Paper short abstract:

Local experiences of statehood in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste are not of decline, but of extension. In places where customary forms of land tenure remain dominant, coterminous processes of globalization and state-building are giving rise to potentially radical reimaginings of sovereignty and the state-citizen relationship.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on multi-sited ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste. The dominance of customary land tenures in both countries means that the presence of the state in local communities has only ever been, at best, partial. Contrary to the linear trajectories postulated by some recent theorising (e.g. Agnew, 2005; Sassen, 2008), which describe the era of the modern state system transitioning to a late/post-modern global order where Westphalian sovereignty, if not expunged, is significantly diminished, here the dominant experiences of statehood are not of decline but of (uneven) state-building. Local experiences of globalization and state-building as dynamically interlinked processes are producing deeply ambivalent practices of sovereignty and citizenship. Land reform projects seeking to bring customary land within the administrative control of the state are often fiercely resisted as incursions on place-bound structures of authority, identity and culture. As communities are simultaneously drawn into the extended social relations of global capital, however, the lack of actual or effective state structures can create heightened vulnerability, and various forms of accommodation to the state (land registration, titling, or lease-lease-back agreements) are sought or compelled. Discourses of citizenship and national belonging are being invoked as the basis for rights claims, even as some of those making such claims act in other ways to keep the state at bay. On the one hand insecure and precarious, on the other hand these ambivalent local responses to state-building in a globalizing age suggest the possibility of radical reimaginings of sovereignty and the social contract.