The Spectres of Sovereignty

The philosopher and literary critic Kojin Karatani turns 85 today. His latest book, The End of Modern Literature: On Permanent Revolution, publishes later this month. Meanwhile, his most ambitious work, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange – which I had the privilege of editing for Editora Machado – has been translated into Portuguese and should reach Brazilian readers in the coming months.

Both of Karatani’d books are arriving at an opportune moment. Recent actions by Donald Trump’s United States — such as the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, the attacks on Iran, the tariff wars launched against several countries and, above all, the designation of criminal organizations from various countries as terrorist groups, as well as the application of the same label to left-wing organizations operating within the United States — have created a dangerous precedent for justifying US military interventions in sovereign states. We have seen this film before, in the Bush era and in the days of the War on Terror. But everything suggests that this new wave of interventionism will strike with far greater force and violence.

In this light, it is striking that Kojin Karatani’s work should now, in his later years, prove such a powerful tool for addressing questions that have preoccupied him since his youth. When he entered the University of Tokyo in 1960, the protests against the revision of the US–Japan Security Treaty (known as ‘Anpo’) were at their height; to this day, they are remembered as one of the largest mass mobilizations in Japanese history. The immediate provocation for the demonstrations was the treaty that formalized Japan’s strategic and military subordination to the United States within the postwar order. But Anpo also raised a broader concern: what remained of Japanese sovereignty under the tutelage of the US military? It was, after all, an asymmetric agreement, signed between formally independent states, whose economic and military resources were, at the time, vastly unequal. The protesters, many of them young left-wing students like Karatani, confronted not only the policies of the Japanese government, but also the distance between state sovereignty, national sovereignty and popular sovereignty. We might say that Japan was witnessing a political struggle among competing conceptions of sovereignty.

It would be misleading to turn this episode into an origin myth, as though Karatani’s later theory of capital, nation and state — which would only be formalized decades afterwards — was already contained in the streets of Tokyo in 1960. But it is no exaggeration to say that the movement’s defeat helped to frame a set of problems that would be integral to his subsequent work. Anpo’s failure was frequently interpreted as proof that the surrounding movement lacked a centralized political organization capable of directing it. Karatani drew a different conclusion. In 1961, he proposed a free association of activists that would not be subordinated to a centralized party. Four decades later, he would recognize something of this intuition in the New Associationist Movement (NAM).

It is regrettable that now, six decades later, the question of sovereignty should have re-emerged so forcefully from the entrails of the “end of history”. If there is a spectre haunting contemporary politics, I would argue that it is the specter of sovereignty. Or rather, of sovereignties.

The Return of Sovereignty

In recent years, sovereignty has reappeared everywhere. Donald Trump’s return to power undoubtedly played an important role in this revival— or in intensifying the appetite for absolute sovereignty. Tariffs, as we know, were already an important element of the first Trump administration. In his second term, however, they acquired a different scale and centrality. From 2025 onward, the government presented its so-called reciprocal tariffs not merely as instruments of trade policy, but as a means of restoring US industry, employment, and national security. The language of economic sovereignty became virtually indistinguishable from the language of economic warfare.

The consequences extended far beyond China, Trump’s principal adversary in his own discourse. Countries traditionally regarded as allies were forced to respond in the same vocabulary. In March 2025, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said that negotiations with Trump would only take place once the United States demonstrated that its president would “respect Canada’s sovereignty and be ready for comprehensive trade talks because Americans are going to suffer from Trump’s trade war”. He added that talks with Trump would not happen, “until we get the respect we deserve as a sovereign nation”.

In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva likewise made sovereignty a central element of his response to tariffs, sanctions against Brazilian authorities and the Trump administration’s attempts to interfere in decisions taken by the Brazilian judiciary. In an address on the eve of Independence Day in September 2025, Lula presented sovereignty not merely as territorial independence, but as Brazil’s right to defend its democracy, regulate digital platforms and make political decisions without foreign interference. “We are not and will not be anyone’s colony again. We are capable of governing and caring for our land and our people without interference from any foreign government”, he declared.

