Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept
Abstract
The political make-up of the contemporary world changes with such rapidity that few attempts have been made to consider with adequate care, the nature and value of the concept of sovereignty. What exactly is meant when one speaks about the acquisition, preservation, infringement or loss of sovereignty? This book revisits the assumptions underlying the applications of this fundamental category, as well as studying the political discourses in which it has been embedded. Bringing together historians, constitutional lawyers, political philosophers and experts in international relations, Sovereignty in Fragments seeks to dispel the illusion that there is a unitary concept of sovereignty of which one could offer a clear definition. This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of international relations, international law and the history of political thought.
... Интересные и безусловно важные исследования концепции суверенитета, представленные в работе Калмо и Скиннера «Фрагментация суверенитета» [12] Политическая составляющая современного мира, меняется с такой быстротой, что было предпринято несколько попыток с достаточной тщательностью рассмотреть вопрос о характере и ценности концепции суверенитета. Требования суверенных властей обусловлены политическими реалиями империй, государственного строительства, военной интервенции и глобализации. ...
... В нескольких главах, посвященных ЕС, Калмо и Скиннер [12] рассматривают вопрос о том, трансформирует ли суть суверенитета правовой опыт ЕС. С точки зрения авторов ЕС является образцом будущего, с его инновационной структурой, верховенством закона и подотчетностью государства -возможно, примером «оптимального суверенитета» или даже оптимальным распределением власти. ...
... Для многих государств-членов ЕС -это самые важные вопросы суверенитета и, возможно, ключ к пониманию его будущего. Естественно, что исключительное внимание [12] к ЕС, и его либеральноевроцентрическая ориентация, оставляет без внимания другие современные проблемы суверенитета и безопасности. ...
... Thus, for the first step of our investigation it is crucial to outline the unique role that the concept of sovereignty enjoys. One such peculiar aspect of sovereignty is highlighted by Kalmo and Skinner (2010), who argued that the ambiguity of sovereignty has certain historical depth, providing a reflection of past efforts to give it content, rather than the result of a conceptual confusion. As such, most of the time arguments about sovereignty are not merely scholarly debates on the meaning of terms, but rather arguments about allocation of power. ...
... This argument does seem to fall into a broader Lockean argumentation on the foundational status of natural human rights as the source of moral justification for the functions of the state and civil government (Locke et al. 2003(Locke et al. [1823). This historic parallel also illustrates another observation, highlighted by the emerging new domains of functional sovereignty-that competing calls to reconsider and redefine sovereignty historically coincided with moments of significant social transformations (Kalmo and Skinner 2010). ...
Self-sovereign identity (SSI) solutions implemented on the basis of blockchain technology are seen as alternatives to existing digital identification systems, or even as a foundation of standards for the new global infrastructures for identity management systems. It is argued that ‘self-sovereignty' in this context can be understood as the concept of individual control over identity relevant private data, capacity to choose where such data is stored, and the ability to provide it to those who need to validate it. It is also argued that while it might be appealing to operationalise the concept of ‘self-sovereignty’ in a narrow technical sense, depreciation of moral semantics obscures key challenges and long-term repercussions. Closer attention to the normative substance of the ‘sovereignty’ concept helps to highlight a range of ethical issues pertaining to the changing nature of human identity in the context of ubiquitous private data collection.
... Arguably, violence is a necessary tool of the state and the state is explicit in that it will not hesitate to use it in the event of internal chaos and against external interference in its sovereignty. In essence, it enables the State to achieve political goals by employing strategic policies in pursuit of important political and/or military objectives such as the maintenance of control and political power (Osiander, 2001;Hent & Skinner, 2014). Although violent repression is coercion, not all coercion is repressive as in cases where it is used by the state to stamp out societal violent crimes such as rape, murder, armed robbery, kidnapping, and holding people hostage for ransom. ...
This paper argues that political repression and violence are international phenomena brewed within the internationally agreed conceptualisations of the state and sovereignty. Its objective is to describe how conceptualisations of the State and sovereignty centralise violence in any country. The ancient Westphalia (1648) conceptualisation of sovereignty as a yardstick in determining a sovereign state and rights of the state accorded therein is a recipe for state political violence. Given that the state should protect its citizens, there is a thin line between the citizens" need for protection and opponents of the state. Using extant literature, such as the views of Mann, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Migdal on the state and how it defends itself and theories of sovereignty, this paper illustrates that intra-political repression has prevailed out of the exploitation of the violence enshrined in the two concepts of State and sovereignty as ingredients of political repression. The paper articulates how the State uses violence within the parameters of being "States and sovereignties". It concludes that the emergence of repression is a reality and cannot be divorced 12 from how the world has accepted statehood and sovereignty regardless of ideology.
... For one, particular terms acquire specific meanings within certain specialized communities that have their own language games. The meaning of sovereignty, for example, cannot be understood to be the same within the international law community as within political theory, where it acquires a broader use (Kalmo and Skinner 2010). Similarly, different communities deploy the same natural language in different ways through differences in text or genre but also, as we will see, in different social contexts that entail a different way of engaging with words (for a broader argument about the role of communities, see Adler 2005). ...
At stake in this forum are the politics of translation in the study of global politics. More specifically, the following interventions aim to consider the ways that scholars can recenter the utility of language toward more flexible conceptions of relationality. As each contribution reveals, translation is indispensable to individual theorizations of international politics; yet taken together, the forum aims to mitigate the alleged necessity of a lingua franca in IR scholarship. We go beyond the linguistic demands of conventional conceptual history in that each intervention employs a reflexive disposition to consider both their subject position and normative aspirations in the experience of translation. The forum's overall goal is to illustrate the ethical imperative to acknowledge the contextual specificity of linguistic encounters—past, present, and future—and in the process breathe life into the prose of world politics.
