Robin Celikates
In what follows, I formulate three interrelated challenges in response to the powerful critique of imperial popular sovereignty and the vision of anti-imperial popular sovereignty that Inés Valdez develops in Democracy and Empire: 1) In addition to the critique of the dominant imperial form of popular sovereignty and self-determination, more empirical and theoretical attention should be paid to informal, disobedient, eruptive, and revolutionary forms of popular self-determination and their complex genealogies. 2) Migration, understood not just as world-historical event but as world-historical force, or in Marx’s words, real movement, provides an empirically and theoretically significant limit case for this alternative genealogy and form of self-determination. 3) The reality of migration forces us to ask how the alternative form of anti-imperial popular sovereignty envisioned in the final part of the book could emerge and develop in a world of capitalist markets and nation-states.