Contenu du sommaire : Souveraineté et territoire (XIXe-XXe siècle) ? Aumône et sorcellerie

Writing Sovereignty with Invisible Ink: Indigenous Sovereignty and Territorial Appropriation in French-African treaties (XIXth Century) This paper focuses on the modes of territorial appropriation that characterized the transition from the old to the new colonial regime, during the period when Europeans built their colonial empires in Africa. It offers an analysis of the juridical construction of colonial territorialities based on a corpus of treaties concluded by agents of the French colonial authority and African chiefs, a kind of legal device as-yet little explored by historians of international law. The terminology used in these treaties reveals that European negotiators hardly grasped the meaning of the legal frameworks they pretended to impose onto African chiefs. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the protectorate became the most usual modality of regulating sovereignty on newly acquired territories. This implied the emergence of forms of sovereignty-sharing or sovereignty-lending based on the distinction of external and internal sovereignty. The consent of African chiefs to such arrangements would therefore hang on whether they considered their territorial sovereignty as divisible or not.

Organizing Sovereign Provinces in Independent America: The Republic of Córdoba, 1776-1827
This article deals with the different political forms that emerged after the former viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (which would eventually become Argentina) became independent. It analyzes the territorial and institutional construction of an original political entity, different from the nation-state : the sovereign province. Focusing on the Republic of Córdoba, it shows how this polity was based on the politicization and reinforcement of the territorial corporations during the imperial reforms at the end of the eighteenth century, then the independence revolution. This created a tension between the sovereignty of these corporations and the sovereignty of the “nation,” both working on different territorial dynamics. The Republic of Córdoba presents the case of the consolidation of an internal sovereignty while working towards integrating a larger, confederal, polity.

Neighbors in-between (1917-1924). The Thick Border of the Bolsheviks at the East of Europe
Through the analysis of what happened at the European margins of the former Russian Empire as he was being reinvented by the Soviet, this article uses central and local archives of the former Soviet Union to uncover the modalities of the construction of territorial sovereignty when new, ideologically hostile countries interacted on the ground. The article shows how Soviet authorities, while adapting to the particular negotiation rules for the “co-construction” of the border, evolved into an exclusive conception of sovereignty over the territory. The thick border that was invented then between suspicious neighbors, especially through the creation of buffer zones, was then institutionalized by the Soviets and imported into domestic policy in order to control interactions and border crossings. This analysis of the everyday life in the “in-between” of the States thus offers new perspectives for a transnational history of the state.

The Local Spaces of State-Building in the Light of the Albanian case (1920-1939) Following studies that take into account locality as a place of production and not simply of reproduction of center-driven processes of nation-state building and sovereignty affirmation, this article proposes to move the focus at the local level. Through the case of school policies in interwar Albania which were at the very heart of the assertion of this sovereignty, it studies the control of local space as the locus of these processes. Here, the emphasis is put on power relations around the role of religion in the school space, the appropriation by the state of school buildings structuring confessional spaces, as well as the effect of the inscription of actors of these negotiations — be they agents of these policies or not — into social spaces.

The Scales of Money: Monetary Sovereignty and the Spatial Dimensions of American Politics after the Civil War
With its victory in the Civil War, the Union affirmed the primacy of the national sovereignty of the United States. After the conflict, the country was absorbed by the consequences of this momentous event. Yet, even in this context, the monetary policies of the Government became contentious and led to the eventual redefinition of sovereignty. This article explores how the American institutional structure and political system allowed the money question to become a spatial issue, opposing the great sections of the country, and how this sectionalism triggered a confrontation between alternative understandings of what sovereignty entailed, both in political legitimacy and spatial scales. The eventual redefinition of its perimeter, at the end of the century, excluded the currency as an instrument of the sovereign.

Gift, Sacrifice, and Sorcery: The Moral Economy of Almsgiving in Senegal
In 2010, a strange rumor of “deadly alms” circulated in Senegal : a mysterious individual driving a SUV was said to distribute alms that killed all those who accepted them. The story made the headline news and several persons were accused of giving deadly alms and consequently beaten by crowds. In this article, we show that the rumor destabilizes the everyday routines of charity and the religious solidarity that underpins them. In the Muslim context of Senegal, the rumor thus exposes the ambiguities inherent in the moral economy of alms (sarax in Wolof). This paradigmatic case of poisoned gift indeed reveals a grey area between religion, magic and sorcery. It also worriedly questions the relation between gift and sacrifice, two classic concepts in anthropology since Marcel Mauss.