Current Anthropology Volume 57, Number 5, October 2016 565

The Nature of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene

Hydroelectric Lessons of Struggle, Otherness,
and Economics from Paraguay

by Christine Folch

Leftist former Bishop Fernando Lugo came to power in Paraguay in 2008 with the pledge to “recover Paraguay’s
hydroelectric sovereignty” from Brazil by demanding greater control of the energy and finances of Itaipú Binational
Hydroelectric Dam. This article explores what is meant by “hydroelectric sovereignty” and argues for a new approach
to how to theorize sovereignty within anthropology by urging that scholars move beyond a focus on the exception, bio-
power, and bare life. The (re)turn I propose situates sovereignty historically in terms of nature, economics, cultural oth-
erness, and imperialism by engaging an older genealogy of sovereignty, the sixteenth-century Spanish school of Sala-
manca, which centered on the rights of indigenous peoples to control their natural resources and govern themselves. This
tradition gave rise to international law, setting in place a framework that continues to structure the global economy and
natural resources, including the hydroelectric potential of Itaipú Dam. By exploring how hydroelectric sovereignty is
an example of theorizing from the margins, I show how the asymmetrical dominance between Brazil and Paraguay, the
desirability of natural resources in a time of environmental scarcity, and the supremacy of economic imperative presage
twenty-first-century changes in eco-environmental sovereignties.

A man in the crowd eagerly handed me a flyer from the large
stack in his arms.
“Why We Are Mobilized” opened the full-page litany in
Portuguese, none of which had been translated into Spanish,
though we still stood on Paraguayan soil. Amid drumbeats and
ice-cold tereré sipped on the already hot morning, hundreds
of Paraguayan activists from peasant, indigenous, and worker
groups marched to the border with Brazil at the very center of
the Friendship Bridge suspended high above the Paraná River.
The yellow/green/blue and red/white/blue of the national flags
intermingled with the red flags of Brazil’s Landless Workers
Movement and the green of the Paraguayan Campesino Move-
ment. Parked in the middle of the international highway was
a large pickup truck rigged with loudspeakers over which orga-
nizers explained the goal of the rally: “popular integration along
with energy and food sovereignty, to construct the Great Home-
land.”1
The first of three brief speakers, a member of the Landless
Workers Movement, called for solidarity in the face of elite
opposition. He proclaimed, “The struggle for sovereignty over
energy resources, over water resources, is a common struggle
of the Paraguayan people [povo] and of the Brazilian people.”
Christine Folch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural
Anthropology at Duke University (201 G Friedl Building, Campus
Box 90091, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA [christine.folch@duke
.edu]). This paper was submitted 13 XI 12, accepted 18 I 16, and elec-
tronically published 23 VIII 16.
Although much was said about agrarian reform and land
rights, the allusive timing of the protest made clear its pur-
pose: March 26, 2009, was the twenty-sixth anniversary of the
1973 Itaipú Treaty (Paraguay-Brazil), which initiated the con-
troversial construction of Itaipú Binational Hydroelectric Dam,
the world’s largest hydroelectric dam. Transnational and multi-
sectoral, the protest combined several grassroots struggles for
control over natural resources. And by prominently showcasing
Brazilian social movements, it represented an important tri-
umph for Paraguayan hydroelectric energy activists who had
mobilized around the cause of Itaipú as a source and expres-
sion of systemic inequality for decades. Leftist energy activists
in Paraguay used the cry for “hydroelectric sovereignty” to ex-
press both the problems and the solutions for injustice and
poverty, forming a subaltern sovereignty movement that ac-
tively redefined epistemological categories and had its sights
set on something other than just control of the national-state
apparatus.
On that morning, more than a thousand activists from Bra-
zil, Paraguay, and even Argentina took over the main economic
artery connecting Paraguay to its most important trading part-
ner, effectively shutting down all traffic and customs duties; yet
the few Paraguayan police ambling through the crowds merely
looked on, observant but placid. The one-page flyer—signed
by Vía Campesina, the Brazilian Social Forum, and Popular As-
1. “Integración popular con soberanía energética y alimentaria con-
struyendo la patria grande.”

q 2016 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2016/5705-0002$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/688580

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 566
sembly but curiously not by the Movement of Dam-Affected
Peoples—explained:
We are mobilized . . .
• Because we fight for a fair solution for the Itaipú Treaty.
Paraguay ought to receive a fair price for energy it sells,
and those resources should be used to confront the grave
social problems of that country;
• Because we defend the energy sovereignty of Para-
guay, the energy sovereignty and food sovereignty of
our countries.
The language on the flyer came directly from the long-
standing Paraguayan struggle for hydroelectric sovereignty
(Folch 2015). Through their treatment of sovereignty, the peas-
ant and energy activists forged a political-economic critique of
international law on the streets and from the margins as part
of the leftward turn in Latin America.
During his prematurely terminated presidency, Paraguay’s
socialist-leaning president Fernando Lugo (2008–2012) spear-
headed a nationwide effort for greater control over the coun-
try’s vast hydroelectric resources. In fact, ex-Bishop Lugo came
to power with a pledge to recuperar la soberanía hidroeléctrica
(recover Paraguay’s hydroelectric sovereignty) at Itaipú Bina-
tional Hydroelectric Dam and reinvest the proceeds in social
development, a campaign promise that initially began on the
left but grew so popular that it became widely accepted across
the political spectrum.
The example of Itaipú and of the movement for hydro-
electric sovereignty in Paraguay raises important questions
about nature, asymmetrical relationships between states, and
just why the term “sovereignty” has such relevance. In addition
to exploring these themes, however, I also wish to take up the
debate launched by the energy activists to suggest a significant
theoretical turn in how we study and understand sovereignty
within Anglophone anthropology. The move I urge situates
sovereignty historically in terms of nature, economics, and impe-
rialism and is not so much something new as it is a reengage-
ment with a body of literature that has received less attention
in the wake of recent interest in bare life and the exception. I
advocate a return to a conversation about sovereignty begun by
Spanish jurists in the sixteenth-century school of Salamanca
that centered on the rights of indigenous peoples to control
their natural resources and to govern themselves in the context
of imperialism, debates that influence the present because they
shaped the bedrock of international law.
But Itaipú matters beyond the specificities of Paraguayan
politics. Whereas the United States generates two-thirds of its
electricity by burning fossil fuels and the rest of the world fol-
lows suit—with regions deriving two-thirds to three-quarters
to all of their electricity from hydrocarbons—South America
stands apart (EIA 2012). In that region, known for fossil fuel
exports, two-thirds of the electricity generated comes from re-
newable energy sources. Itaipú Dam is the largest source of re-
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Current Anthropology Volume 57, Number 5, October 2016
newable energy in the one region in the world that gets the
majority of its electricity from non-fossil-fuel sources, fore-
shadowing conflicts and resolutions that may become all the
more common in a post-fossil-fuel future. And so, in struggling
for energy/hydroelectric sovereignty at Itaipú, social movements
in Brazil and Paraguay touched on issues concerning contentious
water resources the world over.
The Anthropocene has made natural resources all the more
fraught by calling into question just exactly whose priorities
and claims have precedence. Contests over natural resources
have increased with the growing awareness that humans have
become a planet-shaping force, altering biological, climato-
logical, and geologic systems in manners so catastrophic that
the viability of human life itself is threatened (Aravamudan
2013; Chakrabarty 2008). As nature-as-an-accumulation strat-
egy expands to include DNA sequences and energy potentials,
decision-making processes over the use and ownership of re-
sources have entered into a new era of heightened complexity.
But for all the novelty of a future endangered by anthropogenic
climate change, this is not the first time that such a sharp dis-
juncture between an old world and a new one has called into
question the very way humans relate to one another and to
the earth with ramifications that restructured the global politi-
cal economy. In the early sixteenth century, the world’s largest
empire also faced a similarly unprecedented dilemma: how to
comprehend the Americas and their inhabitants in light of the
already rapacious conquest and the desirability of New World
resources. My contention is that categories embedded in the
school of Salamanca’s discussion have increased resonance to-
day precisely because of the unknown catastrophic potential
from the Anthropocene.
To untangle these threads, this article bookends a discus-
sion of various theoretical approaches to sovereignty with
ethnographic data from Paraguay. In the first section of the
paper, I give a more detailed introduction to Itaipú Dam and
hydroelectric politics in the Fernando Lugo era. I then discuss
sovereignty as commonly studied within political science as
well as more familiar anthropological interventions on the sub-
ject before turning to challenges to nation-state-centric and
biopolitical definitions of sovereignty raised by counterhege-
monic—what I have called “subaltern”—sovereignty move-
ments, such as tribal, food, seed, and hydroelectric sovereignty
struggles. The third section of the paper then builds the case
for the Spanish juristic origins of the kinds of sovereignty-
related themes that we see arise in subaltern sovereignty strug-
gles by detailing the contributions of Francisco de Vitoria. The
key insight that comes from recognizing the influence of the
school of Salamanca is that, in imperialism, nature and necro-
political killability are united via economics and justified by
cultural inferiority. The final section returns to the ethno-
graphic case from Paraguay and refracts subaltern sovereignty
struggles through the lens of Salamanca to show how com-
merce, natural resources, and cultural otherness are enmeshed
in sovereignty.
Folch Nature of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene
Hydroelectric Politics in the Lugo Era
Itaipú Dam is riddled with state sovereignty issues.2 Paraguay
and Brazil each own 50% of the binational dam, which spans
the tumultuous Paraná River dividing the two countries. The
joint venture was built in the 1970s and 1980s to solve a
sovereignty conundrum over the exact location of the inter-
national border. Though the dam is equally owned by both
countries, per the 1973 treaty the energy and the finances from
the dam are not evenly split. Brazil receives the vast majority of
the electricity from Itaipú Dam, including most of Paraguay’s
share; Paraguay receives additional payment for its energy sold
in Brazil, although this amount is disputed. On the other hand,
the Brazilian government was entirely responsible for financ-
ing the construction debt (including the Paraguayan half ) be-
cause Paraguay could not secure the loans and, to this day, be-
cause the majority of the energy is sold to Brazilian consumers,
pays the majority of this debt. Itaipú generates US$4 billion
in annual energy sales (most of which goes to pay off the
$US60 billion construction debt) and produces an average of
more than 90,000 GW-hours each year.
Numbers like these can be difficult to envision because of
their sheer scale, but they are necessary for understanding
how sovereignty and nature are tied up in the energy from
the dam. Itaipú’s turbines churn out enough electricity to sup-
ply around 20% of Brazil’s entire annual energy consumption,
or 20 Paraguays, or enough to power one-third of the state of
California (Itaipú Binacional 2010:15). In 2009—an average
year—Paraguay consumed only 16% of its half of Itaipú elec-
tricity, which met 77% of its total demand. The remaining 84%
of Paraguay’s half, plus all of Brazil’s half, was consumed in
Brazil, providing 19% of that country’s total energy consump-
tion (Itaipú Binacional 2010:15). For the Paraguayan energy
“ceded” to Brazil, Brazil’s public utility company paid Para-
guay’s government US$2.81 per MW-hour in 2009, at that time
the highest rate since the dam first became operational in 1984.
The Brazilian electricity company then resold the electricity
on the Brazilian market for anywhere between US$20 and US$80
per MW-hour, pocketing whatever did not go to cover trans-
mission costs. In essence, Paraguay received one-tenth to one-
fortieth of the final market price of its electricity.
Fernando Lugo—thanks to the urging of Ricardo Canese, a
close ally and a lifelong energy activist—promised to renego-
tiate this unequal distribution, demanding a market rate for
2. A note on terms and definitions. I take the “state” to be both insti-
tutions and practices of violent domination as well as the symbolic struc-
tures and personal experiences that interpret, justify, and mediate that
domination (Abrams 1977; Mitchell 2006). By “nation,” I mean the group of
people and the historical narratives that describe the members of a nation-
state. For the sake of simplicity, in this article I do not italicize these terms
to signify that they are also in question and, in fact, in a constant process
of contestation and construction. Itaipú Dam (14 GW installed capac-
ity) produces more than 90,000 GW-hours per year, more electricity that
the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam (22.5 GW installed capacity) in China.
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567
the energy as well as the freedom to sell Paraguayan energy to
whatever market it chose. Both demands departed from the
Itaipú Treaty, which would expire only in 2023. From 2007 to
2010, I conducted fieldwork among Lugo’s social movement
supporters and cabinet-level appointees as Canese’s team nego-
tiated Itaipú with their Brazilian counterparts and attempted
to implement social development. This article focuses on the
progressive hydroelectric sovereignty activists led by Canese,
who helped organize the March 26 rally and, as senior members
of the Paraguayan Foreign Ministry, negotiated directly with
the Brazilian chancellery. But they were not the only or even,
perhaps, the most successful interlocutors with Brazil. As a
result of the electoral coalition necessary for victory, Lugo
appointed Carlos Mateo Balmelli as the Paraguayan executive
director of Itaipú Dam. Balmelli, a former presidential candi-
date from the more traditional Liberal Party, headed a team of
Paraguayan energy technocratic experts in Itaipú in a concur-
rent behind-the-scenes negotiation with their Brazilian ana-
logues at Itaipú Dam.