And so, for the first time in years, the Brazilian left could carry the national flag in the streets without fearing that it would be mistaken for support for Jair Bolsonaro. The flag appropriated by the far right returned, at least temporarily, as a symbol of resistance to a foreign power. The episode then gave fresh momentum to Lula’s re-election campaign. In recent weeks, as the tariff war has returned to the headlines, the possible effects of the US government’s measure are still being assessed. But a considerable share of the Brazilian population, according to recent polling, sees it as an attempt to intervene in the country’s elections on Jair Bolsonaro’s son Flávio’s behalf.

When tariffs first came to dominate the Brazilian news, sovereignty was also being invoked by other actors, in a very different context. On 28 October 2025, approximately 2,500 police officers entered the Penha and Alemão complexes in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone to carry out an operation against the Comando Vermelho. The final official tally recorded 121 deaths, including four police officers and two teenagers. It was the deadliest police operation in Brazilian history. The main leaders targeted by the operation were neither killed nor captured.

After the operation, the massacre was described by state authorities and much of the Brazilian press by way of the language of war. Felipe Curi, secretary of Rio de Janeiro’s Civil Police at that time, argued that what the police were confronting was no longer simply a public-security problem, but an “irregular and asymmetric war”, a matter of national defense and sovereignty. An editorial in O Globo, one of Brazil’s largest-circulation newspapers, argued that this claim could not simply be dismissed.

As the journalist Fernando Barros e Silva later observed in an article for Revista Piauí, this argument coincided with the campaign to classify the Comando Vermelho as a narcoterrorist organization, a proposal advanced by the US government and subsequently supported by far-right politicians in Brazil. What had been a mere possibility became a reality in June of this year. The United States did in fact designate both the Comando Vermelho and the Primeiro Comando da Capital as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, creating a legal and political precedent for covert or military operations on Brazilian soil.

If, on the one hand, the Brazilian state invoked national sovereignty as a means of defending itself against US interference, the police forces appealed to sovereignty in order to institute a kind of temporary state of exception and attack criminal organizations, leaving civilian victims in their wake — as so often happens in such operations when human rights are pushed aside in the name of repression — and leaving many questions unanswered. The talk of “narcoterrorism”, circulating through the corridors of the White House during the same period, added yet another form of sovereignty to the imperialist brew.

Nor was this confined to Brazil: it represented a shift in the United States’ relationship with Latin America. The kidnapping of Maduro is symptomatic in this regard. But there are other examples. In Paraguay, during the same period, a Status of Forces Agreement approved by parliament established a legal framework that facilitated the expansion of the temporary presence of US military personnel by granting them a form of “diplomatic immunity”, which shields them from any punishment by Paraguayan authorities. For them, only the US Constitution is sovereign.

It is not, therefore, simply a matter of saying that the idea of sovereignty has returned. Nor is it a matter of questioning the supposedly inconsistent use of the word. What has returned is not sovereignty in the singular, but a conflict among different aspirations to sovereignty. There is the sovereignty claimed by an imperial state, the defensive sovereignty invoked by states subjected to its pressure, the popular sovereignty governments claim to represent, and the de facto sovereign powers exercised by organized crime within states. These forms sometimes oppose one another, sometimes overlap, and sometimes produce unexpected and dangerous alliances.

What makes sovereignty such a diffuse notion, capable of being mobilized in such different contexts? What is the difference between sovereignty defined in abstract terms and the way it is exercised in practice? One useful way to begin answering these questions may be to revisit the origins of the concept of sovereignty, which lie in the emergence of the absolute monarchies of Europe and the consolidation of the modern nation-state. Karatani’s theory of modes of exchange is particularly valuable in this respect, precisely because it allows us to separate what tends to be perceived as a unity within “national sovereignty”.

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Capital, State and Nation

Karatani’s most systematic political work, The Structure of World History, proposes a reinterpretation of the history of social formations through the concept of modes of exchange, which he regards as more adequate than that of modes of production. For Karatani, the various social formations that have existed throughout history can be understood as combinations of three distinct modes of exchange, always under the dominance of one of them: one based on reciprocal exchange (mode A), another on plunder and redistribution (mode B), and another on the equivalent exchange of commodities (mode C). Put very schematically, we might say that the first operates according to the logic of affinity, the second according to the logic of property or contract, and the third according to the logic of value. In the modern arrangement, these modes would correspond, respectively, to the nation as an imagined community, the state as a social contract, and capital as the market. Together, for Karatani, they form a Borromean knot under the dominance of the last. Without going too deeply into the dynamics of the modes, I propose that we look more closely here at what Karatani calls mode B, which corresponds in modernity to the state — perhaps it can help us unpick the tangle of sovereignty described above.

