, or prevent, clashes between religious communities and attacks on minority communities in the country; the police force is widely regarded as brutal and incompetent; a large number of crimes and murders are never reported or investigated; the courts are overburdened and ineffective with conviction rates below ten % political parties, movements, and criminal rackets routinely subvert the law, commit crimes with impunity, and so on.

Scholars studying India’s transition to democracy and neoliberal economic development have called attention to a variety of newly problematized sources of insecurity: the so-called ‘criminalization of politics’ (i.e. growing links between organized crime and political parties) and persistent corruption (Gupta, 2012); the emergence of the ‘criminal entrepreneur’ (a term used by Sanchez 2012; see also Weinstein, 2008) to describe the quasi-legal activities of venture capitalists in urban India); and the criminalization of poverty (Sahoo, 2008; Shaban, 2008). Delhi is now one of the most dangerous cities in India, for women and in general (Mukherjee et al., 2001).

Yet what is novel about these problems of crime, insecurity and state inefficacy is not the problems themselves (rampant corruption, for example, is not new) but how they are now read through the lens of crime and insecurity. As Roychowdhury (2013) argues, there is a growing punitive discourse in India centered on state-led retribution, which shapes how problems of insecurity are interpreted and solutions are imagined. While the use of punitive discourse is evocative of US ideologies on crime and punishment that marginalize poor Americans of color (Simon, 2007), in India, this discourse is organized more squarely around ‘class-based differences’ (Roychowdhury, 2013: 288).

Alongside, and in tandem with, this growing punitive discourse, a renewed emphasis on informal social controls has emerged,⁹ sometimes with the explicit encouragement of formal criminal justice institutions (Lambert et al., 2012) as well as non-governmental organizations looking to protect and empower disenfranchised and marginalized Indians (e.g. Magar, 2003). Meanwhile, the middle class has embraced market-oriented, informal social controls that are geared at enhancing security by gentrifying space (Bhan, 2009; Ghertner, 2011) amid concerns of rampant crime, such as the purchase of private security alongside the development of gated communities known as ‘colonies’ (Bhan, 2009; Ghertner, 2011). Guns appear to be emerging as one of these social controls. Jason Overdorf and Poh Si Teng (2010), two reporters for the Global Post, suggest the middle-class typicality of Delhi’s ‘gun enthusiasts’: ‘Software professionals, executives and salesmen in their 30s and 40s, they’re typical upper middle-class Delhiwallahs. Except for one thing … they’re fighting to make sure one day every Indian gets the right to bear arms—American-style.’

Strategies of crime control in high-crime societies

How do we make sense of these vignettes in the USA, South Africa and India?

We might start by noting that all of these contexts—varying, of course, by particular histories of colonization and decolonization, by empire, and by slavery—exhibit what David Garland (2000: 354) calls ‘a historically distinctive experience of crime’, characterized by the following elements:

i. High crime rates are regarded as a normal social fact

ii. Emotion investment in crime issues is widespread and intense […]

iii. Crime issues are politicized and publicly represented in emotive terms […]

iv. Concerns about victims and public safety dominate public policy

v. The criminal justice state is viewed as inadequate or ineffective

vi. Private, defensive routines are widespread and there is a large market in private security

vii. A ‘crime consciousness’ is institutionalized in the media, popular culture and the built environment.

(Garland, 2000: 367–368)

Garland (1996, 2000) argues that this ‘distinctive experience of crime’ not only transforms the everyday lives of individuals, making them more conscious of and responsive to concerns about crime and insecurity, but it also problematizes what Garland (1996) calls the ‘myth of [state] sovereignty’ with regard to crime control. In Garland’s (1996: 448) words,

The perceived normality of high crime rates, together with the widely acknowledged limitations of criminal justice agencies, have begun to erode one of the foundation myths of modern societies: namely, the myth that the sovereign state is capable of providing security, law and order, and crime control within its territorial boundaries.

