The ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ is a self-proclaimed state in the Donbas region of Ukraine. The struggle for an independent Republic of Donetsk has resulted in significant bloodshed, particularly from 2014. Survey data suggests that most of the residents of the region would like their region to become part of Russia and the Donetsk People’s Republic relies heavily on Russian support. This chapter shows how governance decisions intended to achieve internal legitimacy in fact leave residents without a functional citizenship of either Ukraine or Russia. This means that they are effectively stateless, since citizenship of the Donetsk People’s Republic is not recognised beyond Donbas. The chapter traces what this means for individuals living in the region, and how it affects both their decision-making and their understanding of citizenship and identity. The case of the DPR highlights the powerful link between governance, statelessness, and citizenship. For established states, the inability to govern within a particular territory may contribute to statelessness. For self-proclaimed states, governance in pursuit of internal legitimacy may involve manipulation of citizenship policies, which enhances the risk of statelessness.

This chapter analyses what happens when archival theories migrate to an art context, and considers the specific conditions that make the term stick. It shows how the archive functions as a productive short cut to theorise a changed notion of art, and the complex function of art institutions, documents and discursive systems in post-war art. The increasingly theoretical understanding of the archive in the second half of the twentieth century – as both material and structure, both concrete place and abstract law – is shown to share a great deal with the institutional theory of art outlined by Arthur Danto in the mid-1960s. By considering these jointly, comparing vocabulary, use of concepts, epistemological structures and notions of temporality, the chapter makes clear that these different theoretical clusters lock into one another in numerous ways and that elements of archive theory reinforced elements of the institutional theory of art and vice versa.By examining one recent reference to Ed Ruscha’s work – Michael Maranda’s 2009 remake of Twentysix Gasoline Stations – the chapter points to the archival function of such returns.

The introduction sets up the premises and aims of the book. Modified views of history and knowledge meant that archives were gradually becoming of more interest in different disciplines in the second half of the twentieth century. No longer viewed as a neutral site housing historical documents, the archive instead became a concept and structure that needed to be scrutinised and critiqued in its own right. The introduction situates the surge in archival references in art writing and artistic practice within this broader historical and theoretical context, and formulates the book’s main questions: why is archival terminology used with such frequency in art discourse in the years around the turn of the twenty-first century, and what does this pervasive referencing indicate? These questions feed into the book’s overarching aim of analysing the function and meaning of the concept of the archive in contemporary art c. 1995–2015. The introduction ends with an outline of the book’s structure and summaries of each of its eight chapters.

This chapter is about the messy complexities and dynamics of leaving the field of martial arts. From Karate as a teenager, to various martial arts, with Muay Thai and Jeet Kune Do as a main focus, throughout university studies and up to present times. The author’s martial arts journey was highly intermittent and fragmented over a lengthy period. Doing martial arts was an essential part of his bodily capital that enabled him to perform longitudinal studies of bouncing (Calvey, 2017). However, the martial arts community was never aware of his covert bouncing studies and martial arts academic interests. The management of the author’s ‘divided self’ was a source of continued guilt as he built bonds and friendships. Gaining an embedded covert insider view of his martial arts journey also had a ‘spoiling effect’ on his field. This chapter reflects on situated scenarios, moral ambiguities, guruism, ethical dilemmas and the lessons learnt from the author’s field experience. The logic is the central appreciation of creatively recasting absence, loss and liminality in our field journeys. Existentially, the field became a very blurred part of the author’s identity politics and was written on his body. Exiting the field is a profoundly messy and artful business, and the author never fully left. His field was an emotional and moral labyrinth and lifestyle that he could not cleanly exit. He still trains in martial arts and remains on a type of sociological duty.

The context and focus of this chapter is the Indian sub-continent in the turmoil of the 1947 Partition and thus the comparative frameworks of according and denying citizenship that emerged at that time for migrant populations in Pakistan are explored. This chapter begins by reviewing the theoretical ground from which the category of the stateless individual emerges. The chapter outlines the shifting status of migrant populations throughout Pakistan’s post-colonial history; most notably the population of Afghan-origin persons residing in Pakistan over the last forty years. It does so by analysing the development of domestic legislation on identity and citizenship in Pakistan such as the Naturalization Act 1926, the Pakistan Citizenship Act 1951, and more specifically governance of Afghan refugees as ‘aliens’ under the Foreigners Act, 1946. With Pakistan as neither a party to the 1951 UN Convention relating to the Status of Refugees nor to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, the large influx of persons into Pakistan from neighbouring Afghanistan since the 1970s has been and continues to be governed through a complex array of policy measures. The chapter attempts to uncover how it is not only the lack of a formal legal conformity with international rights instruments that defines the ‘status’ of this population but also a history of geopolitics, the development of the nation-state, and the use of state apparatus (including courts) that has historically rendered certain populations effectively ‘stateless’.

