Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the daily politics towards organizing a popular referendum of independence in the Basque Country, the paper looks forward to contributing to reflect on the current state of the Anthropologies of the State and the relationships between state desire, prefigurative politics and sovereignty.

Paper long abstract:

After the formal ending of the armed conflict and the disbanding of ETA in 2018, the topic of Basque Independence has become a political fulcrum both to stigmatize all nationalisms and to favour new legal peaceful expressions of the rights to self-determination. By speaking of such rights, nationalist political parties and pro-independence social movements claim about the need of democratizing the Spanish state-kingdom institutions. Focusing on the daily politics devoted to organizing a popular referendum of independence based upon the ‘right to decide’, the paper looks forward to contributing to the anthropological study of the State and political activism. It departs from a brief discussion of tactics in political anthropology. Secondly, it examines how political engagement with sovereignty is currently experienced in the Basque Country. Third, it offers an argument on ‘Democractics’ as counter-intuitive heuristic to setting up alternative meanings of democracy and statehood. The paper is based on a long-term ethnography of contemporary grass-root mobilizations and the daily experience of the state in people's lives, driving them mad in encounters and material effects. It belongs to a wider project that aims to produce new anthropological insights about the relationships between state desire, prefigurative politics, and sovereignty by shedding light onto the banalization of ethnic/identity politics and political violence.