March 26, 2009, demonstrated that popular groups within
Brazil also appreciated Paraguayan claims about the massive
dam. This support was important because the Paraguayan
push for hydroelectric sovereignty faced outright opposition
from some sectors in Brazil and a markedly different nego-
tiating strategy from political rivals within Paraguay, who
sought a less polarizing resolution to the crisis.
Political and economic elites in Brazil were public in their
dissent. On hearing of the popular agitation in Paraguay dur-
ing the 2007 presidential campaign, Brazilian Foreign Minister
Celso Amorim offered a conciliatory note, suggesting that the
price paid to Paraguay might be increased a small amount as
long as it did not onerously burden the Brazilian consumer.
But he also maintained that “there is an aspect of Itaipú that
is sacrosanct: the energy that does not go to Paraguay must go
to Brazil. This is the essence of the agreement for the dam”
(Leo 2007).
Brazilian Energy Minister Edison Lobão was less diplo-
matic. Just two weeks before the March 26 protest, long after
Lugo had won the election and hydroelectric negotiations be-
tween the two countries had commenced, disagreements in-
tensified over Paraguayan requests for more money for ex-
ported electricity from Brazilian consumers. An exasperated
Lobão expressed what many were saying off the record: Par-
aguay did not contribute “um centavo sequer” (even one cent)
to construct Itaipú (Craide 2009).
In the midst of the sound bites that flew back and forth
between the leftists in Lugo’s government and Brazilian gov-
ernment officials, I asked one of the high-ranking Paraguayan
energy technocrats at Itaipú Dam about their alternative ne-
gotiating strategy: “Why don’t you mention Paraguay’s hydro-
electric sovereignty?”
“Because there’s no such thing,” the engineer replied.
Carlos Mateo Balmelli, a trained lawyer with a doctorate in
political science from the University of Mainz, circumvented
 568
the discussion on hydroelectric sovereignty entirely by fram-
ing his team’s proposals in terms of two well-established in-
ternational legal principles: pacta sunt servanda (agreements
must be kept) and rebus sic stantibus (things thus standing).
Whereas the leftists demanded a renegotiation of the treaty,
effectively upending international legal practice, the techno-
cratic team invoked international legal structures in support of
Paraguayan claims. Balmelli’s team was not merely placating;
they had their own international legal-political project that
saw the binational dam as a way to implement a new political
economic order within Paraguay.
It is beyond the scope of this article to explore the ram-
ifications of these different political projects, how it came to be
that Itaipú was the locus for so many debates on sovereignty,
or what this all might herald for energy and water politics in
the twenty-first century. Instead, I focus on how the expansion
of counterhegemonic sovereignty struggles calls for better the-
orizing of sovereignty. The complaint began on the Paraguayan
left, part of the Latin American new left that has developed after
the fall of the Soviet bloc and in the midst of dissatisfaction with
Eurasian political-economic categories (Escobar 2010; Mignolo
2005). Moreover, Paraguay has a long tradition of local pro-
gressive activism; for example, the 1936 Febrerista Revolution
was an autochthonous socialist movement independent of both
Moscow and Beijing. Important critique from below is being
done in Paraguay; the definition of sovereignty, the problems by
which it has been lost, and what should be done with it do not
simply follow in the mold of North Atlantic political-economic
categories.
Approaches to Sovereignty
Understanding sovereignty has been one of the central con-
cerns of North Atlantic political science from the moment
sixteenth-century French theorist Jean Bodin (1992) defined
sovereignty as the “absolute and perpetual power of a com-
monwealth,” without limits of time, power, or function (1).
Writing to other political scientists and policy makers on state
sovereignty in the context of late twentieth-century weak states
and globalization, Krasner (1999) distinguishes four ways that
the term has been used, though he acknowledges that there
may be others. The first two look inward, while the latter two
turn outward. “Interdependence sovereignty” he describes as
a government’s ability to control what moves across its bor-
ders as well as its ability to use its borders as a means of con-
trol. By “domestic sovereignty,” he means the way authority is
organized within a certain polity. “Westphalian sovereignty”
refers to a government’s autonomy from external authority
and takes its origin from the 1684 resolution to European re-
ligious wars that determined that the religion of the magnate
was the religion of the land. This is closely linked to “inter-
national legal sovereignty,” which is the mutual recognition
of states (often signaled through consular exchange, treaties,
and membership in international organizations). Krasner’s at-
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Current Anthropology Volume 57, Number 5, October 2016
tempt to define sovereignty has a particular political-historical
context, as he himself freely admits. In his case, he argues
that accusations that globalization has unleashed a new threat
against nation-state sovereignty err because they fail to rec-
ognize that there have always been challenges to nation-state
sovereignty. Weaker states have always had difficulty internally
controlling the space of the state and repudiating external
control.
But weak institutionality, tentative borders (Chalfin 2010),
and globalization are not the only disruptions of state sov-
ereignty. Human rights and all sides of the war on terror—
in the form of drone warfare and the doctrine of preemptive
strikes as well as in the form of stateless threats—undercut
idealized noninterference. Arendt (1990) poses the core di-
lemma of human rights as the question of who has the “right
to have rights,” especially vis-à-vis the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (1948), which mandates intervention in the
case of genocide, where states are to be the guarantor of hu-
man rights even as they are also the violators. In a different vein,
Mamdani (2008) suggests that human rights are a means by
which a supposedly benign, humanitarian form of antipolitics
is shaping global governance in its own image, turning citizens
into wards. For Benhabib (2009), international human rights
norms have the jurisgenerative potential to “empower citizens
in democracies by creating new vocabularies for claim making,”
in part because participation in transnational networks of rights
advocacy leads to new imaginative horizons (696).
Geertz (2004) makes an argument similar to Krasner’s when
he asks, “What is a state if it is not a sovereign?”—there defin-
ing as sovereign political communities those “culturally solid-
ary entities” that are organized and autonomous (578). He
argues against the fiction of the Weberian state by pointing
out the fragmentation and contestation in new states, turning
to the examples of Morocco (which was defined by its center,
not by its porous and contested edges) and Indonesia (which,
like Morocco, was undergoing the “state-threatening phenom-
enon” of religious violence).3 In this way, problems of sover-
eignty are predominantly characteristic of postcolonial states.
His responders, several of them Latin Americanists, counter
that even just the ability to somewhat withstand multinational
and globalizing forces renders nation-states legitimate. Lom-
nitz (2004) argues, like Adelman (2006) elsewhere, that the
problems of sovereignty experienced in today’s postcolonial
states arise not just because of new globalizing trends but, in
fact, from the incompleteness of colonial states, which had
only limited authority and therefore no sovereignty.
In the conversation of state sovereignty heavily influenced
by political science, the nation-state seems indispensable. How-
3. Weber (2004) is much more careful in his definitions. He writes
that the modern state “is a human community that (successfully) claims
the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given ter-
ritory” (emphasis in original). For Weber, the “claim” is as crucial as the
“monopoly” to his definition.
Folch Nature of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene
ever, for anthropology writ large it is not, in part because we
often work at smaller units of scale but also because ethnology
takes us to other long-standing arrangements of human soci-
ality. The persistence of imperialism as a resilient political phe-
nomenon (Harvey 2003) is, of course, an underlying premise
to this paper. Many recent explorations of sovereignty in an-
thropology have focused on a biopolitical definition stemming
from Agamben’s (1998, 2005) reworking of Schmitt (1985),
with an emphasis on the body, the exception, and necropo-
litical killability. Hansen and Stepputat (2006) consider Agam-
ben’s attention to violence and Foucault’s to how power is
diffused within a system to write, “The key move we propose is
to abandon sovereignty as an ontological ground of power and
order, expressed in law or in enduring ideas of legitimate rule,
in favor of a view of sovereignty as a tentative and always emer-
gent form of authority grounded in violence that is performed
and designed to generate loyalty, fear, and legitimacy from the
neighborhood to the summit of the state” (297). Moreover, they
go on to suggest that complexity in sovereignty was the norm in
the colonial world, asserting that different “registers of sover-
eignty” regularly coincided there.
Set alongside ethnographic studies of political organiza-
tion in communities, anthropologists have found the states
and spaces of exception where sovereignty is demonstrated
through biopolitical acts (cataloging bodies, surveilling bod-
ies, and executing bodies) that are useful in understanding
power (Das and Poole 2004; Folch 2013; Mbembe 2003; Ong
2006; Roitman 2004). And science and technology studies have
foregrounded crucial conversations within the discipline on
biocitizenship and organizational technologies of the body
(Ong and Collier 2005). In spite of the vibrancy of these ap-
proaches, recent scholarship on sovereignty has pointed out
shortcomings in the conversation so far. Singh (2012) explores
the mystical sovereignty of Thakur Baba, a spiritual figure in
central India, moving beyond political or economic contexts
for the exercise of sovereign power. In an insightful genea-
logical analysis of Agambenian sovereignty, Jennings (2011)
points out that an uncritical acceptance of Agamben by an-
thropologists has naturalized modern political categories.
But the Brazilian and Paraguayan activists from the open-
ing of this paper who insisted on speaking of sovereignty do
not seem to fit neatly into any of the categories described
above. In Paraguay, leftist social movement leaders connected
sovereignty to the alienability of commodities and market-
set energy prices as the way to finance social transformation.
To scholars of Latin America and other colonized commu-
nities, the resurgence of sovereignty as a way to frame social
and political issues will be familiar. Although movements like
this are often called “third world sovereignty” or “decolonial”
movements, I prefer to use “counterhegemonic” or “subaltern”
sovereignty because, as the ethnographic examples below will
show, there are similarities to be drawn between movements
that may or may not be in the global South. In fact, many of
them are notably located in the first world. Their appeal may
be against a nation-state or a transnational corporation and
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569
not just against an imperial state. Chakrabarty (2000) has
urged readers to provincialize Europe; to do so, the Latin
American subaltern studies group called for a “radical critique
of elite cultures, of liberal, bourgeois, and modern epistemol-
ogies” (Rodríguez 2001:9). In using “subaltern,” I also invoke
Roseberry’s (1994) reading of Gramscian hegemony: “I pro-
pose that we use the concept not to understand consent but
to understand struggle; the ways in which the words, images,
symbols, forms, organizations, institutions, and movements
used by subordinate populations to talk about, understand,
confront, accommodate themselves to, or resist domination
are shaped by the process of domination itself ” (360–361).
Because modern international law is made in the European
colonial experience, the school of Salamanca exposes contra-
dictions at the very core of universalized (and universalizing)
liberal international legal structures.
As we saw, Vía Campesina and other peasant groups are now
organizing around food sovereignty as a way to combat trans-
national agribusiness (Boyer 2010). In the 1980s, PRONAL, a
Mexican government food program, first defined food sov-
ereignty as national, opposed to international, control of the
food chain. But especially with the founding of Vía Campe-
sina in the 1990s, rural and peasant groups reframed their
aim from food security to food sovereignty, a move that con-
nected self-provisioning, poverty alleviation, and relief from
hunger as expressions of self-determination and community.
The 2007 Nyéléni Declaration, named for the Malian village
that hosted the first International Food Sovereignty Forum
that year, built on these discussions and defined food sov-
ereignty as “the right of peoples to healthy and culturally ap-
propriate food produced through ecologically sound and sus-
tainable methods, and their right to define their own food
and agriculture systems” (Nyéléni 2007). Examining the suc-
cesses and weaknesses of food sovereignty movements, Edel-
man (2014) locates part of the difficulty in a programmatic
uncertainty about the scope and enforcement of sovereignty.
But he also raises theoretical concerns when he mistrusts the
“deeply authoritarian premise” that underlays Agamben’s use
of Nazi sympathizer Schmitt for the definition of sovereign as
“he who decides upon the state of exception” (Edelman 2014:
968).
Cattelino’s (2008) work on Seminole Indians and gaming
also centers on what is meant by and what is done with sov-
ereignty. She shows how Seminoles argue that gaming wealth
is simultaneously an expression of their sovereignty and the
means by which it might be exercised when reinvested in eco-
nomic and social development of tribal citizens, supplanting
the nearly nonexistent US federal provisions. Tribal sover-
eignty can also be enforced through the opening of tribal col-
leges, as the Oglala Lakota (of Pine Ridge) did in founding
Oglala Lakota College in 1971. Similarly, Idle No More’s recent
challenge to Canadian oil extraction rests under a “vision . . .
