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Finn Stepputat

Danish Institute For International Studies, Peace, Risk and Violence, Faculty Member

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As a researcher I have published on forced migration, statebuilding, the security-development nexus, and other issues related to armed conflict and areas of limited statehood. I have a keen interest in exploring manifestations of statehood, sovereignty and public authority in everydaylife, including the governance of the dead. I'm a Latin Americanist, but have also done work on Afghanistan and Somali East Africa.

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University of Sussex

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Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

Queen's University at Kingston

Muriam Haleh Davis

University of California, Santa Cruz

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Papers by Finn Stepputat

States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State

Contemporary Sociology, 2003

Urbanizing the Countryside

Duke University Press eBooks, Dec 12, 2001

At the frontiers of the modern state in post-war Guatemala

‘Sustainable returns’?: state, politics and mobile livelihoods – the Guatemalan case

States of Imagination

Duke University Press eBooks, 2001

“Are We in This Together?” Security, Development, and the ‘Comprehensive Approach’ Agenda

Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022

Civil-military relations in international operations: a Danish perspective

Survival or life in conflict and movement

Whole-of-government approaches to fragile states and situations

As part of the International Research Programme ReCom, this report looks into the documented expe... more As part of the International Research Programme ReCom, this report looks into the documented experience of 'Whole-of-Government Approaches' (WoGA), a concept which many donor governments adopted in the 2000s to meet the challenges of peace-and state-building in fragile states and situations. The rationale for the WoGA is grounded in the recognition of the links between security, development and political objectives, which, as stated in the OECD's principles for 'good international engagement in fragile states and situations' makes a mixture of political, security, development and other instruments necessary.

Special issue introduction: burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of COVID-19

Human remains and violence, Nov 25, 2021

Sovereign Bodies

Princeton University Press eBooks, 2005

Preface vii List of Contributors ix Introduction 1 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat RACE, LA... more Preface vii List of Contributors ix Introduction 1 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat RACE, LAW, AND CITIZENSHIP Territorializing the Nation and "Integrating the Indian": "Mestizaje" in Mexican Official Discourses and Public Culture by Ana Maria Alonso 39 Violence, Sovereignty, and Citizenship in Postcolonial Peru by Finn Stepputat 61 Sovereign Violence and the Domain of the Political by Partha Chatterjee 82 DEATH, ANXIETY, AND RITUALS OF STATE Confinement and the Imagination: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in a Quasi-State Yael Navaro-Yashin 103 Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse, and the Postcolonial State by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff 120 Sovereignty as a Form of Expenditure by Achille Mbembe 148 BODY, LOCALITY, AND INFORMAL SOVEREIGNTY Sovereigns beyond the State: On Legality and Authority in Urban India by Thomas Blom Hansen 169 The Sovereign Outsourced: Local Justice and Violence in Port Elizabeth by Lars Buur 192 Above the Law: Practices of Sovereignty in Surrey Estate, Cape Town by Steffen Jensen 218 POSTCOLONIAL CITIZENSHIP IN THE EMPIRE Citizenship and Empire by Barry Hindess 241 Splintering Cosmopolitanism: Asian Immigrants and Zones of Autonomy in the American West by Aihwa Ong 257 Virtual India: Indian IT Labor and the Nation-State by Peter van der Veer 276 Inside Out: The Reorganization of National Identity in Norway ivind Fuglerud 291 Suspended Spaces--Contesting Sovereignties in a Refugee Camp by Simon Turner 312 Bibliography 333 Index 363

Urbanizing the Countryside: Armed Conflict, State Formation, and the Politics of Place in Contemporary Guatemala

Duke University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

Governing the dead?

