The Decoupling Sovereignty Index: The Anatomy of Becoming Nobody – Port-au-Prince, Catatumbo and Zamfara
Description
Conventional state-failure indices treat the country as the unit of analysis and sovereignty as a binary or a rank, obscuring the everyday experience of those who live under thinning authority. Building on the Trinity of Sovereignty Decay (TSD) theory, this paper proposes the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI), a zone-level instrument designed to measure the gap between a state’s formal legal authority and its effective, lived reach; the DSI was first outlined publicly in a syndicated column. Using documentary evidence from three zones—Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Catatumbo (Colombia), and Zamfara (Nigeria)—it identifies three configurations of decoupling: contested, competing, and negotiated sovereignty. Across these cases, the paper traces three disappearances—protection, legibility, and representation—through which individuals remain legally recognised but become institutionally invisible, a condition termed “becoming nobody.” Rather than waiting for the language of collapse, the DSI enables earlier detection of decoupling by focusing on where, how, and to what degree sovereignty reaches the individual. The paper argues that the zone, not the state, is the more revealing unit for understanding contemporary sovereignty decay, and it sets out the conceptual anatomy that later operational work will formalise. The DSI’s technical specification is documented separately.
Files
Steps to reproduce
Scope. Take the three zones in the working paper: Port-au-Prince Metropolitan Zone (Haiti), Catatumbo Zone (Colombia) and Zamfara Zone (Nigeria). Treat the zone, not the country, as the unit of analysis. Collect sources. Gather the documentary sources listed in dsi_sources.csv (UN agencies, humanitarian reports, think tanks and news reports), 15 in all. Use the publication date and URL or identifier given for each source. Extract evidence items. From each source, record every figure, event, policy or assessment that bears on one of the nine domains: protection, territorial control, institutional reach, compliance, service access, justice, displacement, alternative authority and informality. Paraphrase the evidence and keep any figure exactly as the source gives it. Code each item. Assign the zone, configuration (contested territorial sovereignty, sovereignty in competition, or negotiated space), primary and secondary domain, and disappearance (protection, legibility or representation), using the definitions in dsi_codebook.csv. Handle conflicts. Where sources give different figures for the same thing, keep both rows and set conflicting_estimate to Y. Rate confidence. Record High, Medium or Low according to the quality of the source, and note anything not verified. Link and check. Join the register to the sources on source_id, and check each row against its source.