For Karatani, mode B begins with the domination of one community by another. For domination to endure, the conqueror cannot simply destroy the conquered population. It must protect it from other conquerors, impose order and return a portion of the extracted resources through public works, infrastructure, ceremonies or other forms of redistribution. The governed receive protection and order in exchange for obedience and tribute. We are, therefore, in Hobbesian territory, and it is here that we find the prototype of the state. The state certainly depends upon violence, but it cannot sustain itself through violence alone. To consolidate and preserve itself, it must combine domination and protection, plunder and redistribution. The monopoly of violence prohibits other actors from exercising it, while the redistributive function lends that monopoly a certain degree of legitimacy.

For Karatani, as we have said, capitalist society is characterized by a combination of three modes of exchange under the dominance of mode C, or the logic of value. Even so, commodity exchange does not eliminate the state or the nation (or imagined community). Instead, it reorganizes them within the Capital–State–Nation complex. Capitalism, dominant within this complex, dissolves traditional communities and continuously produces inequality. The nation promises to restore, at the level of imagination and political belonging, the solidarity destroyed by commodity exchange. The state, for its part, appears as the agent that intervenes through taxation, regulation, social rights and redistribution to prevent the inequalities generated by capital from destroying the social formation itself. This, of course, is when the three rings of the Borromean knot operate in perfect harmony. As we shall see, that is rarely the case on the periphery of capitalism and, today, increasingly less the case at its centre as well.

Capital, state and nation, according to Karatani’s theory, operate according to different principles, but compensate for one another’s contradictions. Hence the image of the Borromean knot: three rings linked in such a way that removing any one of them releases the others. Inseparability, however, does not mean alignment, since each element of the triad possesses its own agency: each element possesses its own material basis, its own logic and its own way of exercising power.

This is what gives modern politics its air of fatality. A crisis arising in one of the elements cannot be resolved immanently, without recourse to the others. Rather than being resolved, crises are displaced. At times the state is called upon to save capital; at others the nation is mobilized to legitimize the state; at still others capital finances or disciplines the state whose sovereignty supposedly regulates it. No isolated action, however, can undo this knot.

The theory of modes of exchange therefore allows us to formulate a more precise question about the return of sovereignty. Which element of the knot is missing when sovereignty is invoked? Is it the state claiming autonomy in relation to other states? Is it the nation demanding that the state represent an imagined community? Is it capital demanding the protection of a national market? Or is sovereignty being exercised by actors that coincide with none of these forms?

Sovereignty and the Outside

Modern sovereignty is generally associated with the consolidation of the centralized state in Europe. Jean Bodin’s theory emerged in close relation to the growth of monarchical power, although in his formulation sovereignty was not conceptually restricted to monarchy. It referred to a supreme and enduring authority capable of legislating above the competing jurisdictions, privileges and corporate powers existing within a territory. Internally, this meant that the state stood above rival authorities. Externally, it meant independence in relation to other states, as well as to any imperial power. As Karatani points out, these two dimensions cannot be separated. A state centralizes power internally in part because it confronts other states externally.

It is at this point that sovereignty differs from government. Seen from within a country, the state appears as a field traversed by conflicts among classes, parties, institutions, regions and social groups. When it confronts another state, however, it presents itself to us as a unified subject. War, therefore, is not simply one of the activities performed by sovereign states: it is the moment when the state’s autonomy reveals itself most clearly. In war, the state can demand sacrifices from the nation, subordinate economic actors and suspend the ordinary rules governing its internal politics.

This does not mean, however, that in wartime a state always succeeds in unifying the nation or controlling capital. Often it is the fractured character of the nation-state — the distinction among state sovereignty, national sovereignty and popular sovereignty — that becomes visible in times of crisis. In such cases, it becomes clear that the state possesses an interest and a will that cannot be reduced to the will of the population. It may wage war in the name of the nation while acting against the interests of a large part of that same nation. It may claim to protect the population while exposing specific sections of it to death. It may defend national capital while sacrificing workers, territories and public resources.