[that] revolves around Indigenous Ways of Knowing rooted
in Indigenous Sovereignty to protect water, air, land and all
creation for future generations” (Idle No More 2013). In fact,
 570
the repeated public evocation of tribal sovereignty in North
America parallels a long indigenous intellectual tradition of
engagement on sovereignty (Deloria 1988 [1969]).
In these examples, the question is not so much about
where and when law can be retracted so that certain bodies
are legally killable. Instead, sovereignty is something that has
been taken away or is threatened (and thus needs to be re-
gained or protected). This kind of sovereignty seems to have
a lot to do with law, legality, and contracts. It is somehow
about communities and community control of a vital resource
(often a natural resource—land, water, seed). It is demon-
strated through the ability to dispose of the resource (to use it
or sell it) without intervention from outside the community.
And, as a result of the control of the resource, the community
is able to secure its future.
As anthropologists, we are trained to problematize all the
nouns and verbs in the preceding paragraph—what is meant
by “community,” “intervention,” and “control”? But here I
interrogate what is meant by “sovereignty” in situations like
the Paraguayan case by showing how the concept of sovereignty
has been enmeshed with questions of imperialism, natural re-
sources, and cultural otherness for the past 5 centuries. I turn
to a debate on sovereignty that has its roots in the Spanish
juristic discussions of Francisco de Vitoria regarding the sov-
ereignty of the native peoples of the Americas, which has been
enshrined in international law governing intellectual property
rights, energy disputes, and preemptive strikes even today.
Again, as anthropologists, we do not need to be convinced of
the value of ethnographic specificity; however, the present en-
tailments of Spanish juristic thinking are not solely or even
predominantly experienced in areas of indigeneity but, rather,
throughout international law worldwide. That is to say, this is
not just about third world sovereignty; instead, this is about
principles that structure sovereignty in the first world.
And what of the prominent place of hydroelectricity, soil
fertility, or seed in subaltern sovereignty movements? At Itaipú
Dam, water is not merely water; it is a social relation. Latin
Americanist anthropologists have long called for greater at-
tention to the material—particularly natural resources and
agricultural commodities—than is sometimes given in stud-
ies of political economy focused on the capital-labor dyad.
Writing of Venezuelan petroleum, Coronil (1996, 1997) brings
Marx and Lefebvre to bear on the question of nature and
natural resources in thinking about modern political eco-
nomics. Lefebvre (1991) argues that space is socially produced
via spatial practices of economic production and social re-
production. For Coronil and Lefebvre, the addition of land to
transform Marx’s binary of capital-labor (from Capital, vol. 1)
into his “trinity formula” of capital-labor-land (from Capital,
vol. 3) offers more robust analysis and brings the state more
fully into a political-economic analysis of natural resources.
Because land is a social relation, Coronil (1997) uses Lefebvre’s
argument that it includes “landlords, country, aristocracy” to
then leverage an attention to the physical composition of na-
ture into a full-fledged study of the nation-state, politics, and
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Current Anthropology Volume 57, Number 5, October 2016
political strategy (57). For Coronil, the land that is then in-
flected is oil in Venezuela. In Paraguay, it is hydroelectric
potential. Today, the growing interest in infrastructure, in STS,
and in the impacts of the Anthropocene has cemented the
theoretical, not just empirical, importance of materiality to
lived human experience and the structure of human socie-
ties. And so, while there is notable theoretical richness in an-
thropological writing on sovereignty issues as biopolitical ex-
ception and necropolitics, the literature does not draw the
same depth to an analysis of subaltern sovereignty movements
or their contentions over natural resources and the fundamen-
tal role played by violence in originating an unequal political-
legal hierarchy.
The School of Salamanca: Bringing Colonialism
and Natural Resources Back In
The inland city of Salamanca boasts the oldest university in
Spain. There in the sixteenth century, scholars debated the im-
plications of new economic developments as maritime trade
increased across the Atlantic and the theological repercussions
of employing enslaved Africans. In recent years, the economic
writings of Dominican and Jesuit thinkers of Salamanca who
had contact with Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch merchants
have caught the attention of economic historians. Hayek’s
student Grice-Hutchinson (1952) argues that, as the Thomistic
scholars made sense of the financial changes following the
introduction of New World bullion into the Spanish economy,
they developed a form of promarket analysis that anticipated
the Austrian school of economics (see also Huerta de Soto
2009:83). In a related fashion, the school of Salamanca initi-
ated important directions in international law, whose ramifi-
cations shaped the North Atlantic world and thus European
empires for centuries, exemplifying how a rapidly changing
world leads to new paths of political economy. Legal histo-
rians credit Dominican friar Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546,
sometimes written as “Victoria”) as one of the key originators
of the concepts and problems that got bundled together un-
der the doctrine of sovereignty, forming the core of interna-
tional law (Cohen 1960; Kennedy 1986; Ramón Hernández
1991; Scott 1934; Wagner 2011).
Vitoria and two of his most important modern interpret-
ers, Robert Williams and Antony Anghie, systematically con-
nect economics to self-governance to just war. The sovereignty
doctrine—a component of international legal sovereignty in
Krasner’s typology—undergirds treaties and all other engage-
ments between states, including trade, governance, and war.
The cardinal precept of international law (including economic
agreements with multinational corporations) assumes that all
national states are equal and equally sovereign within bounded
territories. Although idealized as an even playing field of inde-
pendent actors who possess the same capacity to enter and to
withdraw, the reality of the international legal order is anything
but balanced. Williams and Anghie argue that the supposed
Folch Nature of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene
neutrality of the sovereignty doctrine in actuality masks an
ongoing asymmetry between colonizers and colonized. That is,
it is not just unfortunate happenstance that not all states are
equal; rather, the inequality is a product of the system of in-
ternational law. I assert that this debate makes sense of the
movement for hydroelectric sovereignty in Paraguay and clar-
ifies similarities between that movement and other counter-
hegemonic sovereignty movements.
In 1539, Francisco de Vitoria presented two important trea-
tises on Spanish-Indian relations—De Indis (On the Indians
newly discovered) and De iure belli (On just war)—where he
enumerated the rights of the Spanish and of the Indians, her-
etics in mortal sin because they did not practice Christianity.
Forty years had passed since the initial contact in the Carib-
bean, followed by a population decimation so gruesome and
swift that even one of its participants wrote, “Who born in the
centuries to come will believe it? I myself, who write and be-
held, know the most of it and now it seems to me that it
was not possible” (Las Casas 2007:219). The pope, as Christ’s
earthly representative, was shepherd of all humans and had
conceded unto Spain the obligation to missionize the peoples
living in the newly discovered continents. But the rampant
destruction of human lives wrought by Spanish conquistadors
in the first decades proved problematic. Not only was there
labor shortage and thus lost revenue, which led to the trans-
atlantic slave trade, but the religious justification for the en-
deavor was undercut. The question was then how to rein in
the slaughter while acknowledging the Crown’s dominion and
respecting the Church; Vitoria’s innovation was to find justi-
fication not in a spiritual mandate but in natural law.
De Indis and De iure belli resolved the tension by invoking
the law of nations. Revealing the mercantile concerns that
eventually linked Salamanca to Austrian economics, Vitoria
was concerned with legal title, but as importantly, he was con-
cerned with legal war. Although De Indis is the text dis-
cussed in detail here, including its treatment of justifiable
war, the fact that the two treatises were drafted together and
refer to one another points to the centrality of law-making
violence (Benjamin 1986). Vitoria (1975 [1532]) opened by
exploring the rights of the Indians, asking, “Whether the In-
dian barbarians were, before the arrival of the Spaniards, true
owners in public and in private law; and whether there were
among them any true chiefs and princes” (31). That is to say,
the core components of what became known as the sover-
eignty doctrine were questions of ownership and governance.
We will discuss this in further detail below, but here I want to
emphasize that for Vitoria this issue was not a singular but a
plural. International legal sovereignty is about both rule and
possession, about both government and property.
Given the Indians’ morally inferior position as heretics who
did not believe in Christ, could they still be considered the
original owners of their possessions, and were their leaders
legitimate rulers of their domains? In response, the Dominican
priest turned to natural law, and the answer he gave was yes.
He argued that “mortal sin does not impede civil ownership
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571
and true ownership” and “according to divine law, a heretic
does not forfeit ownership of his property because of his
heresy” (Vitoria 1975 [1532]:31). Thus, prior to the arrival
of the Spanish, the indigenous were indeed both rightful rul-
ers and true owners even if they were heretics. And so, the
Spanish conquest was not justifiable on the basis of the her-
esy of the Indians or on a claim that they had lacked sover-
eignty in the first place.
Vitoria argued for a different justification for conquest. He
held that “a heretic, from the date in which he commits a
crime, incurs the penalty of confiscation of his property” (Vi-
toria 1975 [1532]:31). If a natural offense against the Span-
iards, not a spiritual offense against God, were committed by
the Indians, the Spanish could then become rulers over the
Indians and the owners of their possessions. De Indis pro-
ceeds with a refutation of “illegal” bases for claiming title over
land previously held by the Indians. Included in the list are
discovery and papal conferment, argued such because the In-
dians were indeed true owners and because the pope’s au-
thority was over spiritual matters, not secular ones.
After having established that the Indians were rightful own-
ers and countered arguments for claiming title that were un-
just, Vitoria turned to arguments for why the Spanish might
legitimately claim title. He listed eight possible reasons, the
first of which is “natural partnership and communication”
(Vitoria 1975 [1532]:87). This final section of Vitoria’s treatise
outlines the specific rights of the Spanish that, should they
be violated by the Indians, would be justification for war and
therefore dominion over the people and their possessions. He
began by saying, “The Spaniards have a right to travel to the
lands of the Indian barbarians and to sojourn there so long as
they do no harm, and they can not be prevented by the In-
dian barbarians,” and he continued, “It is licit for the Span-
iards to carry on trade [negociar] in the lands of the Indian
barbarians, as long as they do no harm to their own country,
importing the goods which they lack, etc., and extracting [ex-
traer] gold and silver and other objects that abound; and their
rulers can not prevent their subjects from carrying on com-
merce with the Spaniards” (Vitoria 1975 [1532]:87, emphasis
mine). The use of extraer in the text presages the imbalanced
modern global economic system where the complement of
importation is exportation in the global North but extraction
in the global South.
Vitoria’s resolution affirmed that, in spite of their cultural
inferiority, the Indians were sovereign. However, while the
Indians had the right to rule themselves and own their pos-
sessions regardless of their cultural inferiority, outsiders had
the right to travel in the territory of the Indians and carry
out trade. Should the Indians prevent travel and commerce,
it would be just to wage war and take over their land and
government. If twentieth-century Western political theory is
so concerned with how liberal democratic governments fash-
ioned an apparatus to legally kill millions of their own citi-
zens, it is similarly noteworthy that international legal sov-
ereignty should be so tightly allied with how to legally kill
 572
millions of those who were not citizens in the sixteenth cen-
tury. Economics and the desirability of the natural resources
of the Indians were at the very center of just war theory and
the origins of the sovereignty doctrine.
By turning to natural law, Vitoria followed in the footsteps
of another Dominican, Thomas Aquinas. The underlying
premise to Thomistic natural law was that it was universally
rational and applicable to all human communities, regard-
less of religion. De Indis, in fact, interweaves a discussion of
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics with exhortations from the
Old and New Testaments. Vitoria argued for the rationality
of the Indians and therefore the recognition of their rights
under natural law, which they themselves forfeited by violat-
ing that law. If natural law is universally reasonable, as Vitoria
maintained, then any who challenge the Western legal struc-
ture of international law are fundamentally unreasonable. There
is a tension between the rationality of the Indians and their
cultural otherness. In De Indis, commerce presumes universal
rationality, which was why preventing trade was a violence-
justifying violation. The universality of reason plays a critical
role in Vitoria’s thinking; this is why he does not consider the
doctrine of discovery legal justification for conquest. He does not
need to. Rational use, not first discovery, confers rights of
ownership and control.
Vitoria’s thinking made its way to the rest of non-Iberian
Europe after his death. His theological reflections published
posthumously in Lyon in 1558 deeply impacted Grotius, who
cites him more than a hundred times in On the Law of Spoils
and in his most enduring work, On the Law of War and Peace.