... Territorializing food sovereignty When referring to territory, one usually considers it being a delimited portion of bounded physical space, a 'bordered power container' (Giddens 1987: 120), which is controlled by a sovereign power. In the modern world, in particular since the Peace of Westphalia, the most obvious manifestations of this division of space are national borders dividing the world into a tessellation of sovereign nation-states (Skinner 2010;Elden 2013). But what happens if this territorial order is put to the test? ...
In both the global north and south the claim for food sovereignty (FS) has become a powerful antithesis to the globalized economy of food. Drawing on scientific debates around the spatial and political dimensions of FS, we will focus in this contribution on how this emerging claim materializes in practice and space. Therefore, we will analyze in an exemplary manner political practices of the Brazilian and Bolivian Landless Movements, which adopted the idea of FS as a guideline for their political action. Our results reveal that these groups do not only fight for FS in the form of 'typical' repre-sentational and overt political actions such as land occupations, the blocking of roads and manifestations. Rather, we will show that the Landless Movements also express their claims quite subtly, in surprising but yet very powerful ways through multifarious, spatially effective and meaningfully interconnected social practices, which reveal their political character only upon second glance. In order to conceptualize our observations and to recognize the political momentum of these practices, we draw on insights from social theory and political theory and identify three constitutive principles that enable us to make political practices in their 'worldliness' distinguishable and recognizable. Building on this con-ceptualization, we will further propose the approach of the 'multi-territorial site of the political' as an analytical tool to investigate the complex geographies of social movements, in particular but not exclusively, in the context of FS in Latin America. Zusammenfassung Die Forderung nach Ernährungssouveränität ist sowohl im Globalen Norden als auch im Globalen Süden zu ei-nem mächtigen Gegenentwurf zur globalisierten Agrar-und Nahrungsmittelindustrie geworden. Aufbauend auf den wissenschaftlichen Debatten um die räumlichen und politischen Dimensionen von Ernährungssouveränität, widmen wir uns in diesem Beitrag der Frage, auf welche Weise sich diese Forderung in der Praxis und im Raum manifestiert. Zu diesem Zweck untersuchen wir beispielhaft politische Praktiken der brasilianischen und der bolivianischen Landlosenbewegungen, die die Forderung nach Ernährungssouveränität zum Leitbild für ihre politischen Aktivitäten gemacht haben. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass diese Gruppen nicht nur in Form von ‚ty-pischen' offen ausgetragenen und symbolischen politischen Aktionen für Ernährungssouveränität kämpfen, wie z.B. Landbesetzungen, Kundgebungen oder Straßenblockaden. Vielmehr wird deutlich, dass die Landlosenbe-wegungen ihre Forderungen auf subtile und häufig überraschende, aber dennoch machtvolle Art und Weise ein-klagen-und zwar durch verschiedenartige räumlich wirksame und kontextuell miteinander verwobene soziale Vol. 150, No. 4 · Research article
... Historically, the idea of sovereignty, i.e., the idea of paramount and untouchable authority, is inextricably bound to the idea of the nation-state (Skinner 2010). However, in the course of the processes and dynamics of globalization, it has become obvious that the image of the state as the only and unchallenged bearer of sovereignty has eroded (Fraser 2008;Agnew 2009). ...
This contribution discusses two different but interlinked fields of research: political theories of sovereignty and citizenship, as well as conceptualizations of emerging alternative food movements. In drawing on James Tully's practiced-based understanding of 'diverse citizenship', as well as on other selected theories of postmodern political thought, it focuses on the contested political nature of the food sovereignty movement, specifically with regard to the dynamics and actions that have brought it into being. In doing so, it conceives of citizenship as materializing on the basis of multi-faceted practices of 'acting otherwise', which stands in sharp contrast to a conceptualization of citizenship as an institutionalized status, as it is understood in the liberal tradition. In order to deepen and to sharpen this alternative approach, this contribution additionally draws on Theodore Schatzki's practice theory, which, despite its rather apolitical character, makes it possible to conceive of political practices as emergent and situational phenomena that are closely connected to the quotidian practices of everyday life. The combination of these perspectives bears great potential for theoretical discussions on alternative food movements as well as for their empirical investigation, since it puts emphasis on the way how practitioners and advocates for food sovereignty disclose themselves in multifaceted struggles over the imposition and the challenging of the rules of social living together.
... (Ball et al, 1989;Kalmo et al, 2010)。这种政治化， 不应当简单地理解为正在出现的处于支配地位的 种族-民族的自治主张， 而应看作是政治创新的一 部分和社会、 政治领域的重构， 以及人民主权和人 民 代 表 权 的 民 主 原 则 的 内 部 矛 盾 (Rosanvallon, 2006)。显然， 边界的政治化、 重塑和彻底变革的潜 力的内涵依然充满活力， 作为一个概念， 它在指导 历史运动的松散斗争中仍然是一个有效的工具。 因此， 本文认为边界的概念变化应与过去几十 年发生的基本的社会、 经济和地缘政治的变革的联 系起来。边界被看成与主导的地缘政治愿景、 社会 科学中更广泛的范式和松散性转变相关的概念。 传统的定义和理解受到挑战主要是因为创造边界 和边界存在的背景已经改变。这也就是说， 如果我 们想了解边界是如何被消除的， 我们应先了解边界 是 如 何 形 成 的 (Scott, 2012; Laine, 2015)。 正 如 O'Dowd(2010)指出的， 我们必须这样做的原因是， 许多当代边界研究未能考虑历史背景， 因而导致了 对现在情况的误读。过分强调全球化当代形式的 新颖性以及未能意识到 "过去存在于现在" ， 削弱了 我们对一直生活在多样化的世界的认识。 尽管边界长期以来是政治地理学中最重要的 主题之一， 但对这一概念本身的理解已经发生了重 大的改变。Ratzel 和 Maull 提出的著名的地理决定 论， 描绘了由物质和文化环境所决定的边界， 即与 物质环境相符合的边界是 "好的" 边界， 反结构的边 界是 "坏的" 边界。相反的， Bloch， Febvre， Vidal de la Blache 和 Reclus 等人强调历史地理学和人类学， 认为边界是由社会任意创造的。更科学的观点是 如 Christaller， Lösch 和 Hägerstrand 那样， 将边界看 作社会关系的物理和几何要素。 新 康 德 功 能 主 义 者 ， 如 Hartshorne， Kristof 和 Jones， 把边界看成是体现国家统一的必要特征和本 质因素的历史演变和事件的功能， 而马克思主义/批 判主义将边界描绘为资本主义积累和与之相应的 国家性和领土控制形式的系统要素。最近， Paasi， Balibar 和 van ...
