ARI Working Paper Series

This paper deals with several interconnected topics. It examines the differential origins of sovereignty in Asia in connection with ancient Asian philosophical systems, mainly early Buddhism. It links the concepts of sovereignty to corresponding concepts of subjectivity or, respectively, to the willed absence of a concept of subject (as in Buddhism). It assumes that the most interesting transformations in this respect in the political and conceptual sense have been happening since 1989, since the “end of the Cold War” and the advent of globalism, especially in comparison with Westphalian sovereignties that have had different genealogies. It analyses the easiness with which a conceptual apparatus that purposely ignores the subject embarks today into governmentality and forms of governance that do not need it. The paper also inevitably addresses with some detail fundamental epistemological questions of “translation” from one conceptual framework to another, especially between Asian and European philosophies.