Grotius had a tremendous influence on Hobbes and Locke
and, thus, on the development of classical liberalism in the
North Atlantic world. The school of Salamanca appears in
Boswell’s 1791 biography of Samuel Johnson, who quips, “I
love the University of Salamanca; for when the Spaniards
were in doubt as to the lawfulness of their conquering Amer-
ica, the University of Salamanca gave it as their opinion that
it was unlawful” (Boswell and Birrell 1901:117). Even Schmitt
sees Vitoria as seminal in modern European thought, devot-
ing an entire chapter of The Nomos of the Earth (2006) to his
thinking, unlike any other theorist treated there. He writes,
“The first question in international law was whether the lands
of non-Christian, non-European peoples and princes were
‘free’ and without authority, whether non-European peoples
were at such a low stage of civilization that they could be the
objects of organization by peoples at a higher stage” (Schmitt
2006:137–138). Schmitt holds that modern European inter-
national law is based on the American land grab, which re-
sulted in a new spatial order where the New World was the
exception and Europe the place of law.
But while Schmitt treats Vitoria as a medieval theologian,
legal historians read him as a modern jurist. Through Vitoria,
a discourse on sovereignty and otherness developed that sec-
ularized and rationalized the conquest in terms of commerce
and natural resources. This move gave impetus to the political
legal system that underpinned the emerging capitalist world
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Current Anthropology Volume 57, Number 5, October 2016
economy. Antony Anghie and Robert Williams show the sys-
tematic ways that the conceptualization of sovereignty oc-
curred in the crucible of colonialism, foregrounding desirable
natural resources, economic imperative, and the other as cul-
turally inferior.
Williams’s scholarship is primarily concerned with un-
derstanding the place of Native Americans in Western legal
thought, but his work engages much more widely. Regarding
Vitoria, the University of Arizona law professor writes, “In ap-
plying Thomistic natural-law discourse to the question of the
legal rights of the Indians, Victoria inaugurated the first critical
steps toward a totalizing jurisprudence of international order—
a Law of Nations intended to regulate all aspects of the rela-
tionship between independent states” (Williams 1990:96). Spe-
cific European values were claimed to be universally held values.
Thus, a particular asymmetrical relationship and the princi-
ples to justify it were universalized as the pattern to govern all
interstate, intercommunal dynamics. The principles were pur-
ported to be equitable and the various participants equals, but
because the Indians failed to meet rational, universal standards,
they were forever relegated to subaltern status and not permit-
ted to exercise sovereignty. “For half a millennium,” Williams
(1990) writes, “Western legal thought has sought to erase the
difference presented by the American Indian in order to sus-
tain the privileges of power it accords to Western norms and
value structures” (326). For Williams, Vitoria was the first to
erase the difference of Native Americans by simultaneously as-
serting and then removing their legal rights.
Anghie, a law professor at the University of Utah, has a
broader scope on the use of law in colonialism and post-
decolonization in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. He argues
that international law was created to resolve problems arising
from an unprecedented situation of Spanish-Indian contact
(Anghie 1999, 2005). He thus grounds all subsequent inter-
national law in a colonial encounter, showing how law re-
garding governance and property has been systematically used
to disenfranchise and dispossess, linking imperial projects to
the emergence of the sovereignty doctrine. Beginning with
Vitoria, Anghie (2005) sees a close association between sov-
ereignty, property, commerce, and acceptable government:
Vitoria’s arguments are based on the concept of property,
which is intimately connected in his thought with issues
of legal personality and sovereignty. Thus the crucial conse-
quence of being recognized as a legal person, as possessing
reason, is the acquisition of the right to own property. . . .
Taken together, these statements go very far toward assert-
ing that non-European sovereignty is subject to a foreigner’s
‘right to trade’. Crucially, then, one of the major functions
of government was to ensure that international commerce
would be furthered. (251)
Williams (1990) also notes the importance of economic im-
perative in Vitoria: “Victoria had elevated the profit motive to
an extremely privileged status in his totalizing discourse of a
universally obligatory natural Law of Nations” (102). The uni-
Folch Nature of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene
versal reasonableness of the profit motive in Vitoria and the
school of Salamanca may be one touch point for the Austrian
school of economics.
There is much to find useful here in the close linking of
economics to sovereignty, but I want to emphasize the extrac-
tive nature of the wealth-building activities. As international
law is constructed out of an extractive land grab, Anghie and
Williams demonstrate how land is a social relation. Trade, in
Vitoria, was about gold and silver and undefined “other objects.”
Today, extractive activities extend to hydrocarbons, soil fer-
tility, biodiversity, local knowledges, water, and even territo-
rialized legal differentials. The pressures of the Anthropocene
may provide new impetus to international law by returning
to the question of rational usages of natural resources. Recall
that for Vitoria discovery was an invalid claim to title and
that previous rightful ownership could be eclipsed by more
rational—economic—uses. Scholars of the developing world
have highlighted the importance of extraction in organizing
both economics and politics, arguing against an emphasis only
on the postindustrial as characteristic of advanced capitalism
(Ferguson 2006). I am concerned that the privileging of Agam-
ben within anthropology plays into this same blind spot, con-
ceptualizing sovereignty as being primarily about the individual
[ized] human body while subaltern sovereignty movements
insist on a sovereignty that is about land and community.
Following Vitoria, asymmetrical judgments regarding cul-
tural otherness have been assumed into neutral definitions of
appropriate uses of resources and territory. This is why in the
present, among supposedly equal, postdecolonization nation-
states, international law and treaties are the sites of such
contention. By elevating to the level of value-free law the right
of Europe-sourced political structures to organize and to take,
by conquest or purchase, the territory of indigenous commu-
nities, law itself becomes a tool of domination. This is most
baldly seen in the repeated rescripting of law when it suits the
powerful—the ongoing one-sided violation and rewriting of
treaties. Williams is, then, skeptical of treaties and the doctrine
of sovereignty on which they rest. Because “the history of the
American Indian in Western legal thought reveals that a will
to empire proceeds most effectively under a rule of law,” he
argues that “indigenous peoples now seek to redefine radically
the conception of their rights and status in international and do-
mestic legal forums” (Williams 1990:325, 328, emphasis mine).
And Anghie (2005) writes, “Now the non-European world pre-
sents itself not as the tribal leader whose legal personality has to
be determined, or the mandate peoples seeking self-government,
but a sovereign entity intent on reversing the effects of impe-
rialism by changing the rules of international law in order to
achieve development” (235, emphasis mine).
Since Anghie and Williams see international law as an at-
tempt to universalize European concepts and to naturalize the
effects of colonialism, international conflicts over natural re-
sources offer important challenges. This may explain why, in
rhetoric and policy, they are often linked to international com-
merce and definitions of worthy government as opposed to
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573
“failed states.” Current attempts to radically redefine rights, sta-
tus, and sovereignty demonstrate the imbalances internalized
and normalized within law. And so we should not be surprised
to see challenges not merely to the accepted interpretation of
international legal principles or to specific treaties but also
to the underlying precepts of the entire system. We also might
expect that, when such challenges are made by subaltern sov-
ereignty movements, their opponents might counter that there
is something unreasonable and irrational about them.
Recovering Hydroelectric Sovereignty in Paraguay
“In Panama, there were good negotiators,” said Ricardo Ca-
nese to the standing-room-only crowd in an auditorium brim-
ming with more than 300 campesinos and students, women
carrying young children, urban laborers, and urban profession-
als who had waited for hours for Canese to take the stage.
Three previous speakers had already presented updates on the
state of Paraguayan-Brazilian negotiations over hydroelectric-
ity; nevertheless, the audience attended closely to the engi-
neer’s words.
“But it was the people who got the sovereignty,” Canese
continued. “In Bolivia, there were good negotiators, but it was
the people who got the sovereignty. . . . Look at the example of
Chile in development, the role of copper as an ongoing re-
source for development. Hydroelectric sovereignty has got to
be the cause of all Paraguayans.”
Pleased with the turnout from the January 7 presentation,
Canese and the rest of the progressive negotiating team em-
barked on a nationwide circuit of public events, including the
March 26 protest, designed to bring attention to hydroelec-
tric sovereignty. A struggle for energy-articulated sovereignty
swept across Paraguay in the first decade of the twenty-first
century, toppling the dominance of a political party that had
controlled the government for 6 decades and bestowing new
momentum to popular movements. Here I return to ethnog-
raphy to detail hydroelectric sovereignty as it came to be defined
by Lugo’s close collaborators and how Brazilian negotiators
countered these claims. I draw attention to three elements from
the previous discussion of Vitoria: (1) the moral quality of a
government as cultural inferiority and irrationality, (2) chal-
lenges to the international legal system, and (3) the role played
by violence.
Although accusations of corrupt Paraguayan officials and
capitulation to Brazilian interests had dogged Itaipú Dam
from the 1970s (Creydt 1973), in Fernando Lugo’s presidential
campaign these critiques became mainstream, accepted across
the political spectrum. But while the charge of fiscal malfea-
sance and patrimonial clientelism was an old complaint, hydro-
electric sovereignty made new claims about the Paraguayan
nation, the Paraguayan state, and the Paraguayan national ter-
ritory. The phrase was more than just rhetorical strategy, al-
though one of Lugo’s closest associates did describe it to me
as “good ‘marketing.’ ”
 574
The Itaipú hydroelectric dam was built during the Colo-
rado Party dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954–1989) in
Paraguay and the Brazilian military government (1967–1985).
Although Stroessner fell in a coup in 1989, his party continued
in power, controlling the symbolic and financial resources of
the state. Fernando Lugo’s presidency arose out of a nation-
wide grassroots protest against then president Nicanor Duarte
(2003–2008), whose machinations to gain reelection were so
egregious that even part of his own Colorado Party mutinied.
A nonpartisan charismatic spokesman, Bishop Lugo emerged
in 2006 as the moral leader who promised a new Paraguay and
a new politics. With growing momentum, a small team of left-
ist activists who had been persecuted by the dictatorship in their
youth gathered around the bishop with a vision to transform
Lugo’s moral authority into a political one. They formed the
leftist social movement Tekojoja, successfully uniting popular
groups and political parties across the spectrum.4
Ricardo Canese, a critic of Itaipú Dam dating to his days as
an engineering student, was a founding member of Tekojoja
and part of Lugo’s inner circle. Under Canese’s influence, Te-
kojoja not only criticized the financial mismanagement by
Paraguayan officials in the dam but actually challenged “Bra-
zilian imperialism” by demanding a recovery of Paraguay’s hy-
droelectric sovereignty and a renegotiation of the Itaipú Treaty
itself. Doing so would bring in riches that the government
would invest in education, health, and jobs, ushering in the
social development promised but never delivered by other gov-
ernments (Tekojoja Public Platform, April 2008). Like other
governments in Latin America’s leftward turn, social equity
would be attained not through revolution but through energy
rent.
It was a shock to the political discourse in Paraguay. Political
elites distanced themselves from any language that might up-
set the powerful neighbor, but the gamble paid off. Brazilian
President Lula da Silva promised to discuss the issue, should
Fernando Lugo win the election. As soon as Lugo stepped into
office in August 2008, he appointed Canese to a cabinet-level
position as head of a special Commission on Binational Hy-
droelectric Entities (CEBH), the negotiating team responsi-
ble for meeting with the Brazilian Foreign Ministry. The CEBH
negotiating team was staffed primarily by Tekojoja activists,
who had considerable experience in community organizing
but less in international diplomacy.
Hydroelectric sovereignty came to be defined even as it
became accepted as a goal (Folch 2015). In a book titled Re-
covering Paraguay’s Hydroelectric Sovereignty, Canese (2007)
explicitly outlined the core goals as (1) libre disponbilidad, the
ability to “freely access” all of Paraguay’s electricity, includ-
ing selling to parties other than Brazil, and (2) precio justo,
receiving a “fair price” based on the market (101). Language
from Canese’s manifesto and from Tekojoja’s political plat-
form made its way into the Vía Campesina “Why We Are
4. The “j” in Guaraní is pronounced like “jam” in English; the last syl-
lable is accented.
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Current Anthropology Volume 57, Number 5, October 2016
Mobilized” flyer from the March 26 international protest,
an indication of how sovereignty movements build alliances
and of the new vocabularies and imaginative horizons Ben-
habib foresaw. For progressive sectors in Lugo’s government,
sovereignty would be demonstrated by the ability to alienate
commodities at market-determined prices, potentially bring-
ing in almost US$1 billion in additional annual revenue to a
country with a 2009 gross domestic product of US$16 billion.
Canese called for the renegotiation of the Itaipú Treaty as part
of attaining hydroelectric sovereignty.
Though treaties imply greater consensus than other forms
of international agreements, energy activists and the Para-
guayan public challenged the content and the validity of the
Itaipú documents. A nineteenth-century border dispute over
whether Guairá Falls lay entirely within the Brazilian national
territory or within both countries ended in the 1960s with
recognition of Paraguayan co-ownership of the hydroelectric
potential of the Paraná River and an agreement to flood the
waterfalls in order to build a jointly owned dam. The ex-
pression of Paraguayan ownership was simultaneously cur-
tailed by binational agreements around the energy distribution
of the dam (Acta de Foz do Iguaçu, 1966, Brazil-Paraguay;
Tratado de Itaipú, 1973, Brazil-Paraguay). In the instant that
Paraguayan sovereignty was recognized, the energy commit-
ments and price caps were put in place.
