Capital in the Web of Sovereignty: Anthropological Reflections on Extraction, Appropriation and Violence

Focusing on contemporary cases of violent dispossession, appropriation and extraction as well as struggles for the commons, the workshop poses the question anew as to the relation between capital and sovereignty in the contemporary moment. The aim is to explore the current processes of capitalist accumulation against the background of the past and present histories of nation-states, empires and settler colonialisms, and to do so through two angles. The first focuses on the role and genealogy of sovereign logics and techniques in facilitating the movement and advancement of capital and on related value regimes. The second explores the intersection of forms and logics of violence and processes of dispossession and appropriation that cannot be reduced to the history of capitalism and extends to the relation of struggles over commons with the layered histories of multiple sovereignties.