The Lama Question: Violence, Sovereignty, and Exception in Early Socialist Mongolia Hardcover – Illustrated, November 30, 2014

In The Lama Question, Christopher Kaplonski uses the example of political violence against Mongolian Buddhist lamas to interrogate Agamben’s theory of exception. Here, exception refers to the state’s ability to rely on extrajudicial means in times of crisis – ‘the state’ essentially being the one that can utilize extrajudicial, exceptional means when faced with crisis. Agamben roots his notion of exception in the idea of homo sacer – a Roman legal concept that denoted a person who was stripped of their citizenship and subject to execution. Kaplonski refines Agamben’s theory of exception to make use of it in the Mongolian case. There was no homo sacer in Mongolia – the early Mongolian state simply did not possess enough power to simply execute them. As far as states go, the Mongolian government of this period was liminal – it lacked the traditional authority of a state to impose the rule of law, and it also lacked the exceptional authority to resort to extrajudicial means. This liminality of the early Mongolian socialist state answers Kaplonski’s problematique, that is, ‘why did it take so long for the socialist Mongolian government to purge the lamas?’. Lacking power, the Mongolian government made a concerted effort to make the political violence experienced by the lamas fit within an existing legal framework. I’m not sure if it would be fair to characterize Kaplonski’s book as a revisionist history, partly because there is not much literature, at least in English, to be revised. The Lama Question does provide a necessary counter-balance to earlier works in English, such as Baabar’s From World Power to Soviet Satellite. Juxtaposing the two accounts, an irreconcilable irony develops: to refocus historical agency onto the Mongols, that is, to make them more than a ‘Soviet satellite,’ is also to hold them accountable to the purges. Kaplonski’s work also problematizes long-standing conceptions of the state, such as Weber’s famous dictum that the state is the entity/institution that can ‘make legitimate use of violence’. Kaplonski’s work demonstrates that the early Mongolian socialist state was in no position to make legitimate use of violence, and that it was only after the early Mongolian state attained a decree of judicial legitimacy that it could resort to violence at all.

Husband bought it for school. I really don't know anything about it.