Garland argues that two sets of strategies have emerged in response to the dual problems of crime control and state sovereignty: strategies of denial and adaptive strategies. On the one hand, there ‘has been a recurring tendency towards a kind of hysterical denial, and the emphatic reassertion of the old myth of the sovereign state’ (Garland, 1996: 448). This is seen in increased state spending on police, correctional facilities, and the state’s embrace of militaristic technologies for crime control. On the other hand, adaptive strategies have decentered crime control as a problem of the state and have ‘embed[ded] controls in the fabric of normal interaction, rather than suspend them above it in the form of a sovereign command’ (Garland, 1996: 451).

One such strategy is responsibilization: the devolution of ‘responsibility for crime prevention on to agencies, organizations, and individuals which are quite outside the state and to persuade them to act appropriately … The recurring message of this approach is that the state alone is not, and cannot effectively be, responsible for preventing and controlling crime’ (Garland, 1996: 452). The responsibilization of crime control is facilitated by entrepreneurial and consumptive practices within the market. As Loader and Walker (2001: 10) write,

State power is being relinquished here in various ways—‘outwards’ to burgeoning commercial markets in policing and security; ‘downwards’ to private organizations and municipal authorities, and to ‘responsibilized’ consumers and citizens; and ‘upwards’ to new sites of international police cooperation and transnational policing forms.

Security commodities flourish in contemporary high-crime, market-oriented cultures. In the US context, Simon (2007) has shown how security commodities, such as the purchase of home alarm systems and the use of SUVs and cell phones as security devices, provide an outlet for Americans looking to address the fears and concerns that have increasingly shaped American society since the late 1960s (Goold et al., 2011; Simon, 2002, 2004, 2007, 2010).

These dynamics are not confined to the USA. Private security industries have expanded vastly across the globe and enjoy complex relationships with the states apparatuses alongside which they operate (White, 2012): as Weiss (2007: 1) notes, ‘private security is growing at a spectacular rate in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, India as well as the Middle East and the Far East’. In India, fears about crime and insecurity are aggravated by neoliberal, market-oriented policies and practices as well as solved by it: on the one hand, neoliberalism ‘works to generate economic and cultural anxieties and fears’, while on the other hand, ‘mass incarceration and hyper-punitiveness are justified by neoliberal rationalities of state–society relationships and dynamics of urban capitalism’ (Shaban, 2008: 71). This is reflected in the Indian private security industry: private security personnel outnumbers public law enforcement by a ratio of almost 4 to 1 (Timmons, 2009).

Meanwhile, private security firms have emerged as a key player in post-Apartheid South Africa: ‘private security firms reported that business was “booming” as increasing numbers lost “faith in the police and turned elsewhere for protection”’ (Super, 2010: 171). The private security industry in South Africa outnumbers the public police force by more than 2 to 1, with 390,000 registered private security officers to 150,000 police officers (Agence France Presse, 2013b). Not only have private police been critical in reproducing austere levels of segregation, even in a post-Apartheid South Africa (Samara, 2010); in addition, Singh (2005: 171) argues that this expansion in private security normalizes punitive social control as an everyday practice that may ‘redefine the authority to coerce and to punish as within the competence of non-state authorities’. In such contexts, civilians are expected ‘to assume responsibility for their own self-protection, which in part involves the voluntary engagement of the security services offered by multiple and competing providers other than the state’ (Singh, 2005: 170).¹⁰

One consequence of this growth in private policing is the reconfiguration of private space through the emergence of complex, sophisticated policing systems, including those documented in Shearing and Stenning’s (1984) analysis of Disney World. Private policing proliferates in private space because the latter provides both an opportunity (as public law enforcement does not have a practical monopoly on policing corporate space, bedrooms, or gated communities) and a unique threat (as these spaces are imagined as especially vulnerable to intruders and therefore in need of protection). On the one hand, this proliferation is a response to social-spatial transformations: as private corporations colonize public space (i.e. the neoliberal ‘enclosure of the commons’), they provide increasing market opportunities for private security to grow and flourish. But private policing itself does not simply fortify private space; it also co-constitutes private space by establishing new social-spatial orders of exclusion (Pow, 2013).