Manchester University Press eBooks, May 15, 2016

Escaping the Fire: How an Ixil Mayan Pastor Led his People out of a Holocaust during the Guatemalan Civil War - by Guzaro, Tomás and Mc Comb, Terri J

Bulletin of Latin American Research, Dec 2, 2011

This book reads like a novel; it gives a personal account of the experience of living in a terrai... more This book reads like a novel; it gives a personal account of the experience of living in a terrain of insurgency and counterinsurgency; and it provides excellent material for discussing the genre of testimonials as well as more general 'post-conflict' memory politics. Shall we remember or forget? And who have the power to write the history from the myriad positioned personal, local and institutionalised experiences? The Guatemalan civil war had a variety of local, ethnic, class, religious and political fault-lines. Thus, the positions and interests involved in the memory politics are very complex. This book portrays the war from the particular perspective of the evangelical community leader, Tomás Guzaro, who provided the oral account for the testimony that Mc Comb has written and edited. It feeds into the Guatemalan memory politics in which also academics, in particular North American, have taken part. This is probably also the background for the decision of Texas Press to publish this book. David Stoll, who has himself been involved in these politics, provides a useful after-word for learning about such theoretical and political discussions. Yet, despite the particular perspective of this testimony, the pastor's story represents many elements that are representative of the war experience for many people in the countryside who suffered most from the war. Reading the book, I could compare Guzaro's testimony with numerous accounts I've collected since the late 1980s in refugee camps in Mexico and among previous civil-patrollers in the province of Huehuetenango, close to Guzaro's Ixil area. From these accounts I recognise all the elements about the war that form part of the account, about the excessive violence of the army, the specific ways in which villagers in guerrilla-held areas had to support 'the organisation', how the guerrilla at some point started 'separating the good from the bad' and killing suspected enemies, about the suspicions and doubts created by secret webs of army and guerrilla supporters embedded in the ranks of the enemy, and so on. The testimony is organised around the escape of Guzaro and more than 200 villagers who would not endure the dangers and calamities of living in guerrilla-held areas. As the story moves on, it becomes clear that the event became a turning point in the war in the Ixil area, which permitted the army to drain a good part of 'the water' in which the guerrilla 'fish' was swimming and thus undercut the strategy of popular insurgency. This is all very interesting, but in fact I found some of the most read-worthy chapters the ones that depict Guzaro's growing up in the 1950s and 1960s: the close relationship with his father, the death of his stepmothers and children, the rampant poverty, his wives, the alcohol, his salvation and the new ethics that permeate his own interpretation of his life. One example is the painful rupture between Guzaro and his father, which

Securing the city. Neoliberalism, space, and insecurity in postwar Guatemala edited by O’Neill, Kevin Lewis and Kedron Thomas

Social Anthropology, May 1, 2012

Special issue introduction

Human remains and violence, Apr 1, 2022

When the rst wave of COVID-19 ravaged the world in 2020, we made a call for a special issue of Hu... more When the rst wave of COVID-19 ravaged the world in 2020, we made a call for a special issue of Human Remains and Violence to document early experiences and re ections on the management of those who died from the virus. In hot spots of the pandemic in particular, the sudden surge in numbers of dead bodies overwhelmed o en under-resourced and unprepared institutions of death care; new protocols of management of potentially infected dead bodies changed the usual procedures of forensic and funerary institutions and inhibited customary rituals of separation for relatives and friends of the deceased. Blatant cases of crisis and emergency measures and lack of death care hit the media on a global scale and created outrage and debates about the digni ed management and disposal of dead bodies. Luckily, we received a very enthusiastic response to the call for papers, and the journal decided to publish two special issues on the pandemic, of which this is the second (see vol. 7.2 for the rst special issue). The rst article in this issue is a mainly conceptual contribution in which Nicole Iturriaga and Derek S. Denman develop the idea of a spectrum of necropolitics, with extreme violence involved in politically motivated disappearances at one end and state negligence and abandonment related to the surplus dead of the pandemic at the other. Both forms of necropolitics interrupt death rituals, and both have the potential to fuel political opposition and unrest. Carmen Rial's contribution focuses on the di culties of mourning in Brazil, from the case of Yanomami people, whose dead would customarily be burned and where the enforced burial of COVID-19 victims converted 'good death' into 'evil death' , to the case of the workers who transported the dead to closed-o cemeteries and tried to give families in poor neighbourhoods a chance to say goodbye by passing through their street, with a honk as a last goodbye. As Beltrán-Gil, Lopez-Cerquera, Reyes Muñoz, Sedano Rios, Maestro Martínez and Newberry Franco show in their contribution, forensic personel in Mexico also tried to cope with the dehumanising impact of the COVID-19 protocols. These were unevenly and poorly implemented in the context of a pre-existing forensic crisis and under-resourced

