Media Reform, Communicative Sovereignty and the Geopolitics of Knowledge Production in South America

• In Event: Human Rights, Development and the Politics of Knowledge Production

Abstract

With the recent and ongoing wave of media reforms in South America, alternative media movements such as Radio Mundo Real and ALAI have begun to speak of their work in terms of ‘communicative sovereignty.’ These words are intriguing, since they speak to both alternative ways of knowing, and the real world politics of enacting other worlds into being. However, as with its cousin, food sovereignty, this idea is difficult to define, given that it embodies a tension between reinforcing state apparatuses and the desire to supersede them all together. For example, Agamban's approach to sovereignty offers us a means to conceptualize the geopolitics of knowledge production as being shaped by processes of inclusion and exception. This is a useful framework for understanding how media reform processes contribute to reshaping the relationship between normative power and dassein in the region, and in turn the experience of justice within transformed sovereign contexts. However Agamban's radical theory of social change demands subverting sovereignty as the ontological foundation of the international system. This puts into question the use of the term 'communicative sovereignty' by Latin American alternative media movements, since (for Agamban, anyway) the point is to do away with sovereignty as starting point for social and political organization. Drawing on case studies of alternative media movements in the region, this paper will explore the difficulty of defining communicative sovereignty, and examine implications of this term for how we engage with the geopolitics of knowledge production in Latin America at the current juncture.

Author

• Katherine M Reilly, Simon Fraser University