Sovereignty is usually projected as a concept originating and revolving around the idea of the Westphalian State. It has been used by both Colonial and State powers over unrepresented peoples in negating their territorial rights and humanity while justifying the right of conquest by claims of national superiority. Considering that State sovereignty revolves around territory and legitimacy through force, Achille Mbembe says, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.” He says, “to kill or to allow to live constitutes the limits of sovereignty,” and therefore, “to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”
On the other hand, indigenous scholar Alfred Taiaiake affirms that sovereignty is “the result of choices made by men and women, indicative of a mindset located in … a social and political order.” Mbembe points out that the “ultimate expression of sovereignty is the production of general norms by a body made up of free and equal men and women.” who are capable of “self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation.” If sovereignty is the outcome of choices made by the will of men and women, it can be said that both sovereignty and self-determination derive their legitimacy through the people’s will. Yash Ghai, however, cautions that they are also both vulnerable to manipulation by the State system and that self-determination growing out of popular sovereignty often finds itself being obstructed in the name of State sovereignty.
States that continue to deny the right to self-determination often justify such denials on grounds of State Sovereignty. Yet, by denying a peoples’ right to self-determination, the State is limiting its own ability to exercise its Sovereignty. For instance, when Burma suppresses the right of the Karens, Kachins, Chins, etc., to decide their own destiny, through the use of force, it is restricting their ability to function and develop as a Sovereign entity in a manner that is democratic, healthy, peaceful and conducive for its own growth and well-being. A young Naga lawyer in a tone of irony reminds us, “the exercise of self-determination is imperative for a meaningful [State] sovereignty, while [State] sovereignty might not necessarily be indispensable for meaningful self-determination.”
When sovereignty and self-determination as derived from the people affirm and empower each other, they ensure that the idea of State and Territorial Sovereignty no longer remains in an unchallenged position, both in theory and practice. Michel Foucault adds that the end of sovereignty is circular in the sense that the end of [State] sovereignty is the exercise of [Peoples] sovereignty. The harmony of Peoples Self-determination and Peoples Sovereignty as complementing expressions of the people is central to the struggle for humanization and JustPeace.
In the effort to transform self-determination from “state-determination to peoples-determination,” Maivân Clech Lâm reminds us that “humankind, for its part receives most of its paradigm shifts … not from ‘successful’ societies, but from those at the fringes who are compelled by the ‘winners’ to re-invent, or succumb.” Today, Nagas find themselves living at the edge of the modern State – politically, economically, culturally, and often physically as well. In their aspiration to become fully human Nagas are required by the forces to history to conceptually construct new paradigms of the rightful structure, function, and patterns of relationship. It is in their desire to rehumanize that Nagas are challenged to imagine and seek to appropriate or reproduce the unreconstructed state.