Integrated national approaches to international operations: The cases of Denmark, UK, and the Netherlands

Cities on the agenda: Urban governance and sustainable development

2014 (3.88 billion) 2030 (5.06 billion) Megacities > 10 mill. 453 mill. (12 percent) 759 mill. (1... more 2014 (3.88 billion) 2030 (5.06 billion) Megacities > 10 mill. 453 mill. (12 percent) 759 mill. (15 percent) Large cities 5-10 mill. 300 mill. (8 percent) 400 mill. (9 percent) Medium cities 1-5 mill. 827 mill. (21 percent) 1.100 mill. (22 percent) Small cities 300,000-1 mill. 521 mill. (13 percent) 828 mill. (16 percent) <300,000 1.670 mill. (43 percent) 1.920 mill.

Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa

Amid the hype surrounding the 9/11 tragedy, much attention was given to the linkage between secur... more Amid the hype surrounding the 9/11 tragedy, much attention was given to the linkage between security and development. little noticed was the fact that this linkage is by no means a recent invention. rather, this nexus was an important element in the state policies of colonial as well as post-colonial regimes during the Cold war, and it seems to have re-emerged in new configurations during the present wave of democratic transitions. The purpose of this book is to situate and explore the nexus between security and development in a variety of contexts from South Africa, Mozambique, and Namibia, to Zimbabwe and the Democratic republic of Congo. The book explores the nexus and our understanding of security and development through the prism of peacekeeping interventions, community policing, human rights, gender, land contests, squatters, nation and state-building, social movements, disarmament, demobilisation, repatriation (DDr) programmes and the different trajectories democratisation has taken in different parts of southern Africa. At a generic level, this volume draws our attention to the ways in which linkages are changing between "hard", militarised forms of power related to the production of sovereignty, and apparently benign, "soft" forms of power related to the enlightenment agenda of human progress and betterment. Consequently, we hope that the book will also be of interest to scholars working outside the region of southern Africa and that the approach in the book will spur debate and research on the nexus between security and development more generally. we would like to thank the Danish Social Science research Council for its support of a research network and a series of workshops that have played an important role in the development of our thoughts on and approaches to the security-development nexus. The research network, From Inequality to Insecurity? The Place of Crime and Violence within Development Thinking and Practice (2003-05), brought together researchers and practitioners who have directly or indirectly influenced the ideas presented in this book. we are thankful to

Special issue introduction: burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of COVID-19

Human Remains and Violence

States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State

Contemporary Sociology, 2003

Urbanizing the Countryside

Duke University Press eBooks, Dec 12, 2001

At the frontiers of the modern state in post-war Guatemala

‘Sustainable returns’?: state, politics and mobile livelihoods – the Guatemalan case

States of Imagination

Duke University Press eBooks, 2001

“Are We in This Together?” Security, Development, and the ‘Comprehensive Approach’ Agenda

Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022

Civil-military relations in international operations: a Danish perspective

Survival or life in conflict and movement

Whole-of-government approaches to fragile states and situations

As part of the International Research Programme ReCom, this report looks into the documented expe... more As part of the International Research Programme ReCom, this report looks into the documented experience of 'Whole-of-Government Approaches' (WoGA), a concept which many donor governments adopted in the 2000s to meet the challenges of peace-and state-building in fragile states and situations. The rationale for the WoGA is grounded in the recognition of the links between security, development and political objectives, which, as stated in the OECD's principles for 'good international engagement in fragile states and situations' makes a mixture of political, security, development and other instruments necessary.

