I propose a concept of effective sovereignty to argue that states participate in sovereignty regimes that exhibit distinctive combinations of central state authority and political territoriality. Two basic conclusions, drawing from recent research in political geography and other fields, are that sovereignty is neither inherently territorial nor is it exclusively organized on a state-by-state basis. This matters because so much political energy has been invested in organizing politics in general and democracy in particular in relation to states. Typically, writing about sovereignty regards sovereignty as providing a norm that legitimizes central state authority. Unfortunately, little or no attention is given as to why this should always entail a territorial definition of political authority and to why states are thereby its sole proprietors. The dominant approach continues to privilege the state as the singular font of authority even when a state's sovereignty may be decried as hypocrisy and seen...

background

The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective

Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics

This article relies on an analysis of the institutionalization of economics worldwide during the 20th century to argue that the logic of professional development in this particular field has come to be increasingly defined in global terms. Connections to (mainly) U.S.‐based standards of work and professional practice are routinely used in the local competition whereby different professional segments and groups seek to assert their authority on particular jurisdictions (scientific, corporate, or political). In this process of professional construction (or reconstruction), economies are being transformed through complex transnational mechanisms which, ultimately, feed back into the identity and jurisdictional claims of the economics profession itself, both in the “core” and in the “periphery.”

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The construction of a global profession : The transnationalization of economics

In the past two decades human geographers have intensely theorized scale, and extended claims that it is a foundational element of geographic theory. Yet attendant with this move has been a growing...

Rethinking scale as a geographical category: from analysis to practice

The authors examine the impact of globalization on state structures in the specific instance of the central bank. Following the world‐system, world‐society, and neoinstitutional perspectives in sociology, they assume that states are in cultural, political, and economic competition with each other, thereby seeking to maintain their position and status, frequently by adopting organizational forms or practices that make them isomorphic with their environment. The authors predict that countries boost the independence of their central bank from the political power as their exposure to foreign trade, investment, and multilateral lending increases. They also model the cross‐national dynamic process of diffusion of central bank independence by examining the impact of cohesive and role‐equivalent trade relationships between countries. They find support for their hypotheses with information on 71 countries between 1990 and 2000.

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Globalization pressures and the state: the worldwide spread of central bank independence

Over most of history, participants in trust networks such as clandestine religious sects and kinship groups have shielded them from rulers' intervention, rightly fearing dispossession or exploitation. Yet no substantial regime can survive without drawing on resources held by trust networks. In particular, democratic regimes cannot operate without substantial integration of trust networks into public politics. Rulers' application of various combinations among coercion, capital, and commitment in the course of bargaining with subordinate populations produces a variety of regimes. Contemporary democracies face a threat of de-democratization if major segments of the population withdraw their trust networks from public politics.

The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective

Citations

Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics

The construction of a global profession : The transnationalization of economics

Rethinking scale as a geographical category: from analysis to practice

Globalization pressures and the state: the worldwide spread of central bank independence

Trust and Rule

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