Quantum Sovereignty + Entanglement

• Main Author: Salter, Mark B.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2022
• Subjects: inuit
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197568200.003.0013

Sovereignty is a poor model for the prediction of actual political acts, and quantum sovereignty provides a much more accurate tool for measuring power. Insights gained from the quantum state of entanglement demonstrate how the performance of settler-colonial sovereign statehood is always already entangled with and inseparable from Indigenous lifeworlds (among other material and semiotic assemblages). When complex political entanglements collapse into a particular decision (inclusion/exclusion, authority, jurisdiction, membership, etc.), sovereignty is always already in the measuring machines of the observer. The first murder trials of Inuit under Canadian law in 1917 and 1923 demonstrate how quantum sovereignty explains more than traditional models.