Governmentality and contragovernmentality: rethinking sovereignty and territoriality after the Cold War

Abstract

This paper speculates about the origins and effects of global disorder after the end of the Cold War. It challenges the categories used by political realists to interpret governmentality as an ensemble of state sovereignty, territoriality and power in an international anarchic system, suggesting that new subnational and supranational anarchies now permit agents of contragovernmentality, or un-stated sovran potentates, to contest the rules of in-stated sovereign powers. These alternative categories, in turn, provide a new conceptual register to assess how and why new anti-statal, transnational, and extraterritorial social forces begin to proliferate after the Cold War.