State is the legal order (Schmitt 2005)1. Sovereignty is the power of applying the exception in the state. In normal conditions laws and rules are governing the whole causal network of society. Exceptional circustamces allow the sovereign to exercise authority beyond those rules. This special attributes are normally limited by the constitution. But what is happening when both the constituent power and chaos are framing the decisions of the sovereign?

It could be the case in the Peruvian process of democratizing state decisions. This is caused by the global crisis of representation, when nor the state neither elected officials provide the citizens with the living conditions to exercise their rights, granted by implicit agreement that hold the regime operating. Peruvian process has been observed and critizised as an irregular form of democracy. Varied opinions employ adjetive and subjective interpretations. The Economist has qualified as hybrid democracy, due to the lack of political culture mainly2. Meanwhile, academics interpret the process reflecting ‘a fragile democracy or … the sign of a nondemocratic regime’3, within a regime of ‘democracy without parties’4.

In this regard, I hypothesize that above-mentioned references, are influenced by biased perceptions. The source of these interpretations are at least credited to modernist simple conceptions of state order, without taking into account the actual operation of a system composed by multiple interacting and decentralized power subjects, who are generating the political chaos they register accordingly.

To investigate the Peruvian process it is suggested to recognize it as an emergent order. It is not the order from a sovereign that decides the cherished stable political culture, it is the power diseminated across many nodes along with the ‘points of ascription’ (Schmitt 2005). This causal network that determinates everything is therefore the object of study that could better reflect the dynamics. In this sense, Peruvian democratic system keeping away from anarchy fosters autonomous operation of actors, even thos acting ‘informally’ whose power the sovereign state both linger and hinder.

References

  1. Carl Schmitt. 2005. Political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. University of Chicago Press. ↩

  2. The Economist Democracy Index 2023 https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2023/ ↩

  3. Rodrigo Barrenechea, Alberto Vergara. 2023. Peru: The Danger of Powerless Democracy. Journal of Democracy 34(2): 77-89. Johns Hopkins University Press. <DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2023.0015> ↩

  4. Steven Levitsky and Maxwell A. Cameron. 2003. Democracy without Parties? Political Parties and Regime Change in Fujimori’s Peru. Latin American Politics and Society 45(3): 1-33. Cambridge University Press. ↩