Sovereignty in the Skies

Abstract

This chapter discusses aerial sovereignty and uses it as a lens into the “black holes” in international politics created by unrecognized states. Those black holes are ones of information, but also ones of geopolitics and aeropolitics. The chapter looks at the rise and fall of one national airline, and the privatization of both the airline and its unrecognized home airport, to explore both the totemic power of infrastructures and the potential of aeropolitics for anthropology. Like the recent appropriation of geopolitics for the study of political affect and agency, aeropolitics offers a lens onto the everyday practices that produce stateness, the effect of sovereignty, and a sense of sovereign agency. Investigating the national airline of an unrecognized state also shows the role played by national airlines in producing belief in the state — or calling it into question in an era of privatization and globalization. Ultimately, the de facto state of the skies is one that tells us much about how we imagine and construct sovereignty today.