Sovereignty and the UFO
Alexander Wendt · Raymond Duvall
Political Theory · 2008
Wendt and Duvall argue that modern states are structurally compelled to dismiss UFOs because acknowledging non-human intelligence with superior technology would destabilize the anthropocentric foundation on which sovereign authority rests.
Brief
Writing from international relations theory, Wendt and Duvall identify what they call 'the UFO taboo', a durable, cross-institutional prohibition on treating the phenomenon as a legitimate object of inquiry, and argue it is not accidental but functionally necessary. Their claim is that modern sovereignty is constituted by the assumption of human mastery over the political and natural order; a confirmed non-human intelligence would render that assumption incoherent and, with it, the state's claim to ultimate authority. Drawing on Agamben's concept of the ban, Foucault's governmentality, and Derrida's analysis of sovereignty, they trace how the UFO is excluded from legitimate discourse through 'ontological hygiene' rather than empirical disproof. The paper does not argue UFOs are extraterrestrial, it argues that the structure of sovereign power makes genuine investigation politically inadmissible regardless of what UFOs actually are.
Metadata
- Category
- Stigma
- Venue
- Political Theory
- Type
- Peer-reviewed
- Year
- 2008
- Authors
- Alexander Wendt, Raymond Duvall
- Access
- Paywalled
- Tags
- UAP-stigma, political-theory, sovereignty, STS, IR-theory, disclosure-politics
Key points
- The authors define 'the UFO taboo' as an authoritative, largely tacit prohibition in established political culture on taking the phenomenon seriously, distinct from individual skepticism and operating at the level of institutional structure.p.608
- Anthropocentric sovereignty, the political order's grounding in the assumption of human supremacy, is identified as the deep structural reason states cannot acknowledge a potentially superior non-human intelligence without undermining their own legitimacy.p.612
- Invoking Agamben, the authors argue the UFO is placed under a kind of 'ban': included in sovereign order only by being categorically excluded from legitimate inquiry, mirroring the logic of the state of exception.p.617
- Foucauldian governmentality is used to explain how the taboo is reproduced without explicit coordination, scientific, media, and bureaucratic institutions each independently enforce dismissal, producing a stable epistemic closure without a central directing actor.p.620
- The paper explicitly brackets the question of what UFOs are, arguing that the political-theoretical problem, why states do not investigate, is prior to and independent of the empirical question of origin or nature.p.610
- Wendt and Duvall note that their argument implies the UFO question cannot be resolved within the existing political order; genuine inquiry would require a transformation of sovereignty itself, not merely better funded research programs.p.629
- The paper situates itself within Science and Technology Studies (STS) as well as IR, arguing that the sociology of knowledge about UFOs is a legitimate scholarly object even if the objects themselves remain unidentified.p.609
Most interesting
- Wendt is best known for constructivist IR theory ('Anarchy is what states make of it'); this paper is an extension of that constructivist framework to an object the discipline had never previously addressed, published in a leading peer-reviewed political theory journal.
- The paper does not advocate for any particular explanation of UFOs, its argument holds whether UFOs are mundane misidentifications or genuine anomalies, because the taboo operates regardless of the underlying empirical facts.
- By routing the argument through Agamben's 'ban' and Derrida's deconstruction of sovereignty, the authors frame UFO dismissal not as a failure of reason but as a rational protective mechanism for a specific form of political order, making the taboo harder to dismiss as mere ignorance.
- Political Theory (SAGE) is a flagship journal in normative and empirical political philosophy; publication there gave the argument unusual institutional legitimacy and made it difficult to dismiss as fringe scholarship.
- The paper anticipates later disclosure-era arguments by roughly 15 years, providing academic vocabulary, 'anthropocentric sovereignty,' 'ontological hygiene,' 'UFO taboo', that UAP policy researchers subsequently adopted.
- Wendt and Duvall are careful to note that the taboo is not a conspiracy: it requires no coordination because the structural incentive to dismiss is distributed identically across actors, producing collective silence through individually rational choices.