Conceptualisations of State and State Sovereignty as Ingredients of State Violence and Repression

This paper argues that political repression and violence are international phenomena brewed within the internationally agreed conceptualisations of the state and sovereignty. Its objective is to describe how conceptualisations of the State and sovereignty centralise violence in any country. The ancient Westphalia (1648) conceptualisation of sovereignty as a yardstick in determining a sovereign state and rights of the state accorded therein is a recipe for state political violence. Given that the state should protect its citizens, there is a thin line between the citizens' need for protection and opponents of the state. Using extant literature, such as the views of Mann, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Migdal on the state and how it defends itself and theories of sovereignty, this paper illustrates that intra - political repression has prevailed out of the exploitation of the violence enshrined in the two concepts of State and sovereignty as ingredients of political repression. The paper articulates how the State uses violence within the parameters of being ?States and sovereignties?. It concludes that the emergence of repression is a reality and cannot be divorced from how the world has accepted statehood and sovereignty regardless of ideology.