By specifying what had been lost and what must be re-
gained, hydroelectric sovereignty simultaneously enunciated
problem and solution even as, through it, Canese and others
in Lugo’s administration invoked the Paraguayan national
history (and their own heroic place in it). They asserted that
Paraguay’s sovereignty had been lost because unpatriotic Par-
aguayan politicians had signed away Paraguay’s rights in the
Itaipú Treaty. Like many stories told in Paraguay, this one
hearkened to the War of the Triple Alliance (1865–1870).
In the nineteenth century, Paraguay fought and lost the war
against the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uru-
guay. As a consequence, nine out of ten Paraguayan males
lost their lives (including teenagers and children), and more
than one-third of the national territory was transferred to Bra-
zil and Argentina. Memory of the war—invasion by neighbors
to raid a rich, independent Paraguay—is central to how the
nation and the nation’s resources are imagined in Paraguay
(Whigham 2002). Recovering hydroelectric sovereignty reca-
pitulated the loss in the war (ABC Color 2009).
The Brazilian mainstream press, business leaders in São
Paulo, and diplomatic corps flatly refused to renegotiate the
treaty, which the Brazilian foreign minister repeatedly called
“sacrosanct” (ABC Color 2007a). Critics in Brazil character-
ized Paraguay as “full of contraband” and “corrupt,” meaning
that the untrustworthy Paraguayan government should not be
in charge of resources that directly impacted the Brazilian
consumer (O Globo 2008). Others described the situation as
one where Paraguay was trying to get something for nothing,
as did the Brazilian energy minister when he said Paraguay did
not contribute “one cent” to finance Itaipú.
Folch Nature of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene
One Brazilian government official, an expert in Paraguay-
Brazil relations, said to me, “Why is the treaty ‘so unfair’?
Everything was for free. The Paraguayan economy grew 10 per-
cent a year while Itaipú was built. We are not to blame that
the money that came here was not spent on Paraguay but went
to the pockets of the ‘barons of Itaipú’ or to the regimes.” In
other words, the status quo of Itaipú was framed as a result of
and, indeed, a protection against Paraguayan moral failings.
In the rhetoric of the Brazilian government, risk constitutes vir-
tue and therefore provision of all of the collateral for the con-
struction debt granted the moral high ground. Unstated in all
of the outcries against Paraguayan freeloading, however, was
the controversy over the massive construction debt, which had
quadrupled due to questionable arrangements between Itaipú
and the Brazilian utility company, harming the financial sol-
vency of the dam and benefiting Eletrobrás (C. Folch, unpub-
lished data). Discourses of corruption serve as politically ex-
pedient accusations while not being applied consistently.
Lugo, Canese, and the leftist Paraguayan negotiators re-
peatedly threatened to recur to arbitration by The Hague,
although they never did (ABC Color 2007b). At times, Para-
guayan attempts to regain hydroelectric sovereignty moved be-
yond just challenging the interpretation of the Itaipú Treaty to
questioning its basic legality and legitimacy. During the January
2009 public presentation in Asunción, one of the CEBH nego-
tiators argued that because the 1973 Itaipú Treaty was signed by
two “bloody dictatorships,” its validity was dubious. “The
Congress of Vienna gives Paraguay the right to annul the
treaty,” said Canese’s ally, Domingo Laíno, an elder statesman
of the left. “Paraguay can do this unilaterally, or it can be done
bilaterally.” Vigorous applause met this pronouncement. The
Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), of which
both Brazil and Paraguay are parties, codified contemporary
international law and recognized the rights of states when
forming treaties, but the process of annulling treaties was more
complicated than what Laíno implied.
This explanation was one I heard repeatedly in conversa-
tions with Lugo’s progressive base—the very fact that the
treaty was passed by a military regime that ruled through
state terror meant that the treaty did not represent the wishes
of the Paraguayan people, and it should therefore be nulli-
fied. Yet it is not standard legal principle to claim that the
retroactive delegitimacy of rulers negates the validity of treat-
ies. Instead, pacta sunt servanda (promises must be kept) is the
common practice. Brazilian government officials expressed un-
abashed confidence even in private that The Hague and any
other international legal body would side with the Brazilian
government in the event the matter were brought before the
court.
But instead of international arbitration, Presidents Lugo and
Lula signed an agreement resolving the diplomatic tensions and
raising the price paid for Paraguay’s electricity in July 2009. In-
terestingly, the terms of the 2009 agreement were initially de-
veloped by Paraguay’s other negotiating team, the energy sec-
tor technocrats led by Itaipú’s Paraguayan Executive Director
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575
Carlos Mateo Balmelli. The fiery rhetoric of hydroelectric
sovereignty worked better on the streets than in the conference
room. By mid-2009, hydroelectric sovereignty was so popu-
lar within Paraguay that other sectors added it to their own
agendas—notably the Liberal Party and campesino groups
pushing for agrarian reform—as a way to accrue legitimacy.
This success was a double-edged sword for Lugo and his allies
because they did not reap the benefits of brand loyalty.
Sovereignty resonantly mapped onto desirable natural re-
sources and a national history of imperial predation. Although
the Itaipú Treaty was “neutral” international law, for the Canese-
headed Paraguayan negotiating team and for the Paraguayan
public in general the treaty was unfair in its origin and in its
content. Robert Williams here might say that, although the
work of modernity has been to erase difference by claiming to
represent all, the sovereignty advocated by progressive groups
has fundamentally different contours than those contained
within international law. Yet the Paraguayan negotiating po-
sition was beset by tensions—how to use moral appeals to
international legal systems to overturn a treaty when Para-
guayan government officials spoke of the illegitimacy of that
legal system.
The resistance to renegotiating the water and energy rela-
tionship between Paraguay and Brazil in Itaipú suggests that
Paraguayan sovereignty existed to the extent that it facili-
tated the Itaipú Treaty and the energy distribution detailed
therein. Therefore, corruption within the Paraguayan govern-
ment was tolerated by the Brazilian government so long as it
did not hinder energy extraction. But when a Paraguayan gov-
ernment arose that imperiled Brazil’s supply by demanding
greater control and higher prices, the quality of the Para-
guayan state became an issue. Per pacta sunt servanda a de-
mocracy must comply with treaties signed by nondemocratic
military regimes. The quality of Paraguay’s government was
superseded by international economic imperatives, revealing
a value hierarchy where a government infamous for its fla-
grant disregard for rule of law and human rights, like the
violent regime of Alfredo Stroessner, is still an adequate rep-
resentative when natural resources are at stake. But a demo-
cratic movement toward fiscal transparency and social devel-
opment through the market may be a problematic, legally
questionable government.
Conclusion
The struggle for hydroelectric sovereignty encountered a num-
ber of constraints that point to shortcomings in subaltern so-
cial movements and to changes we may see around nature/
energy in the future. One challenge Lugo’s close allies faced
was that, while operating in the idiom of international law,
their Brazilian counterparts were more accustomed to the
terrain. Because government negotiators insisted on revok-
ing pacta sunt servanda, the popular Paraguayan claims were
taken less seriously. Moreover, the technocratic team headed
by Itaipú Executive Director Balmelli deliberately appealed to
 576
international law for a new interpretation of the treaty that
would simultaneously affirm the international legal order and
increase Paraguayan control of finances and energy without
ever mentioning hydroelectric sovereignty. Another obstacle
for Lugo and Canese lay in the dual audience for hydroelec-
tric sovereignty: conflicts arose because, at times, the aim to legit-
imate the leftist regime before a national constituency com-
peted against the negotiating agenda with Brazil.
Ultimately, the greatest barrier to hydroelectric sovereignty
and social development dreams proved to be the political con-
text within Paraguay. In June 2012, President Fernando Lugo
was abruptly impeached in a trial regionally decried as a barely
legal “coup,” validating Brazilian concerns about the quality
of Paraguay’s government. Lugo’s Liberal Party vice-president
(from a different faction than Balmelli) ascended to the pres-
idency even as neighboring countries retaliated by withdraw-
ing their ambassadors. Gains made in Itaipú equity were jeop-
ardized, with the Brazilian government hesitant to yield any
more control in an unstable political situation.
The campaign for hydroelectric sovereignty evinced the
kinds of sovereignty issues formulated by Vitoria. Of particular
import is the way that Vitoria brought cultural inferiority into
the early debate. By describing the problem as one of sover-
eignty, Tekojoja, the CEBH negotiators, and the Paraguayan
public highlighted the inequity of the international legal sys-
tem and of asymmetrical dominance by Brazil. The narrative
of Brazilian imperialists, Paraguayan turncoats, and the suf-
fering of the Paraguayan people fit in a Paraguayan imagi-
nary infused with the history of the War of the Triple Alliance.
On the other hand, the framing of the problem by Brazilian
negotiators as one of Paraguayan freeloading and highly evi-
dent institutional weakness understood the issue as a problem
of moral fragility. In other words, the problem was either one
of sovereignty in the face of imperialism or of prudent man-
agement in the face of corrupt irresponsibility.
For many Paraguayans in the Lugo era, the greatest dem-
onstration of sovereignty would be expressed through the mar-
ket (through the ability to determine how, when, and where
alienation occurs) and through the ability to not have to comply
with treaties. Understanding sovereignty as something about
communities and natural resources from the beginning of the
conquest helps move sovereignty beyond just the experiences
and categories of human bodies, although both biopolitical and
subaltern sovereignty are at work in Paraguay; both are part of
how rule is enacted. And, in fact, the way they operate simul-
taneously and in tandem helps reveal the complexity of the
state, how it can be both symbolic and material, both insti-
tutions and practices of power and the ideological mask that
justifies that domination.
The Itaipú sovereignty crisis suggests that secularized ar-
guments of moral and cultural turpitude will be wielded in
situations beyond Paraguay and Brazil. To wit, the war on
terror denotes cultural inferiority as lack of civilization and
facilitates access to the hydrocarbon resources of the Mid-
dle East. While in the present moral deficiency might not
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Current Anthropology Volume 57, Number 5, October 2016
be religious heresy, perhaps it will be revised as corruption or
weak institutionality. Moreover, we may soon see that envi-
ronmental misuse, pollution, or underutilization are increas-
ingly moralized and thereby justifications for removal of sov-
ereignty. Photogenic natural disasters, many of which are water
based (parched river beds and receding glaciers), reterri-
torialize water as a regional or global resource and not merely
national, justifying intervention. This is where it is crucial that
Vitoria found legitimation for legal title not in discovery but
in rational, economic use. As resources grow strained in the
Anthropocene, international law already has a technique by
which to dispossess, backed by legalized violence and using
moral aptitude as justification. In the Itaipú case, the ques-
tions of fitness revolve around corruption and risk. But I
suspect that anthropogenic climate change will elevate sus-
tainability (environmental and otherwise) to such a univer-
salized status that it can trump preexisting legal title.
In spite of the setbacks in Paraguay and in other subaltern
sovereignty movements, these struggles will only increase, es-
pecially as they learn from one another. We have already seen
how campesino-based food sovereignty activism took on en-
ergy sovereignty. And there are already greater pressures on
national control of desirable natural resources in the face of
increased industrialization, energy scarcity, and anthropogenic
climate change. The Itaipú example and the broader context
given by the Spanish juristic tradition show a value hierarchy
that culminates in commerce, in economic imperative. It is
in the kiln of the resources of marginalized people, especially
natural resources, that the nature of sovereignty is being worked
out again.
Acknowledgments
I thank Mark Aldenderfer and three anonymous reviewers at
Current Anthropology as well as Alessandro Angelini, Marc
Edelman, Julie Skurski, and Katherine Verdery for their com-
ments on earlier versions of this argument. The shortcom-
ings that remain are my own. This article is based on fieldwork
conducted in Paraguay (2007–2010), supported by the Wenner-
Gren Foundation and the Fulbright Institute of International
Education. Writing was supported by the Mellon/American
Council of Learned Societies and the New York Public Library’s
Wertheim Study.
Comments
Jessica R. Cattelino
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles,
341 Haines Hall, Box 951553, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA
( jesscatt@anthro.ucla.edu). 5 IV 16
Three themes caught my attention in Christine Folch’s paper:
genealogies for theorizing sovereignty, the role of indigeneity,
Folch Nature of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene
and the qualities of water. Folch urges anthropological the-
orists of sovereignty to take better account of international
ordering, especially in the wake of disciplinary conversations
about sovereignty that focused on state authority and biopol-
itics and featured keywords such as decision, exception, bare
life, and body. Sovereignty struggles between sovereigns—
in this case, between Paraguay and Brazil over the economics
of hydroelectric power—often take place on different terrain.
