Project description
Rethinking sovereignty beyond statehood
Political entities that claim sovereignty without international recognition often fall through the cracks of conventional analysis. Existing frameworks struggle to grasp their ambiguous status and evolving strategies. The ERC-funded SovereignPerformance project tackles this challenge by focusing on the political performances and aesthetics of such movements, rather than forcing them into rigid categories. Drawing on case studies in Catalonia, Rojava, and among Tamil nationalists, the project explores how these groups create democratic space through symbolic acts and public engagement. Combining ethnography, content analysis, and participatory workshops, the project will build a global database of separatist repertoires and propose a new approach to understanding unrecognised struggles for statehood.
Objective
Existing analytical approaches are poorly equipped to make sense of political entities that aspire sovereign statehood and present themselves accordingly, but which lack a recognised status. The prevalent scholarship struggles to categorize sovereignty-aspiring entities.
This project departs from the extant literature in that it places the unsettled nature of sovereignty-aspiring entities – their defiance of categories – at the heart of the equation. Rather than resolving the interpretative “to be of not to be” dilemmas around their status and activities, the inherent contingency of separatist politics becomes our central vantage point. Turning to political performativity and aesthetics, the project seeks to determine how the performative repertoires of sovereignty-aspiring entities create democratic political space to bend or break the bounds of the formal institutional landscape.
The project centres on three case contexts, which are highly rich and highly diverse: the Catalonian independence movement, the autonomous administration of Rojava (Syria) and the Tamil nationalist movement in Sri Lanka. It takes an inductive approach to then corroborate our findings within and beyond these cases.
The project is structured around four inter-connected work packages each with its own research question and method. 1) We will use political ethnography to establish what political repertoires sovereignty-aspiring entities use. 2) We will use qualitative content analysis and art-based methods to assess the aesthetic dimensions of these repertoires. 3) We will use focus-group workshops to establish constituencies' understandings of these repertoires. 4) We will build a database of separatist political repertoires around the globe to validate our findings.
The project’s overall objective is to give a new impetus to the study of separatist conflicts with a rich and robust research agenda that combines a new conceptual lens with an innovative methodological approach.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
9000 GENT
Belgium
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.