This chapter describes and examines at length the ways in which Fletcher portrays Rome as a corrupted political reality facing irreversible decay, and how he depicts a Rome in crisis and profoundly unsettled by the lack of adequate political leaders and the apparent lack of interest on the part of the gods in human affairs. The only area left to Roman men to prove their virtus is the battlefield, but this emerges as insufficient to offset the violence, the opportunism, and the dejection that exude from the plays, which chimes with the wider scepticism as to the dependability of Roman models and exempla that pervades his canon. In general terms, Fletcher’s Roman plays depict a dissolving Rome that is prey to a deep sense of disorientation; in doing so, they express a pessimistic vision of history and human life, which makes them resemble in some respects the seventeenth-century German Trauerspiel, or mourning play (as opposed to Tragödie), as famously examined by Walter Benjamin. A fresh examination of Fletcher’s depiction of classical history reveals him as a much sharper observer of reality than is usually recognized, not only in the immediacy of the here and now but also in terms of the larger changes and tendencies that are continually at work in history and politics.

The introduction provides the background for a sociological approach to the study of sovereignty, including the study of contested and paradoxical concepts, moments of contestation, and a view on intellectual history and conceptual history as sources of sociological methodologies. The chapter emphasises that basic concepts like sovereignty and democracy appear as rhetorical and polemical resources in constitutional contestation. It accounts for the relevance of such writers as Max Weber, Niklas Luhmann and Pierre Rosanvallon to specify a sociological approach to national and international sovereignty debates.

This chapter establishes the various elements that when integrated in certain ways constitute the conception of freedom pieced together and defended in this book, ‘freedom as Marxian-autonomy’. Both Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberty and Gerald MacCallum’s triadic formula are delineated. The chapter explains why it is a version of the latter that pervades the entire constitution of associational anarchism, and the sense in which it has something significant to offer the more general anarchist theory of ‘advanced selfhood’. In order to establish the other essential premises upon which the associational anarchist conception of freedom stands, three main traditions of political thought that conceptualise liberty in distinct ways are introduced. The next step is to clarify how Marx’s notion of freedom can be incorporated into MacCallum’s formula, and, further, how the former can also be combined with an idealist (sometimes referred to as ‘freedom as autonomy’) interpretation of the latter. Although the chapter endorses Marx’s critique that the abstract individualism of liberalism cannot provide an adequate account of the communal relations through which people gain their self-understandings, state socialist solutions to the liberal contradiction are also rejected. The chapter moves on to indicate the ways in which liberalism’s reductive ontology is replaced with what the book understands as the ‘functionally demarcated higher-self’. Through a discussion of anarchism’s complex relation with democracy, the chapter concludes with an account of the plural democratic forms that constitute the core of associational anarchism’s mode of organisation.

I remember the train trip back from Washington, D.C., to Seattle after I had been definitively told by my embassy that the return home was impossible, and that I no longer had any rights to consular assistance. I was told that I was not considered a national of my home country under the operation of its law. For decades, I thought I was simply undocumented. Apparently, things were a lot more complicated. I had no nationality.’ In this chapter, a founding member of the organisation United Stateless reflects on her own experiences of statelessness and how she and other stateless persons connected to create the first organisation in the U.S. led by stateless persons for stateless persons. On the basis of these experiences, she offers some recommendations for thinking about governance relating to citizenship. In particular, she argues that stateless persons must be at the centre of governance efforts and that stateless persons must work with others who have experienced trauma and discrimination to build a better world for everyone.

This paper traces F. G. Bailey’s varied oeuvre to arrive at three enduring and significant aspects in his ethnography of politics: morality, truth, and power. In a career spanning more than six decades, Bailey’s political ethnographies have generated concepts, and sharpened the theoretical and methodological innovations of the ‘Manchester School’ for discerning and explaining political phenomena. Focusing mainly on his political ethnographies of Orissa in India, as well as his comparative studies, I attempt to show how Bailey’s paradigm helps us navigate universal principles of social life in specific cultural contexts and political practices. Underlying Bailey’s theoretical concerns is the search for a normative core of societies, and the way collectivities negotiate between norms and strategies. Morality is located in the eschewing of violence in favour of disengagement, the saving lie, indifference and manipulation – elements of so called ‘gentlemanly politics’. In Bailey’s political ethnographies, however, ordinary villagers and peasants, the proverbial small men, are the ones who deploy these strategies to preserve their world unencumbered by those in power. It is this idea of morality that informs Bailey’s substantive notion of politics and political power, leading in turn to his idea of truth in politics arrived at through hard-nosed political ethnographies: contingently, as the case may be.