The stuff of such (violence-backed) sovereignty claims, Folch
says, are cultural difference, control over natural resources,
and economic power. Suggesting an alternative genealogy of
sovereignty through the writings of Vitoria and others in the
Spanish school of Salamanca, Folch informs/reminds readers
that the modern (inter)national order was born not with the
Treaty of Westphalia, the doctrine of discovery, or the con-
solidation of liberal democracy but rather/also with traditions
forged in the colonization of the Americas. Vitoria queried the
legitimacy of colonial rule, endorsing European takeover in
limited circumstances, such as indigenous peoples’ insuffi-
cient and/or irrational use of resources. We hear echoes of this
in Locke’s theory of property and government and in the an-
thropologically well-documented blame game by states and
NGOs of indigenous peoples for allegedly causing ecological
degradation by improper resource use.
In the genealogical spirit, I would like to suggest another,
less temporally and disciplinarily distant reference point. Dur-
ing the 1980s and 1990s, a substantial anthropological litera-
ture on nationalism grappled with the postcolonial condition
and, more broadly, the analytical and political dilemmas that
pervaded when groups sought freedom through the nation-
state. Like Folch, scholars such as Partha Chatterjee, Lila Abu-
Lughod, and Akhil Gupta called for ethnographic attention to
the international order of things and to the ways that claims
to, or on behalf of, nation were not simply about consolidating
internal rule but were also, always, about asserting political
legitimacy in relation to others. Scholars showed how a “logic
of seriality” (it is Benedict Anderson’s phrase) facilitated
nations’ claims to equality and recognition against the back-
drop of imperialism and dependency. Whereas anthropolog-
ical studies of sovereignty generally have highlighted its vio-
lence, earlier research on nation and nationalism more closely
aligned with the circumstances Folch analyzes. What would it
look like to revisit such proximate studies for the purpose of
analyzing sovereignty in its present-day forms? What kinds
of politics might come into view, including about nature and
economy?
Indigeneity matters in all of this, not only because it was a
key problem for Vitoria but also because of the importance of
indigenous sovereignty in today’s world. The question of sov-
ereignty in anthropology has interested me since a time just
before Agamben’s work began to circulate widely in the field.
In the late 1990s, when I sought funding for doctoral research
on Seminole sovereignty and high-stakes casino gaming, grant
reviewers expressed skepticism that sovereignty was an an-
thropological concept. Meanwhile, American Indian Studies
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577
scholars long and increasingly had been addressing indige-
nous sovereignty as claim, category, practice, status, and his-
tory. Soon, anthropological attention turned to sovereignty,
and in 2004 the conference of the Society for Cultural An-
thropology even took sovereignty as its theme. Conference
goers met in a Portland hotel decorated with historical images
of the Lewis and Clark expedition, complete with an image of
American Indians on our room key cards. Notably, however,
vanishingly few papers addressed indigenous sovereignty. It
was a post-9/11 moment, when the problematics of sover-
eignty helped anthropologists gain traction on emerging forms
of power: Agamben, more than Foucault, could account for
Guantánamo Bay. Soon, the word “sovereignty” appeared ev-
erywhere, in anthropology grant applications and dissertation
titles. A reader’s report on my book manuscript referred to
sovereignty as the “flavor of the month.” Much had changed in
a few short years.
Still, dominant anthropological approaches to sovereignty
worked better for describing and theorizing settler state sov-
ereignty than indigenous sovereignty. What would it take to
recenter indigeneity in theories of sovereignty? Although in-
digeneity does not seem to be a focus of these negotiations be-
tween Paraguay and Brazil, what should we make of Guaraní
linguistic and discursive presence or, more importantly, of
the question of indigeneity that haunts Folch’s use of Vitoria?
Indigenous sovereign formations are critically important for
rethinking the relationships among sovereignty, economy, and
nature. This is the case not only when indigenous groups are
the focus of analysis but in everything from international dis-
putes over natural resources to the buen vivir movement in
Latin America to analyses of American power in today’s global
order. For example, my analysis of Florida Seminole gaming
entailed taking (inter)dependency seriously as a site of sover-
eignty, and this, at least for me, had implications for sover-
eignty’s theorization beyond Indian country.
Water calls attention to undertheorized aspects of sover-
eignty. The Paraná River divides Paraguay and Brazil, even
as it is fed by tributaries and carries soil particles from each.
Waterways can divide, but freshwater also connects and poses
notorious challenges to borders as it flows across them; builds,
erodes, and recontours land; and connects far-flung commu-
nities. Water’s temporality—for example, across seasons or
water years—is an awkward fit for bureaucratic timekeeping.
Water troubles private property, implicates people in the well-
being of others, and creates interdependencies: it is no coin-
cidence that nation-states build authority by harnessing water.
Increasingly frequent calls for watershed governance compel
attention to underanalyzed aspects of sovereignty. Folch takes
water to be a social relation. I would love to hear more: In what
sense? With what implications for theorizing sovereignty?
What would come of analyzing the Itaipú hydroelectric dam
alongside an account of, say, the Guarani Aquifer, an enor-
mous underground freshwater reservoir that many parties—
indigenous peoples, corporations, regional interests, and even
the George Bush family—eye as critical to global water sus-
 578
tainability? I am less certain than Folch that rethinking sov-
ereignty in light of Vitoria offers insights into the Anthropo-
cene per se, but without doubt this stimulating paper pushes
toward future anthropological work on sovereignty in the in-
ternational ordering of environment and cultural difference.
Jeffrey S. Kahn
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, 328
Young Hall, One Shields Avenue, Davis, California 95616, USA
( jskahn@ucdavis.edu). 21 IV 16
Anthropologists have been studying sovereignty’s political fic-
tions (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1966 [1940]), its expressive
performances (Geertz 1980), and its mimetic potentialities
for some time (Merry 2000). It was not until the first decade
of the new millennium, however, that sovereignty and its
more brutal dimensions took center stage (Cattelino 2008:
212, n. 22). This disciplinary shift was facilitated in part by
the work of Giorgio Agamben, whose interweaving of Carl
Schmitt, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt offered up a
provocative theoretical framework that seemed ready-made
for an academy confronted with the conundrums raised by
resurgent executive power in a time of perceived crisis. Over
the years, however, a “bare life” fatigue has set in, giving rise
to pointed critique (Comaroff 2007; Jennings 2011); more cau-
tious assessments of the presence, or nonpresence, of necro-
political violence (Ticktin 2011); and ethnographically grounded
alternative formulations (Cattelino 2008).
Christine Folch’s thought-provoking piece joins these crit-
ical voices with a complex analytical and ethnographic in-
terweaving of its own. For Folch, the widespread uptake of
Agamben’s preoccupation with bodies and the exception has
blinded us to important questions regarding land, resources,
and community. She finds the elements of a corrective re-
framing in the writings of Francisco de Vitoria, a sixteenth-
century Dominican jurist and Thomist theologian known for
his assertion of Indian rights in the Americas (Koskenniemi
2011:6–8). Folch contends that Vitoria’s focus on the relation
of sovereignty to resources and property, as opposed to merely
governance, can orient the discipline anew, curing us of our
myopic fixation on bodies and bare life while illuminating
phenomena like the infrastructure-centered “hydroelectric
sovereignty” movements she describes. Boldly and creatively,
Folch adds a historical dimension to her argument, positing a
dark symmetry between the epic destruction contemplated by
Vitoria in the wake of Spanish imperialism and the looming
catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change that has become
synonymous with the current moment.
Folch’s call for a refocusing on questions of land, property,
and empire in debates over sovereignty is welcome, although
her effort to distinguish herself from the existing literature is
perhaps a bit overdrawn. Questions of territory and imperi-
alism have been central to a host of recent anthropological
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Current Anthropology Volume 57, Number 5, October 2016
efforts to wrestle with sovereignty (e.g., Bonilla 2013, 2015;
Cattelino 2008; Ong 1999; Simpson 2014; Stoler 2006). More-
over, Agamben (2005) and Schmitt (2006) also spend a fair
amount of time exploring the coding of territory through law
and, in Schmitt’s work, the conditions of possibility of im-
perial resource extraction. By no means is their exclusive fo-
cus the subjectification of bodies. I surmise that Folch would
agree with me on this point and that the backgrounding of
this literature is a feature of her decision to foreground other
questions. Nonetheless, it is worth acknowledging the wider
terrain of scholarship within which Folch’s contribution is
situated.
More important, however, is the question of what role Vi-
toria plays in Folch’s argument. At times, the Spanish jurist
figures less as a theoretical interlocutor and more as a histori-
cal ethnographic case study: his relevance is intertwined with
the parallels Folch discerns between sixteenth-century debates
over sovereign title, present-day battles over Brazil’s share of
Itaipú energy sales, and resource conflicts yet to come. For
Folch, Vitoria’s writings also hold within them the logical ker-
nels of sovereignty’s juridical structure. As a player in those early
debates over Spanish conquest and as one of the progenitors
of modern international law, Vitoria, Folch contends, helped
establish the rules for permissible moves within the game of
sovereign contestation, rules that are still relevant to subaltern
sovereignty movements operating in the present.
Despite the appeal of this argument, I remain skeptical that
we should be looking to Vitoria as the primary guide for a re-
orientation of anthropology’s approach to sovereignty. Sala-
manca may be a key moment in an intellectual genealogy
(or historical process) that spanned centuries, gave rise to cur-
rent legal doctrine, and inspired existing political imagina-
ries. I fear, however, that the overemphasis on this early era
obscures the transformations of the intervening years. To give
one example, Folch never addresses the twin Roman law con-
cepts of imperium and dominium so central to elaborations of
nation-state sovereignty and so deeply bound to juridical no-
tions of property and resource management (on land and at
sea) during the sixteenth century and after (Armitage 2000;
Keene 2002; Steinberg 2001). Moreover, assertions regarding
the types of sovereign infringements Folch imagines as poten-
tialities foreshadowed by Vitoria beg for a fuller description
of the constraints imposed by the contemporary international
legal landscape beyond brief references to pacta sunt servanda,
rebus sic stantibus, and the law of drone warfare (cf. Keal 2003).
If we are to look to Vitoria more for theoretical inspiration
than historical causation, however, I still wonder if he merits
the primacy given to him here. What of Grotius (2005 [1625])
and Vattel (2008 [1758]) on eminent title—the grounding of
all private property interests in a superseding state interest
in land? What of Locke’s (1980 [1690]) own justification for
imperial territorial grabs and his concomitant theory of sov-
ereign prerogative? Are these authors merely derivative, or
might their particular formulations allow for a more robust
theorization of Itaipú than Vitoria alone? While I fully sup-
Folch Nature of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene
port the intended shift away from sovereignty qua “North
Atlantic universal” (Trouillot 2003:36) and the light shone
on the imperial roots of international law, the privileging of
Vitoria as intellectual inspiration or historical figure opens
the door to just these sorts of questions regarding the insights
of others who have pondered the relation between sover-
eignty, resources, and land. Surely, as Agamben has taught us,
substituting Aristotle and Pompeius Festus with Vitoria can-
not be the answer. That being said, Folch’s emphasis on the
property logics of sovereignty and its many entailments is
deeply important, and I look forward to the further develop-
ment of an already intriguing thesis.
Ronald Niezen
Department of Anthropology, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke
Street West, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T7, Canada (ronald.niezen
@mcgill.ca). 27 V 16
In their critical engagements with major extractive industries,
including hydroelectric megaprojects, anthropologists have
tended to focus on the overlooked human impact of these
projects: the consequences of displacement, environmental
destruction, loss of subsistence, the ruination of ways of life.
The subject has been framed in simple, stark terms as strug-
gles between industry and “victims of progress.” In Christine
Folch’s paper, we have a very different approach to hydro-
electricity and its anthropological subject matters, one that
uses another kind of critical approach to address a curious
phenomenon that she refers to as “hydroelectric sovereignty.”
From this term alone, we get a sense that something unusual
is afoot.
Her paper can be classified among those pieces of schol-
arship that both study and reflect sweeping transformations
in important aspects of collective life. The “eco-environmental”
sovereignty movement behind Paraguay’s hydroelectric popu-
lism, with its claims to a greater share of benefits from the joint
Brazil-Paraguay Itaipú hydroelectric project, would have been
hard to conceive a few short decades ago—not so much as a
grievance but more in terms of the particular form of sover-
eigntist activism behind that grievance. The connections be-
tween this and other popular environmental sovereignty move-
ments like Via Campesina are among those developments that
stand out as new, marking an obvious rupture with the post–
World War II regime of global governance and activism, point-
ing to a departure even from the kind of rhizomically net-
worked social justice movements that have become central
features of justice-oriented activism. By situating sovereignty
issues with the crises of the Anthropocene, Folch is pointing to
something emergent and as yet ill defined, inviting speculation
on things-to-come in an area that she refers to as “twenty-first-
century changes in eco-environmental sovereignties.”