Guns can be understood as part of this push toward private policing; the carrying of guns as everyday security objects allows gun carriers to actively practice a capacity (that is, aggressive pursuit of social order) commonly with the state. The vignettes from the USA, South Africa and India suggest that in some societies, individuals are increasingly participating in kinds of power usually reserved for the state: gun-toters use their guns (or prepare to use them) for exceptional circumstances in which questions of life and death, friend and enemy, must be decided (Schmitt, 2006). Zimmerman and Pistorius are policing the private spaces of their gated communities and bedrooms, respectively, and they mimic the police power (Dubber, 2005) of the state to do so. This appears, therefore, to be a version of responsibilization (Garland, 1996; O’Malley, 1992)—producing what I call the ‘sovereign subject’.

Sovereign subjects

Guns are embedded in the contradictions that Garland identified in his analysis of high-crime societies, where ‘adaptive strategies’ emerge alongside ‘strategies of denial’ that flaunt state sovereignty. I argue that gun ownership and carry suggest a particular kind of political subject: the sovereign subject.

Sovereignty is a framework for imagining and justifying state power: ‘naturally’ rights-bearing subjects enter into a ‘pact’ of ‘subjection’ (Foucault, 2009: 300) or a ‘founding contract’ (Foucault, 2009: 103), which provides the sovereign with a mandate to demand obedience to the law within a given territory in exchange for the sovereign’s paternalist promise to pursue the ‘common good’ (2009: 98). As such, ‘the sovereign is the person who can say no to any individual’s desire’ (2009: 73), which is enacted through (1) law¹¹ and (2) theatrical terror. Under sovereign power, subjects must ‘accept acts of violence as the purest form of reason’ (2009: 267). This means that subjects recognize the sovereign’s sanction to violence as legitimate. This recognition of legitimate violence is constitutive both of the obedient subject and of the paternalist sovereign, who is expected to protect individual subjects from harm in exchange for obedience. The ‘strategies of denial’ described by Garland (1996) are precisely geared at reproducing—through the theatricality of state might—the ‘myth of state sovereignty’ that states can and should protect individuals (i.e. potential victims) and that the state is acting legitimately when it uses force to do so.

But gun users also participate in a myth-making of their own insofar as they embrace (1) the capacity (even if not enacted) to kill in self-defense as a right of citizenship and (2) the imperative to ‘take the law into their own hands’ against the backdrop of state inefficacy. In cases like George Zimmerman or Oscar Pistorius, citizens—not police, not judges, not any other kind of state representatives—become the ‘judge, jury, and executioner’. Or, in short, ‘the sovereign’. They join the state as a kind of sovereign protector, disrupting the pact of sovereignty by claiming the right to use lethal violence for protection. This disruption calls for an analysis of sovereignty not merely as something possessed by the state but also as a form of power that is productive and practiced.

Sovereign power as productive and practiced

Contemporary demand for guns requires thinking about sovereign power as productive and practiced, an approach in line with Foucault’s (1995) analysis of sovereign power in Discipline & Punish. One of Foucault’s foundational insights was to rethink power as practiced and productive, rather than as possessed and prohibitive. While sovereign power often serves as a counterpoint in Foucault’s work to forms of power that emerged historically later, his analysis of sovereign power in Discipline & Punish (1995) emphasizes its productive and practical aspects, which he would further detail in later works.

Discipline & Punish opens with an injunction to consider punishment beyond its ‘“repressive” effects alone … as a complex social function … as a political tactic’ (1995: 23). Tracing the historical development from torture, to punishment, to discipline, Foucault aims to look at the ‘way a specific mode of subjection was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a “scientific” status’ (1995: 24). His first stop on this historical journey—torture—is most of interest here, because it is in this context that he analyzes the productive power of state violence. Contrasting accounts that emphasize the ruthless excess of violent state power, Foucault notes that torture ‘was a regulated practice, obeying a well-defined procedure’ (1995: 40). Understood as ‘an aspect of the sovereign’s right to make war on his enemies’, the ‘right to punish’ exercised through spectacular displays of torture is not simply a display of sovereign power but rather, echoing Durkheim (1997: 48), a ‘reconstitution’ of ‘momentarily injured sovereignty’ (1997: 48). In Foucault’s (1995: 49) terms: ‘The ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of “terror” … to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign. The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power.’