Special issue introduction: burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of COVID-19

Human remains and violence, Nov 25, 2021

Sovereign Bodies

Princeton University Press eBooks, 2005

Preface vii List of Contributors ix Introduction 1 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat RACE, LA... more Preface vii List of Contributors ix Introduction 1 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat RACE, LAW, AND CITIZENSHIP Territorializing the Nation and "Integrating the Indian": "Mestizaje" in Mexican Official Discourses and Public Culture by Ana Maria Alonso 39 Violence, Sovereignty, and Citizenship in Postcolonial Peru by Finn Stepputat 61 Sovereign Violence and the Domain of the Political by Partha Chatterjee 82 DEATH, ANXIETY, AND RITUALS OF STATE Confinement and the Imagination: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in a Quasi-State Yael Navaro-Yashin 103 Naturing the Nation: Aliens, Apocalypse, and the Postcolonial State by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff 120 Sovereignty as a Form of Expenditure by Achille Mbembe 148 BODY, LOCALITY, AND INFORMAL SOVEREIGNTY Sovereigns beyond the State: On Legality and Authority in Urban India by Thomas Blom Hansen 169 The Sovereign Outsourced: Local Justice and Violence in Port Elizabeth by Lars Buur 192 Above the Law: Practices of Sovereignty in Surrey Estate, Cape Town by Steffen Jensen 218 POSTCOLONIAL CITIZENSHIP IN THE EMPIRE Citizenship and Empire by Barry Hindess 241 Splintering Cosmopolitanism: Asian Immigrants and Zones of Autonomy in the American West by Aihwa Ong 257 Virtual India: Indian IT Labor and the Nation-State by Peter van der Veer 276 Inside Out: The Reorganization of National Identity in Norway ivind Fuglerud 291 Suspended Spaces--Contesting Sovereignties in a Refugee Camp by Simon Turner 312 Bibliography 333 Index 363

Urbanizing the Countryside: Armed Conflict, State Formation, and the Politics of Place in Contemporary Guatemala

Duke University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

Governing the dead?

Manchester University Press eBooks, May 15, 2016

Escaping the Fire: How an Ixil Mayan Pastor Led his People out of a Holocaust during the Guatemalan Civil War - by Guzaro, Tomás and Mc Comb, Terri J

Bulletin of Latin American Research, Dec 2, 2011

This book reads like a novel; it gives a personal account of the experience of living in a terrai... more This book reads like a novel; it gives a personal account of the experience of living in a terrain of insurgency and counterinsurgency; and it provides excellent material for discussing the genre of testimonials as well as more general 'post-conflict' memory politics. Shall we remember or forget? And who have the power to write the history from the myriad positioned personal, local and institutionalised experiences? The Guatemalan civil war had a variety of local, ethnic, class, religious and political fault-lines. Thus, the positions and interests involved in the memory politics are very complex. This book portrays the war from the particular perspective of the evangelical community leader, Tomás Guzaro, who provided the oral account for the testimony that Mc Comb has written and edited. It feeds into the Guatemalan memory politics in which also academics, in particular North American, have taken part. This is probably also the background for the decision of Texas Press to publish this book. David Stoll, who has himself been involved in these politics, provides a useful after-word for learning about such theoretical and political discussions. Yet, despite the particular perspective of this testimony, the pastor's story represents many elements that are representative of the war experience for many people in the countryside who suffered most from the war. Reading the book, I could compare Guzaro's testimony with numerous accounts I've collected since the late 1980s in refugee camps in Mexico and among previous civil-patrollers in the province of Huehuetenango, close to Guzaro's Ixil area. From these accounts I recognise all the elements about the war that form part of the account, about the excessive violence of the army, the specific ways in which villagers in guerrilla-held areas had to support 'the organisation', how the guerrilla at some point started 'separating the good from the bad' and killing suspected enemies, about the suspicions and doubts created by secret webs of army and guerrilla supporters embedded in the ranks of the enemy, and so on. The testimony is organised around the escape of Guzaro and more than 200 villagers who would not endure the dangers and calamities of living in guerrilla-held areas. As the story moves on, it becomes clear that the event became a turning point in the war in the Ixil area, which permitted the army to drain a good part of 'the water' in which the guerrilla 'fish' was swimming and thus undercut the strategy of popular insurgency. This is all very interesting, but in fact I found some of the most read-worthy chapters the ones that depict Guzaro's growing up in the 1950s and 1960s: the close relationship with his father, the death of his stepmothers and children, the rampant poverty, his wives, the alcohol, his salvation and the new ethics that permeate his own interpretation of his life. One example is the painful rupture between Guzaro and his father, which