The return of sovereignty must therefore be analyzed not as the return of a unified political subject, but as an attempt to overcome the widening distances among capital, state and nation — or, put differently, to deal with the misalignment among the three elements of the modern Borromean knot.

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Imperial Sovereignty

Trumpism is commonly described as nationalist and isolationist. This description is only partly correct. Trump rejects many of the multilateral institutions through which US power operated in the postwar period. But the rejection of multilateralism does not imply the rejection of empire. It may, in fact, simply represent an attempt to exercise imperial power more directly, without the costs and reciprocal obligations imposed by international institutions.

Tariffs, sanctions and military threats are part of this project. They seek to transform the unequal position of the United States within the global system into an explicit right to determine the conduct of other states. Some of Trump’s actions are directed outward: the tariff wars, the attacks on international institutions, pressure on Canada and Brazil, threats against Greenland and the military operation in Venezuela. Others are directed inward: the expansion of federal law-enforcement powers, mass deportations, the militarization of migration policy and attempts to subordinate institutions capable of limiting executive power. These movements are complementary.

The category of narcoterrorism is especially useful in this regard. When a criminal organization is classified as terrorist, the boundary between criminal investigation and military confrontation becomes blurred. The enemy is no longer simply someone who has broken the law and must be prosecuted. It becomes an armed organization against which the state can claim the exceptional powers associated with war, both within and beyond the territory of the United States.

In this sense, Trumpism does indeed express a desire for sovereignty: the desire to restore the US state’s capacity to impose its will internally and externally — or to exercise, ever more expansively, the presumed prerogatives of its empire. In this respect, the anti-Trump protests that popularized the slogan “No Kings” seem to begin from a correct diagnosis, however anachronistic it may appear to a less attentive observer.

Yet this will to absolutism is not itself absolute. The question we might ask is: will the US state actually be able to subordinate capital, unify the nation and impose itself upon rival states? The answer is far from obvious, but the unfolding of many initiatives undertaken by the US government seems to suggest that it will not.

The tariff war, for example, has repeatedly exposed the dependence of US companies on international production chains. Policies announced as a rebellion against global capital frequently subordinate themselves to specific fractions of capital, especially the technology, finance, energy and arms industries. Trumpism, in this sense, does not lie outside the limits established by the Capital–State–Nation triad. It seeks to reorganize the internal balance of this knot in favor of the state, but does so while depending on capital and appealing to a profoundly divided nation. Its apparent absolutism may therefore be less the restoration of a sovereign state than a staging of sovereignty under conditions in which no state can fully control the flows of capital, technology, information and commodities upon which it depends. This does not render the staging harmless. A desire for sovereignty, even when frustrated, can produce — and has produced — wars, massacres and authoritarianism.

Defensive Sovereignty

The appeal to sovereignty made by countries subjected to US pressure cannot be placed on the same plane as the imperial sovereignty of the United States. When Lula, for example, defends Brazil’s right to regulate digital platforms, protect its judiciary or conduct its own foreign relations, he is invoking a genuine principle of international equality: a state that cannot refuse the sanctions, tariffs or orders of a more powerful state is sovereign only in a formal sense. The reclamation of the national flag by the Brazilian left, in response to the negative repercussions of the tariffs, was therefore not merely theatrical. It was effectively a way of defending policies adopted by a sovereign state against attacks resulting from collaboration between an imperialist power and sectors of the Brazilian far right — notably the Bolsonaro family’s increasingly close and subservient relationship with Donald Trump.

This defensive sovereignty, however, is also riddled with contradictions. It is possible to defend national sovereignty in negotiations with the United States while simultaneously granting concessions, for example, to agribusiness, mining companies or foreign investors. The Brazilian government’s defiance of a foreign power can coexist with its submission to domestic capital, which as a rule does not coincide with the interests of the population. National sovereignty can therefore be defended in order to preserve a development model that super-exploits precarious workers, threatens Indigenous communities and, day after day, advances the silent extermination of the Black population living on the urban peripheries.

Here lies the difference between national sovereignty and popular sovereignty. National sovereignty concerns the autonomy of a state in relation to other states; popular sovereignty, by contrast, refers to a population’s capacity to determine its own actions and organize its collective life. The coincidence between the two, however, is far rarer than many theorists of liberal democracy would have us believe. And it certainly does not occur without struggle.

