What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the transformation of sovereignty debate

Abstract

Post World War I, Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African movement managed to coalesce, however briefly and imperfectly, an extra-territorial sovereign authority in the form of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Through the recollection of this project the article seeks to disturb the predominant uni-linear narrative in IR debates of the transformation of sovereignty that posit a recent shift from territorial exclusivity to multi-level governance encapsulated in the emergence of the European Union. By narrating a string of transformations of sovereignty that led to Garvey’s UNIA the case is made that such transformations have not directly followed one universal logic but have been multi-linear in character, and further, extra-territoriality has been a defining principle of sovereignty in the modern epoch and by no means peculiar to the contemporary European milieu. Through exploring the generative relationship between capitalist, nationalist and racialist forms of sovereignty the article contributes theoretically and empirically to a historical sociology adequate to capture the multiple, yet related, transformations of sovereignty in the modern epoch.