In addressing the question of the origins of this new form
of sovereignty, she takes us deep into the intellectual history
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579
of international law, turning to the sixteenth-century Span-
ish jurists of the Salamanca school, Francisco de Vitoria in
particular, who expressed a view of the peoples who were
encountered and conquered by imperial power that empha-
sized their possession of reason and ability to govern them-
selves and control their natural resources. Folch’s paper thus
pushes the boundaries of the ecological sovereignty move-
ment at both ends of the historical spectrum, arguing for in-
spiration from a deep historical source and pressing its future
consequences forward to the as-yet-to-unfold, shaping the con-
tests of the Anthropocene to come.
Each of these two ambitious goals is fraught with difficulty.
First, although Vitoria can be seen as an influential precursor
of Grotius in the foundations of international law, one should
be cautious in drawing inspiration from these early origins—
going back to a school of thought that was active before in-
ternational law as such can be said to have existed—with ref-
erence to the contemporary phenomena that seem to reflect
this school’s progressive tendencies. In the contemporary eco-
logical sovereignty movement(s), are we really witnessing a
reengagement with a sixteenth-century precursor of interna-
tional law, or is this more of a fortuitous, disconnected sym-
metry of thought? And if it is the latter, are there still lessons
to be drawn from this intellectual history with reference to
the challenges of coming to terms with the phenomena some-
times referred to as the Anthropocene? There are two risks in-
herent in engaging with sixteenth-century scholarship in this
way: one is to misinterpret the work of Vitoria and others by
imposing present concerns on their work, and the other is
to overlook the complexities of the statist system of interna-
tional law by turning for inspiration to sources that may have
inspired but that predate international law as such.
In addressing these questions, lessons can be drawn from
the international movement of indigenous peoples. In this con-
text, too, Vitoria’s name has come up as a source of early op-
position to the ideas of “aborigines” as “natural slaves” and
the related doctrine of discovery. But the place of indigenous
peoples in international law actually began with an assimila-
tive intent, in the initiatives of the International Labour Or-
ganization in the 1950s. And even in its contemporary form,
the United Nations remains solidly, persistently state centric,
despite the apparently growing influence of NGOs in a wide
range of policies and processes of international law. The de-
velopment of indigenous peoples as a global movement, ori-
ented in part toward environmental justice and claims of self-
determination, is closely connected to changing structures and
roles of global organizations, the growing influence of NGOs,
and the networking possibilities inherent in new media. And
let us not overlook the rise of a human rights–inspired con-
ception of humanity accompanying all of this, one that tran-
scends the human rights movement as such and that, indeed,
might tangentially draw inspiration from precursors such as
Vitoria. But to what extent does the Salamanca school really
have increased resonance in the context of “the unknown ca-
tastrophic potential from the Anthropocene”?
 580
Moving in the other direction, the futurism of Folch’s study
of eco-environmental sovereignties offers another set of chal-
lenges. Addressing these challenges is more of an anthropo-
logical than an intellectual-historical project, one that involves
expanding on something only touched on here: the ways that
eco-sovereignty movements are connecting around common
concerns (including their all-important understanding of sov-
ereignty itself ), the expertise that they draw from, the ways
that their ideas are traveling and being reshaped in their new
destinations, the visions of humanity and of justice that they
draw from and create, transcending local concerns and even
continents—these are the kinds of emergent phenomena that
anthropology is uniquely equipped to explore with its long-
term method and its inclusion of organizations and social
movements in its subject matter. Whether this anthropology
of the emergent will confirm the vision presented here, of an
increasing frequency of struggles around sovereignty in the
context of the crises of the Anthropocene, remains to be seen.
We know too little to rely securely on any kind of oracularity,
even the kind built on the fairly certain assumption of An-
thropocenic environmental crisis. All we can be sure of is the
significance of unfolding phenomena of the kind that Folch’s
paper points us toward.
M. Lois Stanford
Department of Anthropology, New Mexico State University, MSC
3BV, Las Cruces, New Mexico 88003, USA (lstanfor@nmsu.edu).
31 V 16
In her study of Paraguayan political movements, Folch ana-
lyzes the emergence of “hydroelectric sovereignty” as a politi-
cal discourse, pointing to historical discussions of the school of
Salamanca during the sixteenth century. She draws on the work
of Francisco de Vitoria to examine how Spain could both rec-
ognize the rights of indigenous peoples over their lands at the
same time that Spain validated its right to engage in “justifiable
war” and exert sovereignty over indigenous peoples. This doc-
trine formed much of the basis of European efforts to rational-
ize their domination over Latin America. Yet in her discussion
of subaltern sovereignty movements, she cites a different liter-
ature, one that reflects the development of indigenous sover-
eignty in American Indian history. Here, some of the issues ad-
dressed may also provide insights into Paraguayan reflections
on hydroelectric sovereignty and emergent binational linkages
between Paraguayan and Brazilian subaltern political move-
ments.
First is the issue of colonial powers’ historical disregard for
indigenous sovereignty, leading to their efforts to carry out
genocide and assimilation. In the United States and Canada,
indigenous scholars may acknowledge the concept of “sov-
ereignty” as a European construction, but they also contend
that at time of contact “Indigenous Nations were politically in-
dependent and governing themselves under their own laws”
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Current Anthropology Volume 57, Number 5, October 2016
(Ford 2013). Thus, from the perspective of American Indian
tribes and First Nations, the history of European contact with
indigenous peoples is strewn with broken treaties, massacres,
imprisonment of indigenous peoples, sending off Indian chil-
dren to boarding schools, and banning of Native languages,
among other transgressions. The goal of these efforts was to
eradicate the indigenous peoples or, at the very least, erase their
culture from the earth. Even today, this recognition is seared
in current consciousness and public discourse. In Paraguay, the
War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) resulted in the deci-
mation of 60%–70% of the entire population of Paraguay, leav-
ing only 28,000 adult men. After this genocide, Brazil occupied
Paraguay for years afterward (Whigham 2002). Then, in 1973,
the Paraguayan government enters into the Itaipú Treaty with
Brazil, one of the same nations that almost eradicated the pop-
ulace of Paraguay barely 100 years before.
A second parallel may be seen in the ongoing negotiations
and sovereignty issues related to the American Indian tribes
and the federal trust relationship. Over time and through
numerous Supreme Court cases, the US government has been
charged with a legal obligation to protect tribal treaty rights,
lands, and natural resources. In reality, many tribes and Amer-
ican Indian scholars question the US government and respec-
tive federal agencies in their commitment to this trust re-
sponsibility. Examining the specifics of federal administration
of public lands, for example, points to the complexity and
contradictions of balancing public demands with federal com-
pliance to the Indian trust doctrine (Tsosie 2003). As well,
American Indian nations recognize their treaties with the US
government as a bilateral agreement between two sovereign
governments, that is, the US government and the American
Indian nation. From this perspective, the US federal govern-
ment’s failure to adhere to its trust responsibility and treaty
obligation undermines its legitimacy to exercise sovereignty
over American Indian nations. Comparably, when the Para-
guay government entered into unfavorable treaty negotiations
with Brazil, agreeing to the inequitable allocation of hydro-
electric power and the requirement to sell electricity at below-
market prices, the government broke its trust responsibility
with its own people and society. As Folch summarizes in her
conclusion, “the treaty did not represent the wishes of the
Paraguayan people.” Perhaps from the perspective of inter-
national law, this trust betrayal does not negate the “validity”
of this treaty, as Folch notes, but there are many other indig-
enous cultures where this betrayal does.
Third, from the perspective of American Indian nations,
culture and livelihood are inseparably linked. Thus, maintain-
ing the culture requires continuation of practices that depend
on the environment, that is, the hunting, fishing, and gather-
ing that underlie cultural sustenance. Throughout the history
of the United States, the loss of environmental resources—land,
water, and forests, among other resources—laid the ground-
work for genocide and assimilation. As Folch notes, water is a
“social relation,” so it provides an arena within which power
and political influences are played out. At the same time, water
Folch Nature of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene
is water; it is environmental sustenance and cultural preserva-
tion. In the US West, American Indian nations have fought
most passionately to regain sovereignty over water rights and
distribution. Initially, some of these efforts targeted the nega-
tive consequences of dam constructions (Church et al. 2014),
but recently some American Indian nations now claim owner-
ship of the dams themselves, using water itself as the mecha-
nism to reassert their sovereignty (Krivonen 2013).
Fourth, this reaffirmation of sovereignty is different, clearly
distinguished from the sovereignty discussions of the Sala-
manca school, because it comprises a collective sovereignty.
As Folch notes, the developing world’s subaltern movements
now organized around food, land, and water are grounded in
the conceptualization of collective rights and responsibilities
that cannot be appropriated by individuals or corporations.
This notion of collective sovereignty questions the legitimacy
of any treaty or trade agreements that would alienate people
from their sustenance. As well, collective sovereignty is in-
extricably linked to practices of collective responsibility. In the
case of the food sovereignty movement, as exemplified in the
Declaration of Nyéléni (Nyéléni 2007), food sovereignty places
the producers at the center of food systems since it is these
same producers who save and reproduce the seeds, grow the
food, and maintain the diversity and sustainability of the ag-
roecological system. Their collective sovereignty and respon-
sibility ties them not just to their society today but also to
generations of producers and breeders before and after them.
As Folch notes in her conclusions, the Itaipu sovereignty
crisis suggests that these movements hold implications be-
yond the borders of Paraguay. In particular, the potential sub-
altern alliances between Brazilian and Paraguayan groups
suggest the emergence of common perceptions, mistrust, and
rejection of the government trust. For indigenous sovereignty
among American Indian and First Nations, these emergent
alliances reflect a long history of mistrust and broken trea-
ties, as they do among indigenous populations in the Brazil-
ian Amazon. As well, these underlying questions could form
the foundation a collective sovereignty that questions the le-
gitimacy of the Paraguayan government to exercise authority
over its own people.
Finn Stepputat
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), Østbanegade 117,
2100 Copenhagen Ø, Denmark (fst@diis.dk). 11 IV 16
As Christine Folch shows so well in her article, the notion of
sovereignty has a long history, as a doctrine of international
law as well as an object of scholarly debate. Scholarly inter-
est in the notion and practice of sovereignty has waxed and
waned for almost 500 years, but it is unlikely that scholars
will ever manage to establish a consensus about how to un-
derstand and define sovereignty in precise terms. Thus, sov-
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581
ereignty has been characterized as, for example, “a word which
has an emotive quality lacking meaningful specific content”
and “the most glittering and controversial notion in the his-
tory, doctrine and practice of international law.”5
Folch argues for a new approach to theorizing sovereignty
within anthropology. She leans on critical readings of Vitoria
and the sixteenth-century Spanish school that arguably was
important for the formative linking of the colonial encounter
in Latin America and the emerging international law. Folch
proposes that this conversation can provide an alternative to
the Agamben-inspired focus on “exception, biopower, and
bare life” that during the past 10–15 years has informed much
of the engagement with sovereignty in anthropology and other
disciplines that previously have studied sovereignty explicitly.
Agamben played an important role in the 2000s by con-
ceptualizing and provoking thinking on sovereignty outside
the disciplines of political science, international relations, and
law, which had tended to monopolize such discussions in
previous decades. While in anthropology it became clear that
his ahistorical and schematic interpretation of sovereignty
and bare life begged the engagement of ethnographic and
historicizing approaches, the political events and trends that
marked the early 2000s resonated very well with Agamben’s ap-
proach: the issue of undocumented migrants living in shadow
worlds in the metropoles, the wars on terror and crime, the
indefinite incarceration of “foreign fighters” in Guantanamo,
and the proliferation of vigilante groups, private security com-
panies, self-help security, and other substate groups that chal-
lenge or coexist with state security forces.
In these years, it also became evident that the way Fou-
cault had been used in anthropology in the 1990s tended to
downplay the role of physical violence, the violent underside
of the modern state that became so visible after 9/11. How-
ever, while Agamben reintroduced the violence that disap-
peared from focus with Foucault’s linking of modernity and
governmentality, he still situated violence at the margins and
not at the center of the polity, which, as Benton (2007) has
emphasized, ignores the centrality of violence in many his-
torical forms of rule.
