Steppe Immunity

Immunity has never just been a medical concept. In an age of pandemics and global crises, personal and national immunities have emerged as central political concerns around the world. On the Mongolian steppe, immunity has taken many forms--imperial privilege, socialist collectivization, nationalist enclosure--each one promising to shelter life in sovereign protection. But under sovereignty's shell, immunological crises are felt intensely in Mongolia: climate change transforms steppe ecology while a political economy dependent on mineral extraction hollows out democratic life. Today, national sovereignty is under pressures it cannot control, generating symptoms it cannot contain. The Mongolian people feel as if the future of their country has disappeared. From within this impasse, Steppe Immunity asks what comes after the nation.

Drawing on fieldwork, archival research, and the histories, poetry, and ecologies of the Mongolian steppe, Christian Sorace traces immunity from Chinggisid sovereignty to the present destabilization. Against understandings of immunity as that which protects us from the world, the book reimagines it as a form of life in common--what we have forgotten to call communism. The steppe is not a refuge outside history. It is a constellation of past and future possibilities of new forms of immunity, democracy, and being-in-common.