William E. Connolly's review of Peripheral Visions is what any author should want, a thoughtful, appreciative account of the book's merits and an invitation to push aspects of the argument further than the book currently does. One point of clarification: I did not mean to suggest that Foucault's work should be read only in terms of its emphasis on coherence and control, or that my own is intended as a blanket critique of his. My understanding of political power and resistance is beholden to Foucault's insofar as he shows how power depends on multiple points of resistance. He thus describes how existing mechanisms of social control get reproduced and yet are also vulnerable to creativity, innovation, and surprise. My point was to challenge Foucault-inspired scholars of colonialism, in particular, who tend to exaggerate the capacities of colonial administrations and to neglect not only outright challenges to colonial rule, but also the ways in which colonial rule could, at times, be irrelevant to inhabitants' political experience. The goal was to distinguish between the stated claims of colonial rulers and colonialism's actual effects. At stake is not simply a reading of Foucault, of course, but a sense of what matters politically—whether scholars emphasize the reproductive power of institutions and ideas or whether they focus on how reproduction places those very ideas and institutions at risk. I want to chart a middle course here, neither exaggerating coherence nor romanticizing resistance.

An emphasis on reproduction and risk gets us to the issue of politics as performative, a term familiar to political theorists and the anthropologically-minded, but less well-known in mainstream comparative politics circles. Conceptually, the book invites understanding the term “performative” in two senses that extend beyond the strict J. L. Austin one. First, certain ordinary practices enact that which can be named conceptually. By pledging allegiance to the flag I perform the work of a national subject; by deliberating in public with others I perform aspects of democracy. Second, all language is performative in a looser sense, as Wittgenstein recognized so promisingly. Language is itself an activity with effects. These two senses of “performative” are of particular importance for Peripheral Visions because they provide the methodological scaffolding for understanding identity in terms not of motivations, beliefs, or intentions, but political action. Methodologically, identifications—whether they be national, ethnic, racial, gendered, class-based, religious, authoritarian or democratic—need to be studied politically in terms of what people do, rather than ontologically in terms of who people are. Or put differently, who people are can be best understood for purposes of political science by analyzing what they do. Theoretically, to understand political identifications as performative is to consider how identity operates like other dimensions of social convention: political identifications require repetition; they can be “stretched” while remaining intelligible; and they produce variations that do not necessarily place the convention radically at risk. Political resistance is often part of the convention (of nationalism, for example), and not a radical alternative to it (see Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, 2008). Such resistance may end up destabilizing regime politics as usual, but it will generally do so within conventional expectations of collectivity and community.

Peripheral Visions stresses the salience of performatives in ways that do not disregard nonlinguistic aspects of practice, despite the term's origins in theories of language. But it does not emphasize them. As Connolly suggests, attending to embodied, nonlinguistic practices more thoroughly would have empirically enriched the book's analysis. Indeed, my own work has recently turned to Merleau-Ponty as a way of considering how nonlinguistic, visceral experiences of affective attachment and judgment might matter for politics, and Connolly's writings have been crucial in this regard. It bears noting, however, that a more detailed consideration of these factors in Peripheral Visions would not have changed this book's key arguments.

The book is about nationalist identifications, but it is also about their connection with democratic and pious solidarities. Public sphere activities (such as the qat chews Connolly mentions) facilitate national identifications to the extent that they create specific assemblages of fellow participants who have come to share the everyday experience of communicating with others within the limited, territorially sovereign space of the nation-state. But the content of these discussions does not necessarily presume a national identity or use vocabulary suggestive of one. The Yemeni example shows too that the public addressed in quotidian social gatherings can be both broader and more indeterminate or narrower and more specifically local than a national one. Thus, the significance of these public interactions also resides in their profoundly political character, in the ways in which they make possible an addressing of others in terms that connect actors' diverse and contentious interests to a common venture, a dimension of politics foregrounded by theorists such as Hannah Arendt and Hanna Pitkin. In this light, the book contrasts entrenched minimalist formulations of “democracy” as contested elections with civic participation and the formation of “public spheres.” I argue that the latter must be understood not as epiphenomenal, but as instantiations of democratic expression in their own right. Public sphere practices occasion the performance of an explicitly democratic “subjectivity”—one that relishes deliberation—without producing specifically liberal debates or forms of personhood. These deliberative practices, as they express themselves in Yemen, have arisen under conditions fundamentally different from the ones that Habermas and others have identified as seminal to Western European experience. And they have arisen under conditions in which contemporary expressions of piety can and do coalesce with nationalist solidarities. This coalescence not only demands a de-coupling of nationalism from secularism, but also requires rethinking prevalent causal claims about the historical relationship between “neoliberal” reforms and the proliferation of piety movements.

The book offers a theory of quasi-nationalism under conditions of weak state institutions. As is already well documented, cases of early state-formation in Western Europe suggest that the state evolved into a powerful set of institutions before nationalism developed as the articulated, ideological expression of common political identification. Scholarly accounts of a number of postcolonial states suggest a second, different relationship between state- and nation-“building.” In these cases, regimes have had to construct an effective institutional apparatus while concomitantly cultivating national consciousness. The need to consolidate state power while generating national identification affects the kinds of institutions, practices, and loyalties these regimes can produce. In the examples of many postcolonial states, such exigencies have produced authoritarian regimes that deliver goods and services in return for a modicum of national allegiance and a lot of obedience. The case of Yemen suggests a third model of political development, involving the emergence of vague, mildly constraining forms of national identification in the absence of an effective sovereign state. The consequence tends to be a politics of “muddling through,” creating possibilities for regime durability without stability. In this context of vibrant civic activism and political violence, in more or less equal measure, a sense of political possibility and efforts to contain it are made starkly apparent. By adopting a notion of politics as performative and by examining the details of the Yemeni case, we can begin to see with finer resolution how nationalism works as an ongoing process, how democratic practices operate in the absence of a democratic regime, and how piety interacts with each.