From 'Men of Prowess' to Religious Militias

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Africa, South Asia, and Latin America has sought to theorize twenty-first-century governance by highlighting the importance of 'informal sovereignties', unofficial or privatized domains of authority that operate within and alongside domains under formal state control. Analyses of Southeast Asian cases have been notably absent from this work, despite a long regional tradition analysing the centrality of figures of informal authority. This article revisits Southeast Asian analyses in light of scholarship on 'informal sovereignties', identifying three qualities that set these analyses apart from comparable work on other regions of the world: Their focus on patterns of perennialism in the cultural idioms of informal sovereignties; their view that informal sovereignties can only be understood through their historical relations to the modern state and the market; and their emphasis on the fragility of sovereign power and the importance of spectacle and performance in shoring it up. The article argues that, taken together, these elements provide a culturally and historically contextualized approach for analysing contemporary informal sovereignties, including those religious militias that have garnered much attention in recent years.