Securing the city. Neoliberalism, space, and insecurity in postwar Guatemala edited by O’Neill, Kevin Lewis and Kedron Thomas

Social Anthropology, May 1, 2012

Special issue introduction

Human remains and violence, Apr 1, 2022

When the rst wave of COVID-19 ravaged the world in 2020, we made a call for a special issue of Hu... more When the rst wave of COVID-19 ravaged the world in 2020, we made a call for a special issue of Human Remains and Violence to document early experiences and re ections on the management of those who died from the virus. In hot spots of the pandemic in particular, the sudden surge in numbers of dead bodies overwhelmed o en under-resourced and unprepared institutions of death care; new protocols of management of potentially infected dead bodies changed the usual procedures of forensic and funerary institutions and inhibited customary rituals of separation for relatives and friends of the deceased. Blatant cases of crisis and emergency measures and lack of death care hit the media on a global scale and created outrage and debates about the digni ed management and disposal of dead bodies. Luckily, we received a very enthusiastic response to the call for papers, and the journal decided to publish two special issues on the pandemic, of which this is the second (see vol. 7.2 for the rst special issue). The rst article in this issue is a mainly conceptual contribution in which Nicole Iturriaga and Derek S. Denman develop the idea of a spectrum of necropolitics, with extreme violence involved in politically motivated disappearances at one end and state negligence and abandonment related to the surplus dead of the pandemic at the other. Both forms of necropolitics interrupt death rituals, and both have the potential to fuel political opposition and unrest. Carmen Rial's contribution focuses on the di culties of mourning in Brazil, from the case of Yanomami people, whose dead would customarily be burned and where the enforced burial of COVID-19 victims converted 'good death' into 'evil death' , to the case of the workers who transported the dead to closed-o cemeteries and tried to give families in poor neighbourhoods a chance to say goodbye by passing through their street, with a honk as a last goodbye. As Beltrán-Gil, Lopez-Cerquera, Reyes Muñoz, Sedano Rios, Maestro Martínez and Newberry Franco show in their contribution, forensic personel in Mexico also tried to cope with the dehumanising impact of the COVID-19 protocols. These were unevenly and poorly implemented in the context of a pre-existing forensic crisis and under-resourced

Integrated national approaches to international operations: The cases of Denmark, UK, and the Netherlands

Cities on the agenda: Urban governance and sustainable development

2014 (3.88 billion) 2030 (5.06 billion) Megacities > 10 mill. 453 mill. (12 percent) 759 mill. (1... more 2014 (3.88 billion) 2030 (5.06 billion) Megacities > 10 mill. 453 mill. (12 percent) 759 mill. (15 percent) Large cities 5-10 mill. 300 mill. (8 percent) 400 mill. (9 percent) Medium cities 1-5 mill. 827 mill. (21 percent) 1.100 mill. (22 percent) Small cities 300,000-1 mill. 521 mill. (13 percent) 828 mill. (16 percent) <300,000 1.670 mill. (43 percent) 1.920 mill.

Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa

Amid the hype surrounding the 9/11 tragedy, much attention was given to the linkage between secur... more Amid the hype surrounding the 9/11 tragedy, much attention was given to the linkage between security and development. little noticed was the fact that this linkage is by no means a recent invention. rather, this nexus was an important element in the state policies of colonial as well as post-colonial regimes during the Cold war, and it seems to have re-emerged in new configurations during the present wave of democratic transitions. The purpose of this book is to situate and explore the nexus between security and development in a variety of contexts from South Africa, Mozambique, and Namibia, to Zimbabwe and the Democratic republic of Congo. The book explores the nexus and our understanding of security and development through the prism of peacekeeping interventions, community policing, human rights, gender, land contests, squatters, nation and state-building, social movements, disarmament, demobilisation, repatriation (DDr) programmes and the different trajectories democratisation has taken in different parts of southern Africa. At a generic level, this volume draws our attention to the ways in which linkages are changing between "hard", militarised forms of power related to the production of sovereignty, and apparently benign, "soft" forms of power related to the enlightenment agenda of human progress and betterment. Consequently, we hope that the book will also be of interest to scholars working outside the region of southern Africa and that the approach in the book will spur debate and research on the nexus between security and development more generally. we would like to thank the Danish Social Science research Council for its support of a research network and a series of workshops that have played an important role in the development of our thoughts on and approaches to the security-development nexus. The research network, From Inequality to Insecurity? The Place of Crime and Violence within Development Thinking and Practice (2003-05), brought together researchers and practitioners who have directly or indirectly influenced the ideas presented in this book. we are thankful to

