Sovereign Networks under Pressure: Shared Authority, Authoritarian Incursion, and Urban Resistance in Comparative Perspective

Liza Weinstein, Northeastern University
Walter Nicholls, University of California Irvine

Across the current authoritarian–neoliberal conjuncture, cities and regions have become key terrains on which national executives stage spectacular assertions of sovereign authority. Bulldozers in Delhi’s informal settlements and armored ICE convoys in Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago target minoritized urban residents in the name of legal neutrality while performing sovereignty for audiences far beyond the immediate sites of enforcement. Existing work in critical urban studies and global city research has documented both the constrained position of cities within hierarchical state structures and their partial “de-nationalization” within global financial networks, but it lacks a relational account of how authority is organized across scales and why central states turn to spectacular urban coercion during crises. This paper develops such an account by theorizing shared sovereignty in representative, multi-level democracies as a networked architecture that binds national, regional, municipal, and civic actors into interdependent relationships of material exchange, symbolic recognition, and negotiated compliance. Building on insights from critical urban studies, including Sassen Brenner, and conjunctural theories of crisis from Gramsci, Poulantzas, and Bourdieu, we conceptualize cities and regions as structurally empowered nodes that provide the service delivery, legitimation, and everyday compliance on which higher-order authority depends. Bulldozer politics—demolition drives in Modi’s India and urbanized border enforcement under Trump—represents a crisis-specific strategy of sovereign reconcentration that attempts to bypass this distributed architecture by substituting coercive spectacle for distributive legitimation. Through a comparison of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Trump’s Republican administration, we identify two roads to reconcentration—differential incorporation and frontal assault—and show how their distinct sequencing of accumulation and coercion produces divergent patterns of urban resistance and compliance. The analysis provincializes North Atlantic theories of unitary state sovereignty, arguing that in representative, multi-level democracies, sovereignty is best understood as a precarious network of relationships most visible in the streets and neighborhoods of their cities.

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 Presented in Session 218. Race and Space