Putting on a Show? The Sovereignty of De Facto States Between Performativity, Performance and Virtuality

ABSTRACT

De facto states are widely seen as temporal anomalies of the international system, and, in state-centric literature in particular, as entities lacking ‘real’ sovereignty that are simply putting on a show, pretending to be something they are not in the hope that faking it may one day lead to international recognition. Critically engaging with recent literature on de facto states as well as debates on performativity/performance, this article rejects as misguided the dichotomous ontologies of fake versus real. Instead, I argue that the most prominent examples of de facto states, that possess both internal and arguably also a considerable degree of external sovereignty, demonstrate that statehood is not the linchpin of the international system it is made out to be. Drawing on Bergson and Deleuze, I suggest that the sovereignty – of de facto states and beyond – should be understood as virtuality, where past and present are contemporaneous, and where sovereignty as virtual may or may not be actualised in statehood, thus posing for discussion a novel framework that elegantly disentangles sovereignty and statehood. The analytical promise of such an approach, in conclusion, is illustrated in a brief discussion of Iraqi Kurdistan and Taiwan.

Acknowledgements

Ideas, concepts and sections of this article have been presented at various conferences over the past years and the feedback I received is greatly appreciated and has improved earlier drafts. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Andrew Williams (University of St. Andrews) and Janis Grzybowski (Université Catholique de Lille) as well as the anonymous Geopolitics reviewers for their helpful and much appreciated comments on the final draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For an example of this understanding of performative applied to the state and governance, see Ding (2022).

2. For an indicator of the concept’s inherent complexities, beyond John Agnew’s (1994) classic of critical geography, see for example Kalmo and Skinner (2011) and Černy and Grzybowski (2023).

3. For identity as ideology, see Malešević (2006).

4. Butler voiced a preference for the pronouns they/them when referring to them, to which this article adheres.

5. To be fair, Goffman himself displayed a degree of unease about the extent of optionality an actor can exercise in her performance of social roles; see West (1996).

6. A more extensive exploration of synergies between performance and performativity is also urged by the editors of a special issue on agency in IR in the Journal of International Relations and Development, see Braun, S. Schindler, T. Wille. (2019).

7. See Simon Reeve’s BBC series Places That Don’t Exist (2005), in which he reports from the world’s most prominent de facto states. On many of the same cases, see Keating (2018); on Somaliland, see Prunier (2021).

8. Information provided by the TRNC Foreign Ministry that has not been independently verified.

9. Alternatively, in Bryant and Hatay (2021) the TRNC’s sovereignty is characterised as a ‘real’ that cannot be ‘realised’.

10. On 24 April 2004 two separate referendums were held on the island of Cyprus, with the organisers availing themselves of the institutions in each polity. If, even for the purpose of the referendum, the international community would have adhered to a RoC-only sovereignty, the referendum technically would have been processed differently. See Drath (2004). On the goodwill of the Bush administration towards the TRNC after the referendum, see Pegg and Berg (2016).

11. Growing unease with the strictly linear trajectories of state creation of methodological nationalism is reflected in the more recent de facto states literature which increasingly rejects a terminology of ‘fake’ or ‘pseudo’ to describe these entities. See Broers (2013) and O’Loughlin et al. (2014).

12. On the myth function in IR, see Weber (2017).

13. In fact, for Deleuze even the artist, Vermeer, is a falsifier; what distinguishes him from van Meegeren and the art experts is that the latter merely apply static criteria for their work, while the artist himself has the power of creative transformation. See Deleuze seminar, 12 June 1984, referenced in Smith (2012).

14. Beyond Eurocentric worldviews, a similar understanding of time is expressed in the concept of tiempos mixtos or ‘multitemporal heterogeneity’ (García-Canclini 1995), where pre-modernity, modernity, and post-modernity overlap and co-exist in Latin American societies. ‘The idea of multitemporal heterogeneity, or tiempos mixtos, reflects at once the continuing relevance of the indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial cultural sediments in Latin American societies’ (Kraidy 2005, 62), that are constituted by concurrent complex interplays and articulations of traditions and diverse and unequal modernities.

15. More recently John Agnew, at least indirectly, might have sensed the usefulness of engaging with Deleuzian concepts, for in his conceptualisation of the connection between sovereignty, territoriality, and globalisation he acknowledges (2017, 28) his intellectual debt to Saskia Sassen (2006) who operates with Deleuzian assemblages.

16. The entire special issue Ethnopolitics 17(4) is devoted to this framework.

17. It has to be said that at the same time recognition can assume an almost mythical character for the population of de facto states, whose everyday troubles are expected to miraculously vanish with their polity finally being recognised as a state. On these ill-founded hopes in the context of Somaliland, see Pegg et al. (2019).

18. Technically, one could argue that with the 2005 Constitution Iraqi Kurdistan’s status as an autonomous region of Iraq was resolved and it ceased to be a de facto state, yet IR scholars continue to categorise it as such. See Natali (2010), Voller (2014) or Klich (2022).

19. Taiwan, for example, can only participate in the Olympic Games as ‘Chinese Taipei’ and not under its flag, yet the Taiwanese passport, with ‘Republic of China’ in Chinese characters and ‘Taiwan’ in English on its front cover, according to Henley’s, ranks among the world’s most widely accepted travel documents to allow its bearer visa-free travel to more than 140 countries. Likewise, in 2014/5, when the Obama administration armed Iraqi Kurdistan with sophisticated weaponry for the war against Daesh, it at first channelled all supplies through Baghdad to acknowledge Iraq’s nominal sovereignty, only to soon realise the practical futility of such an exercise and arm Iraqi Kurdistan directly. See International Crisis Group (ICG) (2015).

20. The most recent state to switch recognition from the ROC to the PRC was Honduras in March 2023. See Davidson (2023).

21. While the US position merely acknowledges but does not recognise the PRC’s claim on Taiwan, the PRC’s policy on the international status of Taiwan follows a dual-track playbook. It strives to keep the polity within China – as part of One China – even if it implicitly challenges CCP rule, which is preferable to the ROC becoming an independent state as Taiwan, thus keeping the hope alive that the appeal of the One Country, Two Systems framework it signed off on, for Hong Kong will eventually win the Taiwanese over for unification. At the same time, the PRC leaves nothing undone in poaching states to switch recognition from the ROC to the PRC, thus gradually and quite successfully smothering Taiwan’s breathing space among the international community of states. See Huang (2016) and Shattuck (2020).

22. Unification or merely a gradual move towards unification is supported by less than 10%.

23. The examination of such acts of improvisation in the performance of state practices are central to Newman and Visoka’s (2018) study of the foreign policy of Kosovo.

24. Beyond the TRNC, Iraqi Kurdistan and Taiwan, for this sentiment applied to Somaliland, see Bradbury (2008).

25. While Caspersen (2011) categorise Taiwan as an unrecognised state, Caspersen (2012) lists it as a ‘borderline case’. Klich’s (2022) categorisation, on the other hand, that classifies polities that fail to secure UN admission as insufficiently internationally recognised, rejects such borderline cases and squarely lists Taiwan as among de facto states.