Special issue introduction: burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of COVID-19

Human Remains and Violence

Culture, power, place: Explorations in critical anthropology. EDITED BY AKHIL GUPTA AND JAMES FERGUSON. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 1997. viii + 361 pp. Pb.: £12.95. ISBN 0 8223 1940 3

Social Anthropology, 1999

Formations of Sovereignty at the Frontier of the Modern State

This article discusses the recent revision of the notion of sovereignty that emphasizes de facto ... more This article discusses the recent revision of the notion of sovereignty that emphasizes de facto rather than de jure sovereignty, understanding sovereignty as an eff ect of performative claims to sovereignty. As an implication of this approach, we come to see political landscapes as formed by multiple, overlapping, coexisting, and sometimes competing claims to sovereignty operating within and across boundaries. The article suggests using " formations of sovereignty " as a way of understanding these political landscapes and the way they change over time in specifi c areas. Empirically, the article analyzes diff erent formations of sovereignty in a Guatemalan municipality at the border with Mexico, from before the civil war of the early 1980s to the present. As researchers, we oft en develop concepts in a dialogue with our experiences in places we know well. Such is the case of my engagement with Nentón, a municipality at the Guatemalan border with Mexico and a 1980s hotspot of the 30-year-long Guatemalan civil war, which was slowly winding down in 1993 when I fi rst visited the area. Th e de-and reconstruction of the state before my eyes resonated with the emerging interest in the anthropology of the state in the late 1990s (Stepputat 2001). Similarly, the fact that the Guatemalan state, despite more than 100 years of institutional presence in the area, has never really managed to establish eff ective sovereignty in the borderland, inspired an engagement with a revised notion of sovereignty that focuses on de facto rather than de jure (state) sovereignty (Hansen and Stepputat 2005). One of the implications of looking at de facto sovereignty is that we have to understand the ways in which sovereign claims can coexist and overlap in diff erent ways within and across state boundaries. This article suggests the notion of " formations of sovereignty " as a way of dealing analytically with the political landscapes that are formed through multiple, coexisting, overlapping , and sometimes competing claims to sovereignty over people, resources, and/or territories. Aft er a brief discussion of the revised notion of sovereignty and some of the questions that this raises for empirical research, I introduce Nentón and its history as a frontier of the modern state, before analyzing three subsequent formations of sovereignty. Th e fi rst one relates to the civil war in the early 1980s, the second to the post-confl ict conjuncture in the 1990s and 2000s, while the third one has become visible with the emergence of Mexican drug cartels and other entities that have claimed sovereignty since 2007. Th e article is based on data generated during a ten-month stay, along with my family, in the town of Nentón in 1994–1995, four months of work in 1995–1996 for the UN human rights

Rethinking Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Programs

by JAIRO MUNIVE, Stability International Journal of Security & Development, and Finn Stepputat

This article introduces the special issue on disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) ... more This article introduces the special issue on disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) and 'Armed Non-Statutory Actors' (ANSAs), whose title we prefer to the less precise label of Armed Non-State Actors. The understanding that DDR programs are essential in helping to prevent the recurrence of war in post-conflict situations is at the heart of current peacebuilding practice and the academic literature on peacekeeping and stabilization. However, the changing strategic context of DDR programs and in particular the proliferation of ANSAs presents new challenges, the responses to which have been characterized as 'second generation' DDR. The changing context poses new questions and forces us to rethink assumptions and templates of DDR as the concept is blurred and expanded. The main question is if it makes sense to hold on to the concept or whether the assumptions associated with it will impede the rethinking of templates for violence reduction in the future.