Anticipating Garland’s (1996) analysis of contemporary state power, Foucault argues that torture created the reality of the sovereign ‘super-power’ (1995: 57), which demonstrated the ‘dissymmetry’ of power between the sovereign king and his subjects through the destruction of the body of the accused (1995: 55). This production of both social order and the sovereign/subject relation requires the participation of subjects, albeit in a rather restricted sense. Torture only becomes a modality of power if it produces terror among the sovereign’s subjects. On the one hand, ‘people were summoned as spectators’, but on the other, they served as ‘guarantors of the punishment’ and thus ‘must to a certain extent take part in it’ (1995: 58). Highlighting productive, participatory qualities of sovereign power, Foucault suggests a way that we might think of state violence as practice and logic (in addition to institutional capacity).

This approach to sovereign power helps make sense of contemporary guns that are donned for the purposes of protection. First, such gun use is productive of a particular kind of social order: gun-toters produce a particular kind of social order through the specter of the armed, law-abiding citizen willing to kill in self-defense, reminiscent of the spectacular theater of the sovereign’s capacity to dismember, main and kill in defense of the King’s throne in Foucault’s opening passage of Discipline & Punish. This production of social order is evoked by American gun carriers, for example, when they quote the pro-gun adage that ‘an armed society is a polite society’. Second, gun ownership and carry is productive of a kind of sovereign subject, like George Zimmerman and Oscar Pistorius, who acts as the ‘strong arm of the law’ by distinguishing between friends and enemies with lethal force (as per Schmitt, 2006). (Note that this also produces the social abject who is rendered unworthy of life in the double sense evoked in Agamben’s (1998) concept of homo sacer. Justifiable homicide produces an entire class of people like Trayvon Martin who, as victims of justifiable homicide, are not only physically dead but also denied social recognition as ‘true’ victims of criminal homicide.) Thus, gun use is linked with certain kinds of capacities—that is, the moral and legal capacity to kill in order to protect innocent lives. Far from signifying the end or diminution of the state, the gun-toting sovereign subject suggests that sovereignty—as coercive practice rather than simply a coercive institution—has exceeded the confines of the state. Does this suggest the erosion of the state—or its reconfiguration?

Governmentalization of sovereign power

There is more to states than sovereign power: as Foucault maintains in his analyses of disciplinary power and governmentality, states are also the effect of governance practices that do not produce fear and obedience as much as shape desire and conduct. Shorthanded by Foucault as the ‘conduct of conduct’, governmentality is a form of power that coordinates and regulates whole populations and their statistical qualities by cultivating subjective capacities, rather than by instilling fear and terror into individuals (as per sovereign power) or disciplining them (as under disciplinary power) (Foucault, 2009: 11). As Garland (1997: 175) summarizes, ‘government is not, then, the suppression of individual sovereignty, but rather the cultivation of that subjectivity in specific forms, aligned to specific government aims’.

While Foucault notes that governmentality emerged historically later than sovereignty (and after disciplinarity), these rationalities of power do not represent ‘a series of successive elements, the appearance of the new causing the earlier one to disappear’ (Foucault, 2009: 8). They are reconfigured alongside, against and through one another. This has two theoretical consequences. First, the state is not simply defined by one form of power or the other. Second, no form of power is simplistically monopolized by the state. This is demonstrated by scholars who have studied how a variety of phenomena—from the erosion of the public sphere to global capitalism to private security—result in new configurations of ‘re-feudalization’ (Habermas, 1991) and ‘lateral’ sovereignties that form a patchwork within and beyond traditional nation-states (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2006).