摘 要：随着社会的变化，相关研究的范式往往也会发生改变。本文对边界研究中概念的变化作出了解释。在边界 仍然具有重要作用的今天，我们需要重新审视这些概念在不断变化的历史、政治和社会背景下体现出来的时空变 化性和不确定性。本文强调了边界不仅是国家主权的分界线，还具有从地缘政治，到边界和跨边界的社会实践和 文化生产的多层次复杂性。本文力求对边界研究中的相关争论作出建设性贡献，以促进对边界的过程化、去领域、 分散性的本质，及其在全球化和跨国流动时期保证政权的作用的充分理解，展现边界研究作为一个跨学科的领域， 仍具有自身内涵的学术地位。本文以边界景观的概念为核心组织元素，提倡在边界研究中采取相关的研究方法， 从互补的视角考虑政治愿景与日常社会文化实践之间、社会表现和艺术想象之间的相互作用。 关 键 词：边界；全球化；边界景观；边界建构
... Traçar uma genealogia da soberania é descobrir que nunca houve consenso sobre o que ela significa (SKINNER, 2010). Ao utilizarmos o esquema analítico de Bartelson (1995), somos levados a considerar as características de três períodos históricos, considerados pelo autor como cruciais para se entender a evolução da noção de soberania e como ela se adaptou ao pensamento político moderno. ...
Este artigo analisa a evolução histórica acerca da soberania estatal e como a virada linguística na década de 1980 modificou sua percepção. Ao final, concluímos ser desafiador o seu estudo, mas que, dada às constantes transformações atuais, em especial através da cooperação internacional, se mostra de grande relevância.
How is a new state built? To what ideas, concepts and practices do authorities turn to produce and legitimise its legal and political system? And what if the state emerged through revolution, and sought to obliterate the legacy of the empire which proceeded it? This book addresses these questions by looking at nineteenth-century Greek liberalism and the ways in which it engaged in reforms in the Greek state after independence from the Ottomans (ca. 1830-1880). Liberalism after the Revolution offers an original perspective on this dynamic period in European history, and challenges the assumptions of Western-centric histories of nineteenth-century liberalism, and its relationship with the state. Michalis Sotiropoulos shows that, in this European periphery, liberals did not just transform liberalism into a practical mode of statecraft, they preserved liberalism's radical edge at a time when it was losing its appeal elsewhere in Europe.
Over the past two centuries, the concept of human dignity has moved from the fringes to the centre of the international legal system. This book is the first detailed historical, theoretical and legal investigation of human dignity as a normative value, the intellectual sources that shaped its legal recognition, and the main legal instruments used to give it expression in international law. Ginevra Le Moli addresses the broad historical and philosophical developments relating to the legal expression of dignity and the doctrinal geography of human dignity in international law, with a focus on international humanitarian law, international human rights law and international criminal law. The book fills a major lacuna in the literature by providing a comprehensive account of dignity within international law that draws on an extensive documentary and archival basis and a vast body of decisions of international judicial and quasi-judicial bodies.
The idea of 'hybrid sovereignty' describes overlapping relations between public and private actors in important areas of global power, such as contractors fighting international wars, corporations regulating global markets, or governments collaborating with nongovernmental entities to influence foreign elections. This innovative study shows that these connections – sometimes hidden and often poorly understood – underpin the global order, in which power flows without regard to public and private boundaries. Drawing on extensive original archival research, Swati Srivastava reveals the little-known stories of how this hybrid power operated at some of the most important turning points in world history: spreading the British empire, founding the United States, establishing free trade, realizing transnational human rights, and conducting twenty-first century wars. In order to sustain meaningful dialogues about the future of global power and political authority, it is crucial that we begin to understand how hybrid sovereignty emerged and continues to shape international relations.
Both settler states and Indigenous peoples have mobilised sovereignty to either entrench or challenge the structure of settler colonialism. However, this historical deployment of co-existing and competing ‘politics of sovereignty’ is deeply missed by the predominant fixed and state-centrist analysis of sovereignty. Based on archival and documentary analysis discussing two pivotal moments of Aotearoa/New Zealand history, I expose how the Crown discourses and practices of sovereignty aim at policing a Euro-modern resonance, whereas the Māori ones contain the potential for a resistance and alternative. Findings reveal how these particular politics of sovereignty function as (dis)empowering and (de-)authorising political devices respectively linked to processes of colonisation and decolonisation.
The ideas about self-determination evolved from the Wilsonian understanding of self-governance - to a norm and drive for decolonization that changed the 20th century’s landscape. Despite its general proclamation as a right to all, the UN applied it as a “principle of saltwater”. Hence, the only legitimate right holder – colonial peoples could realize self-determination under several legal instruments and within the principle of uti possidetis juris that preserved the artificiality of the borders. The legal controversies of the decolonization processes are numerous and its loose end appears to be present up to now since the same principles were applied during the dissolution of the socialistic federations after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The USA has a complex political system prone to “divided government”, which has become highly polarized in recent years. The reasons for this extend further and deeper than party diversification or rising populism. This book provides an original contribution encompassing the US polity and its overall development. The author explores how the US constitution has predisposed branches and levels of government to multiple forms of separation of power and constituency; and how developments in democratic and federal government over time have fostered more competition, diffusion, and decoupling, despite earlier trends to more cross-branch and cross-level cooperation. The book thus addresses a multifaceted inquiry, interrogating and conceptualizing the connections between institutions, ideas, and political development, while exploring the interlinkage between the institutional parameters of multidimensional division of powers, constitutional political ideas and their contestation, and the limitation of the state in the US federal democratic system.
