ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have introduced modern sovereignty as a particular response to the problem of constituting legitimate forms of authority after the collapse of hierarchical forms, first as articulated in Hobbes’ Leviathan and then in practice in the treatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. This chapter extends the analysis of sovereignty in another direction: into an examination of the disciplining of knowledge, the production of the categories through which we understand and explain the world. As we saw in Hobbes’ analysis of the relationship between the constitution of political authority and the production of knowledge in Chapter 2, practices of sovereignty are intimately interwoven with the production and disciplining of knowledge. To illustrate this, I focus here on how the disciplines of international relations and anthropology are constituted through and reproduce the necessities of modern sovereignty, and how this shapes their apprehension of and response to the challenges posed by Indigenous politics. My goal is not especially to critique international relations or anthropology, or indeed disciplinarity in general, but to use these specific sites to illustrate a broader problem.
