Graduate student Chelsey L. Kivland, working under the direction of Dr. Stephan Palmie, will undertake research on popular conceptions of political sovereignty in contexts where there are outside peacekeeping forces present. The research will be carried out in Haiti, where a United Nations peacekeeping mission currently seeks to secure the political and legal authority of the state.
The researcher will examine the relationship between the social meanings of peacekeeping and the practices of music and dance groups, known as foot bands (band a pye), in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The foot bands present a vision of the United Nations force as an "occupation," which, instead of enforcing state authority, renders state authority impotent. The researcher will focus on how foot bands have engaged with this contradiction through public ritual performance and other activities.
The researcher will undertake an in-depth analysis of foot band activities, which include grassroots social service projects, such as public surveillance, trash collection, and literacy education. She will use semi-structured and informal interview procedures along with participant observation to collect information on these practices and interactions between foot band members and residents, peacekeepers, and governmental representatives. The overarching focus of the research will be on the processes through which domains of governance and the political authority to govern are actually produced.
This research will contribute to social science theory about the practical sources of sovereign authority, extending the theory beyond the usual focus on the state itself. The study will have the broader impact of informing policy discussions on the hidden impacts of peacekeeping missions. The research also will build international scholarly collaborations and contribute to the education of a social scientist.
@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } My NSF award allowed me to conduct over eighteen months of fieldwork plus an additional follow-up trip in order to explore the political transformations occurring within and through the longstanding community associations of Carnival performance groups, known as "bann a pye" (literally, bands on foot), in Bel Air, an impoverished, downtown neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. While I am not yet finished analyzing this research, I provide below a summary of the argument that will be developed in my dissertation. Comprised primarily of young, unemployed men and organized by neighborhood, bann a pye—each of about fifteen members—have recently constituted themselves as "cultural organizations" and have also founded separate "social organizations" that execute a wide-range of social projects in the neighborhood, from street cleaning and food distribution to adult literacy classes and paving dirt corridors. While these groups’ street performances—in which members play music, sing, and dance through city streets—have long acted as vehicles of protest for the marginalized, their formation of "organizations" (both a legal title and political idiom) has significantly changed their political dynamics. It has enabled them to enter into dialogue with and make claims on the network of transnational organizations and governmental ministries engaged in the project of governance. Assembling this diffuse network into a political configuration, their demands have not only identified and momentarily fixed a locus of power. They have also enabled these groups to procure resources for their performances and diverse social projects. Their everyday claim, "We Make the State" (Nou fe leta!), thus bears two meanings—each of which articulate the performative nature of their politics. On the one hand, it reflects the performative construction of the state as a dialogic site for making claims as citizens, and on the other, it suggests that this site is manifested through collective performances that constitute the community and empower it to make governance perform like a state. Focusing on the way in which organizational logics are mobilized in relation to global governance has allowed me to address a dominant trend in contemporary global politics, as well as concerns central to political theory. While global governance structures are undoubtedly undermining the traditional state model of hierarchical, national government, what has been remarkable is the persistence of the concept of the state in localized discourses of accountability. To explain this, several anthropologists have used the Foucauldian lens of "governmentality" to argue that the state - while no longer a concentrated site of power - continues to be produced through an ensemble of administrative practices that manage populations. In so doing, these scholars have tended to take the perspective of high performing administrative states. While this perspective has shed light on the production of disciplined populations, I argue that it is unable to explain the survival of the concept of the state in places where neither the state’s capacity nor even its existence can be taken for granted, as is the case in Haiti. Consequently, I invert the locus of subject formation to examine how individuals’ concrete political action vis-à-vis diffuse agents of governance disciplines these agents into enacting a model of statehood. With this analysis, I present a novel understanding of the broadening field of politics that is characterized in places like Haiti by emergent mobilizations among longstanding community associations that have formerly refrained from overt political action. Echoing Tocqueville, political scientists and policy analysts alike have tended to approach the quantifiable growth of voluntary organizations as an incarnation of civil society. As a result, they have overlooked the fact that in the range of modern uses of the term "civil society" what remains constant is its contrast with a powerful and intrusive state. Echoing Hegel, I suggest that civil society is best approached as a society of civility that is made possible by the social presence of the state. I thus argue that, rather than an exercise in civil society, poor Haitians’ mobilizations of existing forms of association indicate a more foundational exercise to produce the political authority that would make civil society and an ethics of civility possible. By positioning themselves as collective political subjects able to make claims on those they consider to be in power, Haitians aim to realize the proper human life as well as create a sovereign to recognize their claims. I thus argue that states do not produce citizens out of atomized individuals as much as individuals - in establishing themselves as entitled, ethical citizens - produce the state.