Tensions of American Federal Democracy uses an original analytical framework combined with comparative perspectives – including those of other modern federal democracies – to explore the jigsaw puzzle that is the state of American federal democracy.
This chapter seeks to reorientate the set of theoretical foundations underpinning the sovereignty as responsibility debate, namely, not only the conventional constructivist understanding of norm development but also the concept of sovereignty, and the model of sovereignty commonly assumed as the benchmark for assessing change. As a whole, the chapter challenges any reading of international society that ends up collapsing on either the domain of ‘ideas’, ‘agency’, and ‘intentionality’ or the domain of the ‘material’. Instead, the proposed reappraisal focuses on the recursive quality of the relationship between structure and agency, and the implications thereof in the (re)production of unequal social, political, juridical realities. More to the point, it offers a critical—and, notably, post-positivist—qualification of Finnemore and Sikkink’s model. This brings the configuration of normativity as part of institutional practice to the forefront of the analysis, in the attempt to offer an innovative account of normative change—and (change in) sovereignty, more specifically—distinguishly receptive to questions of power and power inequalities.
The paper assesses the questions if and, if yes, how the republican conception of free statehood can and should inform a compelling understanding of a legitimate post-Westphalian political order. To answer these questions, it, first, reconstructs the foundational arguments of republican internationalists in favour of free states and, second, assesses the points of contention republican cosmopolitans raise. Third, it develops an alternative approach, a republicanism of plural polities: Based on a relational and multi-dimensional understanding of citizenship, the paper questions the strong internationalist reliance on the citizenship-state-nexus and on statehood in general, but also takes issue with cosmopolitans’ neglect of the boundedness of democratic self-determination. A republicanism of plural polities as a multi-perspectival approach to democratic institution-building in and beyond the state is open to constellations of plural polities of different forms and on different political levels while simultaneously recognising the particularity of each ‘free polity’. It thereby adds a new dimension to debates on the political forms legitimate institutions can assume under post-Westphalian conditions and opens avenues for research on inter-polity relations, on more complex constellations of self-rule and shared rule as well as of multilateral decision-making, on sovereignty and independence. The latter are exemplified by reference to the European context.
This study offers a comparison between the “rooted universals” of Western liberal and Chinese Marxist approaches to human rights. I begin with sovereignty, which is redefined in formerly colonized countries as anti-colonial sovereignty, predicated on mutual non-interference in the affairs of other states. From here, I analyze the Western liberal tradition, which arose from a unique legal tradition and its connection with private property, leading to a restricted emphasis on civil and political rights. The Chinese Marxist tradition differs, basing itself on anti-colonial sovereignty and emphasizing the core right to socioeconomic well-being, from which flow a range of further rights. The article closes with the point that it is necessary to understand and appreciate these different traditions in a global situation.
Human rights is in China a component of socialist democracy. However, due to inordinate Western interest in and misrepresentation of Chinese human rights, I deal with the topic in this chapter. The first part distinguishes between false and rooted universals. A false universal forgets the conditions of its emergence and asserts that its assumptions apply to all, while a rooted universal always factors in the possibilities and limitations of contextual origins. In this light, we find that Western human rights arise from the connection between ‘right’ and ‘mastery’, so that a right became an individual’s mastery over property. Initially closely connected with slavery, a right as private property was extended to other property, such as life, freedom, speech, political opinion, and religion—in short, civil and political rights. For the rooted universal of Chinese Marxist human rights, the prerequisite is sovereignty: not Westphalian, but anti-colonial or anti-hegemonic sovereignty. With this prerequisite, the core Marxist human right is the right to socio-economic well-being for all. Not only does this right inform a range of policies, from the BRI to minority nationalities, but from the right to socio-economic well-being flows a range of other rights, such as civil, political, cultural, and environmental rights. The chapter closes by considering the implications of Chinese Marxist human rights for the universal category of human rights.
This chapter establishes sovereignty as the most basic concept of international relations theory and explains its relevance to the question of California’s global activities. The early identification of “space” and the process of replacing that with more formal and hierarchical rules of “place” (territory and jurisdiction) are core to this chapter. The chapter does not seek to cover the vast literature on this specific term, but outlines its main tenets and the challenges they present to understanding current international behavior of states and other subnational actors and entities.
International law’s legitimacy has come under serious attack lately, including, and maybe even more so, in regimes considered democratic. Reading Dworkin’s New Philosophy for International Law in the current context is a timely reminder of the centrality of the political legitimacy of international law. Interestingly, indeed, his account does not succumb to the (however progressive) cosmopolitan ideal of an international political community. Nor is it reducible to a concern for domestic justice in which political legitimacy is only self-regarding. By revisiting seventeenth century international legal theories, Dworkin sends both cosmopolitans and statists back-to-back. He (re-)discovers a third way in which to conceive of statehood today: not on its own, but in a mirror-image fashion and against the background of the international institutional order without which there would be no equal sovereign States, but no individual equality either. Carrying Dworkin’s argument forward, this article identifies and discusses three of its crucial contributions with respect to the objects, subjects and institutions of international legitimacy that deserve further attention. It concludes with different proposals regarding the design and organization of other international institutions than States, both public and private, by reference to their relationship to States (and their people). According to Dworkin, this should enable us to improve not only the legitimacy of the international institutional order as whole, but also the political legitimacy of each State therein since both are mutually related.