The dyad formed by the modern nation-state tends to conceal these contradictions by presenting society as a community endowed with a common interest. Karatani’s theory helps us recognize both the political necessity and the limits of this operation. The same nationalism capable of uniting a people against imperial aggression can conceal important differences between representatives and represented within a democracy. Not to mention the differences between those who command and those who obey, those who exploit and those who are exploited, those who live and those who die.

Criminal Sovereignty

The most difficult case is that of armed organizations described as agents exercising sovereignty within the territory of the state. There is a grain of truth in the expression “parallel state”, frequently used in Brazil to describe the power of drug-trafficking groups and militias (paramilitary groups that extort peripheral populations, supposedly in exchange for protection and services). But in practice, the matter runs deeper. Criminal organizations such as the Comando Vermelho, the PCC or the militias, wherever they operate, rarely replace the state completely. Their authority coexists and frequently interacts with police forces, local politicians, public services, legal businesses, religious institutions and community organizations.

This is not exactly a parallel state, but a structure that at times challenges and at times supplements the state monopoly on the use of force. This can be seen, for example, in the correlation between the territorial control of certain factions and the decline in homicide rates. The PCC’s hegemony in São Paulo is emblematic in this regard. Conversely, the rise in crime in the states of Brazil’s North and Northeast is probably correlated with intensified conflicts, territorial disputes and warfare among factions.

Karatani’s description of mode B is particularly useful at this point. For him, a state begins to take shape when plunder is transformed into an enduring relation of domination that combines extraction, protection and redistribution. Criminal organizations also extract resources, collect fees, monopolize markets and punish those who violate their rules. They may prevent certain kinds of theft, mediate domestic and commercial disputes, impose curfews or organize forms of assistance during emergencies. These practices do not make such organizations emancipatory or legitimate. They show, rather, that coercion alone is rarely sufficient to sustain territorial power. The criminal organization sometimes enacts a distorted version of the exchange characteristic of mode B: obedience and resources are demanded in return for protection and order. Its authority becomes possible where the state itself is present primarily through police violence, imprisonment and extraction, while failing to provide reliable protection, rights and public services.

It would be a mistake, however, to treat the Comando Vermelho and the PCC as equivalent forms. The power of the Comando Vermelho in Rio de Janeiro — and, today, increasingly in other Brazilian states — has a markedly territorial and overtly armed character. Its control is associated with specific communities, the open display of assault rifles, the defense of access routes and frequent confrontations with the police and rival organizations.

The PCC followed a different path. It emerged within São Paulo’s prison system, producing rules, hierarchies and mechanisms for mediating conflicts among prisoners. Its power later expanded through networks connecting prisons, neighborhoods, drug markets and international trafficking routes. Compared with the Comando Vermelho in Rio, it often operates in a less visibly territorial and more networked manner.

Both exercise forms of coercive governance, but the political geography of their power differs. The sovereignty of the Comando Vermelho is more readily imagined as the armed occupation of a territory. The PCC’s authority circulates through prisons, commercial circuits, codes of conduct and networks extending far beyond any specific territory. (Perhaps we could say that the PCC tends to be oriented more toward the logic of value, while the Comando Vermelho tends more toward the logic of property—but perhaps it would be best to avoid that digression).

The US designation erases much of this difference by placing both organizations under the category of foreign terrorism. The category transforms complex regimes of criminal governance into unified military enemies. It also produces a paradox. The existence of criminal power is described as proof that the Brazilian state has lost sovereignty. But this supposed loss becomes the justification for a more powerful foreign state to violate Brazilian sovereignty. What is presented as the restoration of state authority can therefore become the extension of US jurisdiction over Brazilian territory.

The massacre in Rio reveals another dimension of the problem. State authorities argued that the territorial power of the Comando Vermelho had transformed public security into a matter of war and national defense. In practice, this argument presents the residents of certain territories as populations situated within an enemy zone.

