This article argues that state-induced displacements are not aberrations, but rather an ever-present possibility and practice integral to contemporary as well as past modes of rule and state making. States and their allies make discursive use of notions of sovereignty to legitimise violence and displacement against selective citizens in the service of different projects at multiple scales. Such practices are themselves a means of producing and performing sovereignty, in Agamben’s (1998) terms. Three cases from post-independence Zimbabwe are used to provide some evidence and insight into more general patterns linking displacement, sovereignty and state making. At the same time, they confirm the historical and spatial diversity of particular assertions and versions of sovereignty, as reflected in situated expressions and effects of state making.