Questions of sovereignty remain central to political theology, yet the role played by demonology in sovereignty’s construction has yet to be closely examined. This article addresses this omission by exploring the relation between the phantasmatic figures of the “sovereign” and the “witch” in the work of Jean Bodin (1530–96). Early modern concepts of “witchcraft” and its prosecution have a constitutive relation to (theo)political sovereignty, modern gender relations, and the birth of the nation-state. Reading Bodin’s work on witchcraft alongside those on sovereignty, tolerance, and the household, I argue that the demonological witch forms a self-consolidating other at the foundation of modern constructions of sovereignty, tolerance, and the (cishetero)normative family – an excess or absence that reinforces and destabilizes gendered, sexual, political, juridical, and religious hierarchies that continue to influence the present. In doing so, I demonstrate that sovereignty rests on a demonological foundation.
Sanctuary movements have existed in the United States since the 1980s when communities offered support to refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala. Now, sanctuary communities assist undocumented people and refugees, predominantly from South or Central America, by facilitating access to fundamental rights. C.12.3 million undocumented people currently reside in the United States, and President Trump is the latest in a succession of leaders to escalate securitisation and deportation efforts. Sanctuary movements counterpoint the dominant legal-penal regime.
Based on three months of fieldwork across Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Texas this paper explores how communities mobilise to provide support to undocumented people who are facing criminalisation and deportation. In exploring the ‘bottom up’ construction of migrant (il)legality I focus on community reception rather than migrant experience. I address tensions between the federal immigration regime and local actors, determine how sanctuary movements frame their varied work, and reconcile the issues raised by sanctuary processes with ideas of state sovereignty. I explore community-led processes which provide novel understandings of citizenship, reception, and the governance of migration.
I explore sanctuary in relation to activism (Part 3), local-level policymaking (Part 4) and humanitarianism (Part 5). I discuss how the performance of sanctuary might be critiqued for (re)producing social hierarchies (Part 6). I then reconcile sanctuary with contrasting sovereignties and principles of legal pluralism (Part 7). Finally, I explore its relation to regularisation by developing the idea that communities have the capacity to ‘legitimise’ people who are otherwise excluded by the nation-state (Part 8).
The UK referendum on leaving the European Union (EU) in 2016 was based around the issue of regaining a putative control or sovereignty that had been lost with membership in that supranational organization. Irrespective of the fact that many people seemed to vote in the referendum on the basis of attitudes towards questions not directly related to EU membership, such as immigration from countries outside the EU and a general disenchantment about governance, the negotiations over leaving focused on how to go about disentangling the UK from the rules and regulatory authority of the EU. These turned out to be far from easy. Much of this reflects the fact that sovereignty itself is invariably contingent. Only in few historical cases, usually associated with autarkic regimes exercising control over large territorial empires, has any sort of absolute territorial sovereignty even approached possibility. The purpose of this paper is to use the case of Brexit to examine three aspects of the contingency of territorial sovereignty: (1) the major ways in which sovereignty has been organized historically; (2) the character and role of sovereignty in the Brexit ‘debate’; and (3) why the focus on territorial sovereignty and its recapture should be so persuasive to so many people notwithstanding its geographical complexities.
This article furthers our understanding of the ontology of modern international relations by foregrounding the neglected structuring role of nationalism. Most accounts of nationalism in international relations reduce the phenomenon to a peripheral threat, whereby nationalism only seems to become relevant in moments when the international order is in crisis. In contrast, I argue that the ontology of modern international relations is inherently parasitic on nationalism. Leveraging on Jacques Derrida's writings on “hauntology,” this article recasts nationalism as a spectral logic that silently structures the ontology of modern international relations, even when it seems to remain absent and ineffective. In particular, I explain how the contradictions of nationalism become embedded in the concept of sovereignty, which serves as the ontological cornerstone of modern international relations. Transgressions of sovereignty are therefore not reducible to a tension between normative and factual levels, or logics of appropriateness and logics of consequences, but stem from the structural impossibility of the nationalist project itself. Viewed this way, the aporetic form of sovereignty is not merely a logical conundrum but a vital and productive ontological opening that sets international relations in motion.
The article addresses the question of how to study global constitutional law by suggesting a material methodology. Drawing from previous studies of the notion of the material constitution, both from materialist and institutionalist types (Marx, Mortati, Poulantzas), the article proposes to look at the development of global constitutional law, in its many instantiations, in terms of its relation with the state. Accounts of the autonomy of global constitutional law are requalified in terms of relative autonomy. More specifically, global constitutional law is conceived as a legal construction functional to the transformation of the contemporary state. From the perspective of the material study of constitutional law, the state is still deemed to be the main unit of analysis, but, at the same time, state-centred accounts based on an exceptionalist understanding of sovereignty are rejected as reductive and, at times, inaccurate.
o artigo tem por objetivo aprofundar uma abordagem da noção de soberania, segundo análise de obras de Maquiavel estabelecida por Antonio Negri (2002). O autor defende que a soberania para Maquiavel corresponde à sobredeterminação da ação do governante -seja no principado, seja na república- em face das limitações e oposições impostas pelos adversários e pela própria fortuna. Buscamos, assim, entender as características dessa acepção de soberania uma vez que o conceito é definido com exatidão por Jean Bodin, quase meio século após a publicação dos textos maquiavelismos. Para observar essa abordagem, digamos, heterodoxa, da soberania será preciso nos concentraremos na sua tese da relação entre ontologia política e movimento. Para Negri, o movimento é o princípio definidor da política e na obra de Maquiavel se encontra uma concepção de ontologia política produzida e pensada da própria ação do governante no tempo e da qual o movimento é constitutivo e indiscernível. Observaremos como se desenvolve a análise do conflito no caso de cidades como Roma e Florença. Como conclusão pretendemos observar que limites a interpretação das Istorie Fiorentine apresenta à tese negriana da soberania democrática em Maquiavel.
The dissertation identifies and analyses the origins of the present crises afflicting the
European Union. It examines the Schuman Plan Conference of 1950-51 and the European
Coal and Steel Community that provided the blueprint for today’s supranational structure.
The core argument - the unresolved sovereignty thesis – reveals that preconditions for future
crises were embedded in the original institutional design.