Here the traditional figure of the “internal enemy” returns. During Brazil’s military dictatorship, the internal enemy was the communist: a citizen whose political commitments supposedly placed them outside the legitimate national community. Today, the enemy is constructed through the categories of crime, drug trafficking and terrorism. The designation is not limited to the armed members of criminal groups. It radiates outward, affecting the territories in which these organizations operate and the populations that live there. Residents become suspect because they inhabit an area described as controlled by the enemy.

The language of sovereignty thus legitimizes an operation in which the state monopoly on violence no longer appears primarily as a promise of protection. It becomes the sovereign power to decide which populations may be exposed to death. Karatani’s mode B adds a material dimension to this description. The state is not merely the actor that kills. It is also a relation of exchange that promises protection and redistribution in return for obedience and taxation. What happens when redistribution recedes while plunder and coercion intensify?

The state can still collect taxes, arrest, imprison, occupy and kill, but it becomes less capable — or less willing — to provide protection and the capacity for social reproduction to certain sections of the population. Mode B is stripped of its redistributive pole. The criminal organization often enters this breach. It does not simply appear where the state is absent, because the state is frequently very present through the police, prisons and selective forms of regulation. Criminal governance grows within a specific form of state presence: coercive, unequal and entwined with illegal markets.

A career in crime may consequently resemble precarious work in a deregulated economy. The organization recruits among populations expelled from formal employment, offering income, status and protection in return for obedience and exposure to death. This does not turn organized crime into a spontaneous rebellion against capitalism. The drug trade is itself a highly competitive commodity market, connected to international financial, commercial and logistical circuits. Criminal governance combines aspects of mode B with the imperatives of mode C.

The sovereignty of criminal organizations, like that of the state or the empire, is always incomplete. It is territorial and connected to global markets, coercive and entwined with state agents, opposed to the law and dependent on legal economies, and so on. It is not, therefore, a kind of sovereignty that runs outside the Capital–State–Nation complex, but one of the forms that tends to grow in times of misalignment. 

Sovereignties at the End of History

The so-called golden age of capitalism produced the impression that capital, state and nation could operate in relatively stable alignment. For approximately three decades after the Second World War, the central capitalist countries combined industrial growth, rising wages, social rights and public redistribution. This alignment, however, was never universal. The prosperity of the center always depended upon imperial and unequal relations with the periphery, including the exploitation of differences in wages, technology, political organization and access to raw materials. Nor did it last. From the 1970s onward, the liberalization of capital, the weakening of trade unions, financialization and the international reorganization of production, among other processes, progressively loosened the correspondence among the economy, state regulation and social policy.

Today, capital operates through global production chains and financial networks that no national state can fully control. States, however, remain responsible for managing the social and political crises produced by these movements. Nations are called upon to absorb the resulting insecurity by offering an imaginary of belonging or promises of a greatness to be restored.

It is in this context that sovereignty returns. It is invoked precisely because its material foundations have become unstable. Trump promises an imperial state capable of disciplining global capital and restoring national industry. Lula invokes Brazilian sovereignty against the unequal power of the United States, both to rally popular support and to appeal to the international community. Police authorities claim that state sovereignty must be restored in territories governed by criminal organizations. The United States invokes this same criminal sovereignty as a justification for projecting its power across national borders.

These claims do not converge. They form a hierarchy. US sovereignty commands military, financial and technological powers unavailable to Brazil, Paraguay or Venezuela. The sovereignty of the Brazilian state is incomparably greater than that exercised by a criminal organization, but it is also internally unequal. The state protects some territories and treats others as enemy zones. It recognizes the autonomy of certain economic actors while denying even basic security to large sections of the population. It would therefore be more precise to speak not simply of sovereignty, but of wills to sovereignty. Some actors possess the power to translate their claims into sanctions, tariffs and military interventions. Others can only invoke sovereignty as a principle of resistance, as an empty signifier. Still others exercise fragments of sovereign power within the interstices of the state.

The contemporary proliferation of sovereignties, therefore, may be less a crisis of democracy or of the modern ideal of the nation-state than a symptom of a misaligned Capital–State–Nation complex, in which states, criminal organizations, and many other actors struggle over what remains of the powers that capital has displaced or internationalized. What may have been exceptional was the brief postwar period during which, at the center of capitalism, the nation-state appeared capable of containing capital, redistributing wealth, and representing a relatively unified political community. In this sense, the contemporary scene exposes what that apparent stability concealed.