Content area
Abstract
This dissertation explores public and private hybridity in the production of sovereign power, or hybrid sovereignty, through the cases of the English East India Company, Blackwater, International Chamber of Commerce, and Amnesty International. It asks: What forms and dynamics are featured in hybrid sovereignty? What implications does hybrid sovereignty have for politics? The dissertation aims to better reflect the diverse power relations we see in our headlines and our lives into our scholarship. A core part of this diversity is that not all actors in international politics are the same or endure in the same way. I argue that the indivisible sovereign state is more fiction than reality and that it takes a whole lot of diverse relations to produce sovereign power. These are relations of hybridity and I focus on public and private hybridity in particular. In this hybrid sovereignty, I complicate standard separations of state and nonstate and make clear the political stakes of their co-production. I also construct a conceptual framework where hybridity is foundational rather than incidental to sovereign politics. All of this supports the empirical weight of the cases, which reveal different hybrid relations in accounts that are not usually put together across security, political economy, and law, to represent the same phenomena and the same politics. I contend that we have to be more thoughtful and precise about the power of and in hybridity if we want to intervene in ongoing debates about how we live responsibly with each other. In doing so, I contribute to research about sovereign authority and power; about relations and the construction of public and private; about historical methods and interpretive methodologies; and about breaking with conventions in unconventional times.
