Paper Short Abstract:

Decades of anthropological critique revealed oppressive tendencies inherent to the state form. An uncannily parallel critique of the state has been developed by illiberal actors, who operate at the political fringes of established democratic states. Comparing both I ask: who is the mad one?

Paper Abstract:

Starting with Begoña Aretxaga's observation that the state can drive people mad, I reflect on my doctoral research on "Sovereign Citizens" in Germany. The ill-defined shorthand “Sovereign Citizen” describes amorphous and heterogenous actors in different countries that argue that the state they live in is not a state, but a corporate entity that exploits the population under the guise of enshrining rights.

Similarly, anthropologists have understood the state as an ideological, rather than material object: as a “collective illusion” or “social fantasy” (Hansen and Stepputat, 2001). In this frame, Sovereign Citizens appear as attentive analysts, both in challenging the performative generation of “stateness” (ibid.) in their outright refusal to recognize state authority, and in copying genres of stateness in their enactment of counter-states. While this behaviour appears mad in light of the very real coercive power of the state, it is partially a response to the madness discussed by Aretxaga, the one the state provokes in citizens. Some observers have thus asked who the mad one is: the Sovereign Citizen, who pretends he can step outside of the state, or the citizen who just accepts the state – its current form, its laws – without question?

Disentangling the (dis-)similarities of both views, I ask how apt anthropology is at recognizing the difference between plausible and implausible post-liberal critiques of state. Often enmeshed in the far-right, the parallels between Sovereign Citizens’ and anthropological theories about the state are uncanny, raising the question if after all, the mad one is the anthropologist.