Entanglement and Domination

• In Event: Politics of Suffering and Resistance: Understanding and Responding to Trauma

Abstract

Many political theorists either explicitly or implicitly assume in the background a Westphalian framework, within which the boundaries between political peoples are clearly defined and relatively fixed. In this framework, each people is constituted by a sovereign state, whose individuated and bounded territorial jurisdiction defines the people’s domain of self-determination. It is further assumed that that members of the people share a political cooperative relationship that is fundamentally different from the relations they have with non-members.
Political realities deviate from this Westphalian ideal, and such deviations are often manufactured as border crisis or infringement of sovereignty. In this paper, I contend that the entanglement between peoples only becomes problematic when it takes on a dominating form. The concept of entanglement is deployed to pick out relationships that range from the relationship between European Union member states to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico. It begins by taking seriously the Westphalian assumption that a people is characterized by a distinct web of political cooperative relationships, combining it with the observation that such relationships are primarily governed by institutions, broadly defined. When one people has a non-trivial say in the institutions of the other people, this say translates into the former’s power to constitute the cooperative relations of the latter. This power is the defining feature of entanglement.
Entanglement can be desirable and, in some cases, inevitable. However, entanglement becomes problematic when it takes on a dominating form, when, in Pettit’s words, one people has the “the unvitiated capacity and uninvaded capacity to interfere or not” over its entangled counterparts. While the concept of self-determination as non-domination was introduced by Iris Young, I argue that, by joining the concepts of domination and entanglement, we are able to pinpoint when a relationship between peoples through studying their institutional dynamics. While domination can come in various degrees, one can nonetheless clarify why the entanglement among European Union member states is more acceptable than that between Puerto Rico and the United States, or the Aboriginal peoples and Australia, or Hong Kong and China. Additionally, by joining the two concepts, we can better interpret a shared dimension of suffering among the dominated entangled peoples. With reference to Puerto Rico’s Citizen Public Debt Audit campaign, Australia’s Indigenous Voice referendum, and Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition movement, I contend that this dimension of suffering can be captured by the people’s deprivation of the capacity to shape its own relations of political cooperation. Through an examination of the demands in these campaigns, I argue that this suffering does not return us to a Westphalian framework but rather points us to possibilities for non-dominating relationships of entanglement among peoples.

Keywords: self-determination, domination, peoplehood, transnationalism, suffering

Author

• Kai Yui Samuel Chan, University of California, Berkeley