Imagined Sovereignties: Frontiers of Statehood and Globalization

Professor Sanjib Baruah is a guest researcher at PRIO in July. He is a PRIO Global Fellow and professor of political studies at Bard College​, New York and honorary research professor at Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi.  

Edited by Pedro Ibarra Güell and Åshild Kolås, Basque Nationhood Towards a Democratic Scenario is now out on Peter Lang International Academic Publishers​​.​​

Debates about Basque self-determination were curtailed for decades by political violence, involving both the actions of ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna) and the counter-terrorism activities of Spain and France. In 2011, ETA announced a permanent cessation of operations. Since then, the stakeholders have become increasingly aware of the need to rethink Basque nationhood and democratic representation in light of the changing nature of nationhood and citizenship within the European Union. These issues are also important in the French Basque country, which has witnessed a re-emergence of Basque identity politics in recent years.

Under the title 'The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty: Contests and Conflicts in a Transnational Era', the conference comprised four panels, exploring a wide variety of cases in which sovereignt​​y is asserted and contested in daily life.

The workshop organized by Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, the Department of Political Science of the University of the Basque Country and PRIO gathered international and Basque researchers to elaborate on contemporary visions of sovereignty and analyze processes of sovereignty construction from an interdisciplinary approach, covering conceptualizations of new political dynamics, emergent sociological processes and their legal reflections, with special focus on the Basque Country and attention to the fields of anthropology, sociology, law, political science and history. Through this multidisciplinary scientific exchange the workshop aimed at advancing the understanding of notions of sovereignty and processes of sovereignty construction in general and in the Basque case specifically. 

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​"Dividing Line" (posted 3 October 2014) and "Upstream Superpowers" (posted 5 December 2014)