The delinking of sovereignty from the naturalized asso-
ciation with state and territory helped anthropologists and
others to conceptualize and explore de facto sovereignty as an
effect of often violent claims to sovereignty performed in the
name of a multiplicity of moral and political communities be-
yond the state. Folch’s well-coined “subaltern sovereignty
movements” that advocate popular control over food, seeds,
hydroelectrical resources, indigenous territories, and so on
bring us back to the nation-state and the self-determination of
the “peoples” of the UN charter. They explicitly make use of
“sovereignty” and its association with the legal arrangements
of states and international relations as well as the legitimacy
that rests with the ubiquitous idea of popular sovereignty.
5. References to Lauterpacht and Steinberger are in Schriver (2000,
69–70).
 582
As Barker (2005) point out, you may ask why these sub-
altern sovereignty movements use a notion that “carries the
horrible stench of colonialism,” and with Edelman (2014) you
may furthermore ask who or what is the sovereign here. Sov-
ereignty is not a completely free-floating signifier but attaches,
explicitly or implicitly, to some kind of moral or political com-
munity and hence to definitions of membership. Subaltern
sovereignty entails questions of which forms of life—related to
forms of production, exchange, and consumption—are deemed
worthy of support and protection and which will be excluded or
abandoned through the policies and laws that aim at enforcing
food sovereignty, for example. Ultimately, violence and bodies
are part of the question of subaltern sovereignty as well.
Ethnographically, Folch should be congratulated for enter-
ing the field of international diplomacy, politics, and law, which
could easily receive more attention from anthropologists. Schol-
ars from international relations and political science are in-
creasingly trying to include ethnographic and practice-oriented
approaches, and like theories of sovereignty, the practice of in-
ternational relations could provide a point of bridging and ex-
change between these disciplines and anthropology.
In addition, Folch should be congratulated for bringing
attention to the older tradition of scholarly thinking on sov-
ereignty. Yet the article serves to underline that one of the
main challenges currently is to address the question of how
the plurality of claims to sovereignty at different scales and in
different domains is organized, of how the always relational,
incomplete, and partial forms of sovereignty exist together in
shifting constellations and with what effects. A less charged
concept than sovereignty would be welcomed, though.
Reply
If misrecognition of the lifeways and lives of the indigenous
peoples of the Americas was a central feature of the European
conquest, then what my generous responders demonstrate and
call for is a series of recognitions. The five essays encourage and,
in fact, recognize connections between conversations on nat-
ural resource sovereignty and other scholarly debates and urge
me to do the same. Several of the writers even take up the ge-
nealogy motif, querying the ones I have used and suggesting
others. Although there was some overlap between interlocutors,
the remarkable diversity of their comments make a stronger
case than I could in my paper alone that the Paraguayan strug-
gle for hydroelectric sovereignty speaks to wider concerns.
Over the past 2 decades, a trend has emerged in the hu-
manities and interpretive social sciences to turn to indigenous
cosmovisions for more than just an interesting contrast to
Western knowledge structures but rather to retheorize ontol-
ogies and epistemologies and disciplines. My article approaches
its task of critique from a different direction, although it in-
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Current Anthropology Volume 57, Number 5, October 2016
cludes similar building blocks. I use European thinking on in-
digeneity as well as decolonial arguments on indigenous sov-
ereignties to illuminate the Anthropocene. In doing so, I seek
to recenter perspectives and debates that have been among
the most marginalized. To be clear, these voices have been
marginalized not because of their weaknesses but because of
their strength. The power of indigenous critiques to uproot
Western foundations is the very reason they have been silenced.
Indigenous sovereignties call into question the basic premises
of private property and the inevitability of value structures that
undergird the global capitalist system. But my paper was not
about indigenous sovereignty per se. Instead, I have argued
that to make sense of hydroelectric sovereignty and other new
political economic modalities, particularly in the midst of a grow-
ing awareness of ecological crisis, the disjuncture stemming
from the “discovery” of a new world offers a way to synthesize
political economy and political ecology. To explore this syn-
thesis, in the next few paragraphs I will discuss four interrelated
themes proffered by the responders: water as a social relation,
the place for Vitoria, postcolonial state debate questions, and
lessons from indigenous critiques of political economy.
1. Cattelino and Stanford both remark that my assertion that
“water is a social relation” beckons more clarification of this
Marxian take on natural resources. The labor theory of value
reminds us that though a commodity may look like a complete
whole on its own, it carries with it the human effort in culti-
vating it, extracting it, and manufacturing it. The fetish quality
of commodities conceals the social dynamics underneath pro-
duction, making it seem that a shoe is just a shoe and not
the labor time, the factory, and the leather-making tools. Com-
modities cannot, by definition, exist outside of human contexts.
Yet when Stanford writes that “culture and livelihood are in-
separably linked” from the perspective of Native American
nations, she suggests that critiques of the fetishization of nature
run deeper than nineteenth-century political-economic litera-
ture and, in fact, points to ways that analyses of capitalism that
nevertheless arise from a Western context are limited. En-
lightenment thought understands humans as separate from
nature. We can imagine anthropocentric questions like, What
is the proper relationship of the government to nature? And
we can speak of nature as a site of untapped resources, waiting
to be incorporated into a distinctly human economy. The alien-
ation implied in these conceptualizations mirrors the commod-
ity fetish. Asserting that water is a social relation is an attempt
to get past this alienation because water has fetish properties,
obfuscating the human-human and human-nonhuman rela-
tionships behind it.
The aphorisms are many: we are told that humans are 75%
water, that we can live only a few days without it, that agri-
culture accounts for 70% of water consumption. Because of
the material role of water in our very bodies, there is no water
separate from its life implications, and its meaning is linked
to other relationships. As an inorganic thing, water links all
living things. It contains within it the history of life, of human
relationships and activities, because all water is recycled. What
Folch Nature of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene
we are drinking in our tea was once consumed (and eliminated)
by a single-cell organism, a nonavian dinosaur, an early mam-
mal. In the ways that water is what it means, it emanates on-
tological power: it can signal disaster, war, abundance. In the
case of hydroelectric sovereignty, water maps onto the history
of violence and survival of the Paraguayan nation in light of
threats from its neighbors. Recognizing that water has been
alienated as a natural resource implies that there is a funda-
mentally political valence to water that bears more exploration,
particularly by anthropologists attuned to science and tech-
nology studies.
2. As I had hoped, the prominent placement of Vitoria in
my argument elicited a range of response. My starting point
in engaging Vitoria was to search for what helped account for
the prominence of things other than human bodies in sover-
eignty conflicts. That is, I wanted to find a way to bring the
material in not as an adjunct to control over human life but as
coequal and perhaps even prior to it in some cases. Vitoria
specifically connects natural resource extraction, international
law, rational (economic) use, and just war, and because of the
pragmatic impact of his argumentation, he speaks to the di-
lemma of ecological disruption.
Kahn and Niezen, although supportive of the move, raise
crucial questions about how I treat Vitoria. Is he best used as
an historical-ethnographic case or a theorist? Am I overselling
the past and underselling the complexities of nearly 5 centuries
of transformation? What about Grotius, Locke, and Vattel?
And why only the recent past, why not the Roman legal con-
cepts of imperium versus dominium? Indeed, these questions
illustrate why we would do well to not just leave legal analysis
to legal historians; there is much more work to be done in
uncovering linkages between current social forms and the po-
litical structures of the past. Crisis pushes policy makers to turn
to political philosophies past, and even if they do not con-
sciously invoke Vitoria, the space created by his inclusion of
cultural inferiority as a criterion for just war gives a foothold
for modern, secularized accusations of moral inferiority as
justification for property seizure. Kahn, precisely in offering a
more robust genealogy on the “property logics of sovereignty,”
makes the compelling case for greater attention to the history of
political thought as part of anthropological engagement with
resource extraction and as part of the larger environmental/
ecological turn in the discipline. Anthropocenic crisis has rat-
tled the foundations of legal thought. I wonder also how legal
history, when explicitly and critically linked to conceptualiza-
tions of nature as a source of resources, speaks to the new
materialism literature. Although neither Kahn nor Niezen explic-
itly states the connection, bringing in conversations with Western
and non-Western political thought would help Anglophone
anthropology expand the at-times apolitical limitations of the
ontological turn. Here there is opportunity to recenter violence
and economics, and there is a place for ethnographic attention
to the politics of uncertainty.
3. Hierarchies—national, regional, and global—run through
resource extraction, implicating the literatures on the state and
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583
on postcoloniality in hydroelectric and other subaltern sover-
eignty movements. Cattelino notices resonances with subaltern
studies and wonders what ecodimensions to anticolonial
nationalisms scholars may have missed; Stepputat argues that
since sovereignty attaches to a moral or political community,
it entails definitions of membership. Thus, subaltern sover-
eignties highlight how natural resources sit amid social rela-
tions and how hydroelectric sovereignty, specifically, makes
claims about the proper contours of the Paraguayan nation. Eth-
nography may address how and even why sovereignty adheres
to certain moral communities and not others. Moreover, be-
cause water and other renewable resources do not coincide with
national boundaries, they imply a new negotiation of legitimate
claims making. And so, water cycles are a means by which one
national community may petition a different national state. But
that Westphalian ideals prove insufficient to questions of power
under environmental strains does not negate the value of tracing
state power expressed through sovereignty claims. Rather, the
complexity of the system calls for more study because although
sovereignty claims are difficult to parse, we see them increas-
ingly mobilized to steer political change.
Catellino, Kahn, and Stepputat take up the critique implied
in the choice for beginning with the Spanish juristic tradition
rather than Agamben or Foucault. They remind us that Agam-
ben’s exploration of bare life, though itself perhaps ahistorical,
rose to prominence because of how presciently it accounted
for the historically rooted crises of the post-9/11 era. That is,
historical context makes different sovereignties possible and
relevant. The growing counterhegemonic struggles over tribal,
food, and seed sovereignties insist on reconnections to state and
territory. And the fact that subaltern sovereignty movements
can practice new populisms and do invoke other political proj-
ects, as Niezen points out, reveals intentionalities in the con-
nections between social justice movements beyond just rhi-
zomatic networks.
4. Examining hydroelectricity and Vitoria through analyt-
ical lenses attentive to subaltern perspectives allows for the
chance to essay what recentered indigeneity brings to schol-
arship. Anghie and Williams, legal scholars on whose thinking
on Vitoria and international law I have leaned, are members
of communities struggling against European colonial legacies
(Williams is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Indian Tribe,
and Anghie is originally from Sri Lanka). By denaturalizing
liberal democracy, indigenous approaches to sovereignty in-
stead interrogate the tacit acceptability of colonialism and the
killability of bare life. Stanford identifies striking parallels be-
tween the Paraguayan hydroelectric and American Indian con-
texts, showing how theory from indigenous margins speaks
to nonindigenous concerns. She notes the devastation of the
War of the Triple Alliance and points out the contradiction
of signing a questionable energy treaty with “one of the same
nations that almost eradicated the populace of Paraguay barely
100 years before.” She thereby emphasizes a reading of history
that does not take for granted the rightness of Euro-descended
political practices by instead highlighting state violence as re-
 584
lationship breaking. This is one reason why betrayed public
trust might invalidate treaties in popular discourse if not in
corporate boardrooms. Because we denaturalize the obvi-
ousness of everyday life, the intervention of anthropology is to
query why the latter, the boardroom, is legitimate and the
former is not.
Niezen, in a different vein, suggests that there are crucial
lessons to be gleaned from the international movement of in-
digenous people, one of several “sweeping transformations
in collective life” of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most
striking feature of these movements, in keeping with Stanford’s
description of skepticism toward European political construc-
tions, is their pragmatism. The UNDRIP is just one example of
how indigenous communities, although unconvinced by liberal
democratic ideals, nevertheless navigate the highly bureaucra-
tized apparatus of the UN in order to attain their goals. Eco/
environmental sovereignty movements’ collaboration with other
subaltern struggles places control of the state back in the cross-
hairs—implying that identity/recognition movements may have
political heft. Since sovereignty is not a free-floating signifier (as
Stepputat writes), its connection to a specific community is at the
very same time the source of its strength and its limit. Human
rights discourse, on the other hand, claims to equal universal
applicability. Thus, indigenous rights movements have creatively
fused the insistently local and the fraught universal in their
framing of environmental justice and self-determination.
Because water is a social relation, anthropologists have much
to contribute to its study. In spite of a sovereignty fatigue after
the burst of post-9/11 scholarship, sovereignty politics globally
(see: Brexit) have only intensified. And given the increase in
violence in the global order, there is an even greater need for
ethnography to take up diplomacy and law. The Paraguayan
subaltern sovereignty struggle over hydroelectricity is but one
case; surely there are others where anthropological attention to
the formulation of arguments and the unfolding of decision-
making processes speaks to changing extractivisms. Since cul-
tural difference is unstated subtext in internationally legalized
resource appropriations, our work as anthropologists in high-
lighting those cultural differences is ever more urgent.
—Christine Folch
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