Given that gun users wield lethal force legitimately, that is, within the legal confines outlined by the state, Foucault’s insistence that sovereign power, governmentality and disciplinarity hang together in historically contextual, mutually co-constitutive configurations is useful for unpacking gun-toters and their relation to the state. In participating in sovereign power, they are not breaking free from the state as much as (re)constituting new relations of sovereign subjection, with governmentality working through the technology of sovereign power. Thus, the very fact that dozens of US state-level governments sanction gun use through Stand Your Ground laws and concealed carry laws implies that armed citizens are not simply usurping sovereignty from the state. Rather than a return to ‘pure’ rights, gun rights can be read, as argued above, as an example of responsibilization of state power and, by extension, as a ‘conduct of conduct’ or governmentality (Foucault, 2009, 2010). As Garland notes of responsibilization in high-crime societies, ‘the state works through civil society and not upon it’ (2000: 348, emphases in original), indirectly managing crime. Indeed,

where it works … the responsibilization strategy leaves the centralized state machine more powerful than before, with an extended capacity for action and influence. At the same time, however, this strategy serves to erode the notion of the state as the public’s representative and primary protector.

(Garland, 1996: 454)

While gun advocates may distinguish themselves as sovereign citizens, they might be bettered conceptualized as sovereign subjects, still constituted by forms of power enacted on them and through them rather than rights emanating naturally from them. While Zimmerman and Pistorius may have made the ‘sovereign’ call to use lethal force to distinguish Trayvon Martin and Reeva Steenkamp as ‘enemies’ (Schmitt, 2006), both are subject to the state’s recognition of their actions as legitimate, as their capacity to exercise their ‘sovereign rights’ is curtailed by the state’s willingness to recognize those rights according to law and as interpreted by the courts. Sovereign power thus operates at once as everyday practice and institutional capacity, straddling definitions that would partition power into ‘possessed’ and ‘practiced’ aspects.

New questions

This analysis raises questions about how local, national and transnational dynamics shape the extent to which sovereign subjecthood emerges as a meaningful political subjectivity. Chief among these questions is what distinguishes pro-gun contexts from other high-crime cultures; not all high-crime societies breed broad-based support for guns as protective tools against crime. Here, I want to provide a tentative answer to this question of generalizability by calling attention to factors that likely boost pro-gun sentiment. In all three of the contexts outlined here, there is a history of precarious state monopoly on policing (including a legal framework sanctioning the civilian use of guns and an ‘illegal gun problem’ that has reached the level of public health concern) as well as some degree of US influence at work.

Precarious state monopoly on sovereign power

As Garland (1996) notes, high-crime societies are characterized by the problematization of state sovereignty, but the cultural toolkits available to interpret and address this problem vary. Some places have a long-standing history of precarious state monopoly on sovereign power, where sovereignty is ‘multiple, provisional, and always contested’ (as Hansen, 2009: 172 describes with respect to colonial and postcolonial states in India and South Asia), and a deep-seated culture of using informal social controls. These contexts will provide a better breeding ground for pro-gun sentiment. In contrast, in places with strong, centralized policing apparatuses and a general culture of reliance on formal, state-centric mechanisms of social control (i.e. much of Western Europe), pro-gun cultures will be less likely to take root and flourish. This highlights, of course, that the sovereign subject represents not so much a new subject as much as a newly problematized dynamic in high-crime cultures. Two manifestations of precarious state monopoly on sovereign power are particularly relevant.

Legality of civilian use of guns

The legal structure allowing civilian use of guns for defensive purposes conditions the practice of sovereign power by non-state actors. At the very least, the practice of sovereign power by civilians requires that the state legitimates this practice through laws on gun ownership and use for self-defense (again, indicating a precarious state monopoly on sovereign power). Before guns may become appealing tools of self-defense for significant sectors of people, guns must be imaginable as such: the legality of the civilian use of guns may well shape the legal consciousness (Ewick and Silbey, 1998) of individuals, making guns imaginable, or not, as solutions to the problem of crime.