The unresolved sovereignty thesis establishes the following:
(i) ‘Popular sovereignty’ was not a feature of Conference deliberations. The
institutions were therefore designed without a mechanism connecting them to the
people of Europe, creating a subsequent ‘democratic deficit’;
(ii) The status of nation-state sovereignty was set aside during the Conference,
resulting in new institutions that were inconsistent with sovereignty
understandings across the member-states;
(iii) European sovereignty was not adequately theorised during the Conference. As a
result, the supranational institutions provoked immediate political conflict, leading
to a subsequent ‘legitimacy gap’; and
(iv) Creating European-level institutions without resolving questions of European and
nation-state sovereignty was the catalyst for ‘Euroscepticism’.
The article focuses on the origins and history of comparatist studies, the objectives of this research method, especially as regards administrative law, as well as possible results of its use, which can be used in legislation, practice administrative, case-law, and finally in the study of administrative phenomena. A separate thread of the article is the presentation of the achievements of Wroclaw school of administration, whose particular feature is the use of administrative comparatist.
This article explores the contested nature of sovereignty as it applies to the state and its citizens from the perspectives of information and communication. While the freedom of expression, right to information and communication rights have typically enhanced the sovereignty of citizens, in the recent past, the state has expanded its rights to mass surveillance, thereby infringing the freedom and rights of its citizens to expression, information and communication. Based on theory and examples of practice, it argues that the exercise of popular sovereignty through mass movements and collective actions contribute to the strengthening of the sovereignty of individuals and to limiting the extent of the state’s sovereign power.
Introduction ‘Law without courts’ seemed to Hugo Grotius an entirely coherent approach to the juridification of international relations. The first edition of his Law of War and Peace (De jure belli ac pacis, 1625) reflects an intense commitment to framing claims and rules for conduct outside the state in terms of legal rights and duties, but not to judicialisation, even though arbitration between sovereigns was addressed in earlier works he had read, such as Alberico Gentili’s Law of War (De iure belli libri tres, 1612 [1933]). Yet in modern times international judicialisation – the creation and use of international courts and tribunals – has been not only a significant component of liberal approaches to international order, but for some an indispensable concomitant of juridification. The opening section of this chapter provides an overview of the formation of what are now ten basic types of international courts. The following section offers some balance to the tendencies (implicit in the approach taken in the first section) to acclaim each flourishing legal institution as an achievement and to study only what exists, by considering the marked unevenness in the issues and in the ranges of states currently subject to juridification through international courts and tribunals. The final section addresses the question whether the density and importance of the judicially focused juridification that now exists has implications for politics, law and justice that are qualitatively different from what has gone before. This is explored by examining some of the main roles and functions of international courts, considered not simply as a menu but as a complex aggregate.
Mines, insularité, indépendance, émergence, développement N° 2018-4 octobre 2018 Résumé : Les débats autour de l'indépendance pour les petites économies insulaires (PEI) reposent pour partie sur des arguments économiques qui sont ambigus. La montée des interdépendances liées à la globalisation questionne la signification de l'indépendance économique, aussi bien que celle de souveraineté politique. Du point de vue économique, il est ainsi considéré que la richesse, et notamment la présence de mines, jouerait favorablement dans le processus d'émergence, et par suite, dans l'accession à l'indépendance. Pourtant, lorsque l'on analyse la relation entre indépendance, trajectoires de croissance et mines, sur un échantillon de 25 îles sur une longue période (1900-2008), on retrouve un résultat, bien établi dans la littérature, que les PEI devenues indépendantes ont effectivement connu des trajectoires de croissance inférieures à celle des PEI affiliées. De façon plus originale, nous montrons notamment que les PEI bénéficiant d'une ressource minière à travers l'hétérogénéité de leurs performances économiques, n'échappent pas à ce constat. Pour autant le sens de causalité entre indépendance et moindre performance économique reste en question : les PEI devenues indépendantes se situaient dès avant l'indépendance, pour la majorité d'entre elles, sur des trajectoires de croissance inférieures à celles des économies affiliées.
Scholars of the history of international law have recently begun to wonder whether their work is predominantly about law or history. The questions we ask – about materials, contexts and movements – all raise intractable problems of historiography. Yet, few scholars have turned to historical theory to think through how we might go about addressing them.
This article works towards remedying that gap by exploring why and how we might engage with historiography more deeply.
Section 2 shows how the last three decades of the ‘turn to history’ can be usefully read as a move from ambivalence to anxiety. The major works of the 2000s thoroughly removed the pre-1990s ambivalence to history, offering brief considerations about method. Recent efforts building on those works have led to the present era of anxiety about both history and method, raising questions around materials, contexts and movements. But far from a negative state, this moment of anxiety is both appropriate and potentially creative: it prompts us to rethink our mode of engaging with historiography.
Section 3 explores how this engagement might proceed. It reconstructs the principles and debates within conceptual history around the anxieties of materials, contexts and movements. It then explores how these might be adapted to histories of international law, both generally and within one concrete project: a conceptual history of recognition in the writings of British jurists.
Section 4 concludes by considering the advances achieved by this kind of engagement, and reflects on new directions for international law and its histories.
Many scholars now argue for deemphasizing the importance of international anarchy in favor of focusing on hierarchy – patterns of super- and subordination – in world politics. We argue that only one kind of vertical stratification, governance hierarchy, actually challenges the states-under-anarchy framework. But the existence of such hierarchies overturns a number of standard ways of studying world politics. In order to theorize, and identify, variation in governance structures in world politics, we advocate a relational approach that focuses on three dimensions of hierarchy: the heterogeneity of contracting, the degree of autonomy enjoyed by central authorities, and the balance of investiture between segments and the center. This generates eight ideal-typical forms: national-states and empires, as well as symmetric and asymmetric variants of federations, confederations, and conciliar systems. We argue that political formations – governance assemblages – with elements of these ideal types are likely ubiquitous at multiple scales of world politics, including within, across, and among sovereign states. Our framework suggests that world politics is marked by a heterarchy of nested and overlapping political structures. We discuss broad implications for international-relations theory and comparative politics, and illustrate our approach through an analysis of contemporary China and the evolution of the British ‘Empire’ in the 19th and 20th centuries.
