The production of sovereignty through the nation and the state are, in other words, often exclusive projects that inadvertently presuppose and produce large numbers of poor, marginalised, or ethnic others as outsiders, people who are not yet ready to become citizens or included in the true political-cultural community. The state finds itself in constant competition with other centres of sovereignty that dispense violence as well as justice with impunity — criminal gangs, political movements or quasi-autonomous police forces that each try to assert their claims to sovereignty. In such situations, the state is not the natural and self-evident and origin of sovereignty, but one among several sovereign bodies that tries to assert itself upon the bodies of asylum seekers, “terrorists”, or mere criminals.