Benedict Anderson and De Facto States: Imagined Communities on the Road to Statehood?

In the absence of international legal state recognition, the ‘statehood’ of de facto states has been prominently conceptualised as based not on absolute physical political power, but on overlapping, networked, improvised, discursive, constructed, and/or performative social processes (e.g. Isachenko 2012; McConnell 2016; Visoka 2018). In a sense, such scholarship argues, de facto states are recognised imaginatively, before they are recognised legally or materialised politically. The statehood of de facto states may be legally non-recognised, but is nonetheless realised through the imagination of local elites and populations. In that light, it is rather puzzling that scholars of de facto statehood pay so little heed to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. While this classic work on nationalism is occasionally referred to in passing, its foregrounding of national imagination(s) in opposition to state sovereignty receives surprisingly little attention in de facto states scholarship. This presentation aims to remedy this caveat. After highlighting the ‘imaginary’ conceptualisations of de facto statehood prevalent in existing research, this presentation will delve into the potential significance of Anderson’s work for these conceptualisations. First of all, it will argue that both Anderson and de facto state scholarship reject traditional notions of state sovereignty. Instead, secondly, Anderson finds that nations are imagined as sovereign – a contention that will be compared to notions of de facto (state) sovereignty. Third, the imagination of nationhood as ‘limited’ will be analysed in light of de facto states’ tentatively non-cosmopolitan stance against ideas of transnational humanity. Fourthly, Anderson’s critique of Gellner’s ‘invention of nations where they do not exist’ sheds interesting light on popular representations of de facto states as ‘places that do not exist’. Finally, therefore, Anderson’s refusal to outright condemn nationalism per se speaks to ideas of de facto statehood as emancipatory projects. This paper, thus, brings common theories of de facto statehood in conversation with Anderson’s foundational piece on nationalism, revealing how such a conversation could offer a deeper understanding of the distinctions between imagined political communities and ‘real’ (de facto) statehood – nations without states, and nations with states.