Widespread criminal use of guns

The material preponderance of ‘criminal guns’—either illegally possessed or used in criminal activities—also shapes the extent to which legal guns become imaginable as a ‘sensible’ response to fear and insecurities regarding crime. A large stock of untraceable, criminal guns shapes the extent to which individuals believe that deadly assault with a firearm is a meaningful threat, and when juxtaposed alongside sentiments of police inefficacy and aggravated by media hype, perceptions of widely available criminal guns make the civilian ownership of guns more appealing as tools of personal protection. In contexts with few gun-related assaults and murders (even if they are high-crime contexts), guns are less likely to appear as appropriate responses to crime and more likely to appear as excessive or over-reactive.

Global impact of US gun culture

While this article has attempted to show that gun culture is not confined to the USA, this is not to say that non-US gun cultures are not shaped by US dynamics in important ways. On the one hand, the National Rifle Association (NRA) has celebrated gun cultures beyond the USA (the organization has, for example, featured articles in its political materials arguing that expanded gun rights is an important element of ending apartheid in South Africa). On the other hand, non-US gun groups have explicitly emulated the US organization. For example, Rahoul Rai of India’s NAGRI has said that:

The National Rifle Association in America is the standard by which all gun owners judge themselves … Here is an organization that has protected the fundamental democratic right [to bear arms] which has withstood the test of time. Which has brought gun ownership not just to the United States but to the whole world.

(Overdorf and Teng, 2010)

Popular associations between guns and freedom—grown in the USA, but with global currency—likely shape local dynamics of gun ownership and use beyond the USA. And to the extent that the USA is the epicenter of a ‘punitive’ turn in crime control, the global proliferation of pro-gun discourse might also be considered part of this ‘punitive package’.

These four factors (historically precarious state monopoly on sovereign power; legality of civilian use of gun; preponderance of criminal guns; and US influence) provide a starting point for understanding gun culture as a global phenomenon. Together, they provide a rough map for investigating how pro-gun dynamics unfold on-the-ground in context-specific ways, even as the USA remains a key flashpoint for pro-gun ideology. But these factors are a tentative point of departure: more than anything, they stress the need for—and promise of—empirically driven, comparative analyses of global gun cultures.

Conclusion

The vignettes about guns in the USA, South Africa and India tell us something about the contemporary life of sovereign power. In all of these places, there is demand for non-state actors to practice sovereign power through the ownership of guns. Situated in high-crime contexts, pro-gun Americans, South Africans, and Indians believe that they could do a better job protecting themselves than the police—and bear guns as a testament to that belief.

The appeal of guns is embedded in a contradiction that Garland (2002) outlines in his ‘culture of control’ thesis: as crime becomes a central social concern worthy of militaristic response, the state breeds suspicion regarding its own efficacy to take on the slippery, but mammoth, task of crime suppression. A number of pro-gun mantras, which circulate within NRA materials, pro-gun online forums and even signs posted in the homes and businesses of gun advocates, convey this suspicion of public law enforcement: ‘I don’t dial 911’; ‘I carry a gun because a cop is too heavy’; ‘when seconds count, the police are only minutes away’. Guns, according to these sayings, allow Americans to resist dependence on public law enforcement (Carlson, 2012).

Far from signifying an erosion of state power, I argue that gun politics signifies its configuration and diffusion beyond the institutional confines of the state proper. Gun politics cut across, and often exacerbate, enduring forms of inequality, disempowerment and privilege (for example, what some have called the legalized lynching of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman). In addition, guns donned for protection purposes also reinvigorate long-standing technologies of power. Sovereign power is ‘alive’ (read: practiced) as much as more seemingly ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ forms of power, such as disciplinary power and governmentality. It is through and alongside (and not just against) sovereign power that governmentality and disciplinary power may find new life.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Jennifer Carlson (PhD, UC Berkeley) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of Toronto. Her recent publications appear (or are forthcoming) in British Journal of Criminology, Violence Against Women and Feminist Criminology. Her research focuses on gender, the politics of policing and gun politics. She is working on a book manuscript on the everyday politics of concealed carry in the United States.

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