RESUMO Este artigo examina as transformações das regras internacionais sobre violência a partir de uma perspectiva construtivista de Relações Internacionais. Em particular, analisam-se as mudanças nas práticas sociais internacionais que têm ocorrido desde o fim do último século, discutindo-as em termos de regras internacionais que concomitantemente limitam e constituem as condições de possibilidade para o uso da violência. Na primeira parte, são mapeados e brevemente examinados cinco conjuntos de regras internacionais sobre violência: o direito internacional humanitário, o humanitarismo, o direito internacional dos direitos humanos, o direito internacional criminal e o regime de segurança coletiva. Na segunda parte, analisam-se as transformações político-normativa-sociais e conceituais que vêm ocorrendo na ordem mundial desde a década de 1990, dando particular ênfase à redefinição do conceito de segurança, à ressignificação do conceito de soberania e ao processo de expansão e confluência daqueles cinco conjuntos de regras internacionais. Argumenta-se que tais transformações das regras internacionais sobre violência, de um lado, expressam o deslocamento do dualismo doméstico/internacional e, de outro lado, ratificam o novo lugar do indivíduo nas relações internacionais. Com isso, sugere-se que é possível identificar mudanças significativas na arquitetura constitucional da ordem mundial contemporânea.
Common pool resource theory appears to assume that external authorities are responsible for initiating attempts to ‘decommonise’ common property regimes. An unusual decommonisation proposal put forward in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the 1960s questions this assumption; in this instance the decommonisation proposal was initiated by rightsholders in the common property regime. The proposal would have enabled rightsholders to purchase their arable fields, thus privatising them and removing them from the hybrid tenure system called crofting. A critical historical and contemporary survey of the political contexts surrounding this proposal discloses that the particular hybridity of the ‘croft-ing commons’ is a result of a historical process of ‘domestic colonization’ within Britain, and that this tenure system exists within a deeply-sedimented structure of domination whose normative assumptions may have influenced the decision of the rightsholders to propose decommonisation in the first place. © 2018, Igitur, Utrecht Publishing and Archiving Services. All rights reserved.
C.L.R. James’s book The Black Jacobins tells the story of the Haitian revolution of 1791–1803, the only slave revolt in history that brought permanent emancipation and a new independent state (James 1963). Central to the story is the magnificent figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture. A former slave, he became the pre-eminent leader of the revolt, but lost the chance to lead it to its conclusion when, in 1802, he was arrested and taken to France. Imprisoned in the mountains of the Jura with deficient heating and reduced rations, he died nine months after arriving there. James’s book was originally published in 1938, and then revised and reissued in 1963. In a recent work, David Scott calls attention to an intriguing feature of the revisions that James made for the book’s second edition, namely that he shifted the register of his story from romance to tragedy (Scott 2004). Whereas in the original version James told a romantic tale of revolutionary triumph, in the revised edition there was a new emphasis on Toussaint’s tragic predicament, and on the dilemmas, disappointments, ironies and uncertainties of enlightenment and liberation. The aspect of international law which is the subject of this chapter is human rights, and I shall be showing how, in that very different context, something similar can be observed.
This intellectually rigorous introduction to international law encourages readers to engage with multiple aspects of the topic: as 'law' directing and shaping its subjects; as a technique for governing the world of states and beyond statehood; and as a framework within which several critical and constructivist projects are articulated. The articles situate international law in its historical and ideological context and examine core concepts such as sovereignty, jurisdiction and the state. Attention is also given to its operation within international institutions and in dispute settlement, and a separate section is devoted to international law's 'projects': protecting human rights, eradicating poverty, the conservation of resources, the regulation of international trade and investment and the establishment of international order. The diverse group of contributors draws from disciplinary orientations ranging from positivism to postmodernism to ensure that this book is informed theoretically and politically, as well as grounded in practice.
For many, jurisdiction has the reputation of being a technical matter and thus of having a rather dry appeal, and not without cause. At the same time, the study of the rules assigning jurisdiction, limiting it and seeking to handle overlaps and tensions arising in this process of allocation is a fascinating lens through which to view the macro-structure of international law, since these very rules, in manifold ways, mirror the interplay, and conflict, of the governing principles of the international legal order. The term ‘jurisdiction’ stems from the Latin ius dicere, which literally translates as ‘speaking the law’. In its widest sense, jurisdiction therefore means an entity’s entitlement to authoritatively say ‘what the law is’. In the context of international law, two principal uses of the term must be distinguished. In a first instance, in the domestic as well as the international realm, reference is had to the ‘jurisdiction’ of institutional bodies. This concerns the question under what conditions institutions, particularly those of a judicial or quasi-judicial character, may pronounce on what the law is. As there exists no single institution entitled to address all questions it deems fit, it is crucial to assess the reach of a body’s jurisdiction and, correspondingly, to identify the limits of its jurisdiction. These limits typically manifest themselves on the temporal, spatial, personal and subject matter level.
