Strangers in a stranger land: political identity in the era of the governance state

Abstract

The ‘governance state’ is characterised by radically reconfigured relations between public and private authority such that sovereign political authority comes to be dispersed along several axes of organised power. Paralleling the dispersal of sovereign political authority is a concomitant dispersal of familiar forms of political identity. Individuals and groups become disconnected from the familiarity of their respective social fabrics by the routine operations of a governance state having little or no concern with the nation-building agendas (and their related understandings of citizenship) of the past. The shifts of political identity possible in a context of nation-building states, of settler and postcolonial societies alike, become increasingly harder to effect. The individualising of ethical positions, of relegating such experiences to the sphere of the personal, creates a kind of closure in which resisting the state's authority comes to be interpreted by individuals as simply resisting their selves, their governance-state identities. This is precisely the kind of situation confronting us as contemporary citizens, an unfamiliar political terrain in which we find ourselves negotiating as strangers in a stranger land.