The virtual north: on the boundaries of sovereignty

Abstract

The paper considers the virtualization of sovereignty today in the context of the Arctic debates. These are debates in which various parties, including the Government of Canada, First Nations groups, Inuit, international organizations, scholars, policy-makers and others, use the term sovereignty in diverse and at times divisive ways. We investigate several of the epistemological and ontological stakes of these discussions. We draw attention to the ways in which sovereignty as an abstract concept is actualized in the course of social and political disputes in the North in the twenty-first century.

Keywords:

• Aboriginal
• racial ideology
• power
• politics
• secularism
• theory

Notes

1. The phrase ‘neo-Weberian moment’ is developed further in Milbank (2008) in which he conducts a precipitous reading of Walter Benjamin's essay ‘Capitalism as Religion’ against the background of Weber's work on the state.

2. Agnew in Geopolitics: Revisioning World Politics (1998) attempts something similar, especially in his aim to use visual metaphors such as imagination to ‘show how political geography incorporated the dominant geopolitical imagination from the European-American experience that was then projected onto the rest of the world and into the future’ (p. 1).

3. Incidentally, žižek uses this point to criticize ‘risk society’ social theorists, such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, whose work is open to the dialectical supplement that points out today that ‘racism itself is becoming reflexive’. The Balkans becomes the exceptional space in which the multiculturalists critic can express and project ‘his/her repressed racism’ (p. 6).

4. See Steinberg (1999 ,2001).