Until 2010, the cycle of socio-environmental mobilization in Argentina against transnational mining that began in 2003 had influenced legislative power only at subnational levels. The enactment of the Glaciers Law in 2010 constituted the first time that socio-environmental mobilization successfully influenced legislative power at the federal level. This article makes a double contribution to the analysis of this type of conflict. In theoretical terms, through the notion of "sovereignties in conflict", it problematizes the question of sovereignty in relation to socio-environmental conflicts, a dimension currently absent in studies of this kind. In empirical terms, it carries out a study of the enactment of the Glaciers Law. The principal argument is that the greater influence of socio-environmental mobilization on federal legislative power was made possible by the higher degree of openness to various viewpoints at this level, in contrast to that observed at subnational levels, and by the more successful organization and articulation of socio-environmental mobilization in this broader context. © Lucas Christel & Daniel Torunczyk. Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Acesso à Edição Completa (V.7 | N. 33-34 | DEZ 2015.MAR 2016)
Zusammenfassung
Spätestens seit der jüngsten Finanz- und Nahrungsmittelkrise der Jahre 2007 und 2008 sind das Thema „Ernährung“ und insbesondere das Recht auf selbstbestimmte Nahrungsmittelproduktion zentrale Gegenstände gegenwärtiger Kämpfe um soziale Gerechtigkeit. Deutliche Anzeichen dieses Phänomens sind die sowohl im globalen Süden als auch im Norden zu beobachtende Entstehung und zunehmende Vernetzung diverser Food Movements, die Forderungen nach Ernährungsgerechtigkeit, Food Democracy oder Ernährungssouveränität stellen und sich damit explizit gegen die neoliberale Ordnung und eine unternehmerische Nahrungsmittelproduktion wenden. Ein besonderes Merkmal dieser Bewegungen ist, dass sie sich in der Praxis nicht nur durch die „klassischen“ Formen des politischen Protestes auszeichnen, etwa durch Demonstrationen oder öffentlichen Kampagnen, sondern auch durch eigeninitiierte und selbstbestimmte Formen des Wirtschaftens, z. B. durch Initiativen ökologischer und solidarischer Landwirtschaft sowie durch regionale Tausch- und Allmendesysteme. Unter Berücksichtigung der einschlägigen Literatur lassen sich diese Parallelökonomien auch als „alternative Ernährungsgeographien“ bezeichnen, da sie sich in unterschiedlichem Maße gegen die kapitalistische Verwertungslogik richten und auf eine wertebasierte „Wiederverräumlichung“ der Nahrungsmittelproduktion sowie ihrer Verteilung abzielen. Trotz der insgesamt hohen internationalen Aufmerksamkeit zu diesem Thema existieren jedoch nur wenige Arbeiten, die sich explizit mit der normativen Grundlage der Food Movements auseinandersetzen, d. h. mit den in der Politischen Theorie kontrovers diskutierten Ideen der Souveränität, der Gerechtigkeit und der Demokratie. Dieser Artikel zielt darauf ab, eine theoriebasierte Diskussion hinsichtlich dieser Forschungslücke anzuregen und mögliche Widersprüche aufzuzeigen, die diese vielschichtigen Ideale im Kontext dieses Themenfeldes offenbaren. Zugleich hat der Beitrag den Anspruch, eine erweiterte Grundlage für empirisches Arbeiten zu den Food Movements bzw. zu den alternativen Ernährungsgeographien zu bieten. Dazu werden Ansätze aus der Agrarsoziologie, der Humangeographie und der Politischen Theorie diskutiert und v. a. der Gerechtigkeitstheorie Nancy Frasers größere Beachtung geschenkt. Dieser aus der Kritischen Theorie stammende Ansatz eröffnet eine differenzierte Perspektive auf den inhaltlichen Facettenreichtum und die potenzielle Widersprüchlichkeit sozialer Gerechtigkeit, die auch Untersuchungen hinsichtlich der Food Movements und ihrer Forderungen in ihrer praktischen Entfaltung erleichtern kann. Darüber hinaus bietet Frasers Theorie wertvolle Anknüpfungspunkte zu humangeographischem Denken, da sie nicht nur die inhaltliche, sondern auch die räumliche Dimension von Gerechtigkeitsfragen im Zeitalter der Globalisierung berücksichtigt.
This intellectually rigorous introduction to international law encourages readers to engage with multiple aspects of the topic: as 'law' directing and shaping its subjects; as a technique for governing the world of states and beyond statehood; and as a framework within which several critical and constructivist projects are articulated. The articles situate international law in its historical and ideological context and examine core concepts such as sovereignty, jurisdiction and the state. Attention is also given to its operation within international institutions and in dispute settlement, and a separate section is devoted to international law's 'projects': protecting human rights, eradicating poverty, the conservation of resources, the regulation of international trade and investment and the establishment of international order. The diverse group of contributors draws from disciplinary orientations ranging from positivism to postmodernism to ensure that this book is informed theoretically and politically, as well as grounded in practice.
This intellectually rigorous introduction to international law encourages readers to engage with multiple aspects of the topic: as 'law' directing and shaping its subjects; as a technique for governing the world of states and beyond statehood; and as a framework within which several critical and constructivist projects are articulated. The articles situate international law in its historical and ideological context and examine core concepts such as sovereignty, jurisdiction and the state. Attention is also given to its operation within international institutions and in dispute settlement, and a separate section is devoted to international law's 'projects': protecting human rights, eradicating poverty, the conservation of resources, the regulation of international trade and investment and the establishment of international order. The diverse group of contributors draws from disciplinary orientations ranging from positivism to postmodernism to ensure that this book is informed theoretically and politically, as well as grounded in practice.
The examination of Pufendorf's Monzambano shows that he was strongly interested in the question of sovereignty, and that the complex reality of the Holy Roman Empire demanded a completely new approach to the question of where sovereignty within the Empire lay. Pufendorf developed his account of the Empire as an irregular political system by using essential aspects of Hobbes's theory and thus departed from all previous writers on the formaimperii. But Pufendorf's writing on the Empire has not only to be linked with political and philosophical discussion about sovereignty within the Empire but also with his own main writings where he developed a more detailed theory regarding the issue of sovereignty in general. The peace of Westphalia was not only an international settlement but it also shaped the constitution of the Empire to a considerable degree, and this is of crucial significance for the history of political thought during the seventeenth century.
Dr. Myers challenges the legitimacy of the traditional concept of the “just war,” revived during the Vietnam War and with the publication of Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars in 1977. The doctrine's major flaw, says Myers, is that it allows self-interested interpretation in a world of sovereign states - “Whose justice are we talking about?” he asks. Myers nonetheless validates the theory's intention and its utility in coping with war