This joint presentation examines how sovereignty is being reconfigured through encounters with Global China across Africa and South Asia. Moving beyond narratives of sovereign erosion or capture, we approach sovereignty as a set of practices that are actively produced, negotiated, and contested through legal, infrastructural, and institutional forms. Drawing on ethnographic research on Chinese litigation in Ethiopian courts and on the governance of the Belt and Road Initiative funded Colombo Port City project in Sri Lanka, we explore how sovereign authority is increasingly exercised through exception rather than rule.

In Ethiopia, courts have become critical arenas where immunity is debated among those who fight, exact, grant, or weigh it, and where sovereignty is enacted through everyday legal practice . In Sri Lanka, sovereign exception is deliberately engineered through infrastructure-led development, as elite commissions design special zones that reconfigure territorial authority, legality, and economic governance.

Taken together, these cases describe how postcolonial states strategically invite and manage sovereign compromise in pursuit of development and how authority is fragmented across state institutions. Most importantly it reveals how Global China serves less as an exceptional actor than as a catalyst that reveals and accelerates existing transformations. By placing law and infrastructure in dialogue, the talk highlights the multiple sites through which sovereignty is performed today and raises broader questions about accountability and governance under conditions of exception.

Thiruni Kelegama (Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, UK) examines how development projects reshape power, space, and identity in Sri Lanka. Her forthcoming book, Central Margins: Sri Lanka’s Violent Frontier (Cambridge University Press 2026), analyses how postcolonial states pair narratives of benevolent development with territorial control.

Miriam Driessen is an anthropologist and departmental lecturer in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. She is the author of Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia and the forthcoming book Immunity on Trial: Ethiopian Courts, Chinese Corporations, and Contestations over Sovereignty.