Showing papers on "Sovereignty published in 2012"

Brownlie's Principles of Public International Law

Abstract: PART I - PRELIMINARY TOPICS PART II - PERSONALITY AND RECOGNITION PART III - TERRITORIAL SOVEREIGNTY PART IV - LAW OF THE SEA PART V - THE ENVIRONMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES PART VI - INTERNATIONAL TRANSACTIONS PART VII - STATE JURISDICTION PART VIII - NATIONALITY AND RELATED CONCEPTS PART IX - THE LAW OF RESPONSIBILITY PART X - THE PROTECTION OF INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS PART XI - DISPUTES

The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement

Abstract: Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz (eds), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, 520 pp., $99.95 hb. (ISBN 978-0-8223-45...

States, Insurgents, and Wartime Political Orders

Abstract: Bargains, deals, and tacit understandings between states and insurgents are common in civil wars. This fascinating mix of conflict and cooperation shapes patterns of politics, governance, and violence. Building on recent findings about state formation, I offer a conceptual typology of political orders amidst civil war. Wartime political orders vary according to the distribution of territorial control and the level of cooperation between states and insurgents. Orders range from collusion and shared sovereignty to spheres of influence and tacit coexistence to clashing monopolies and guerrilla disorder. Examples from contemporary South Asian conflicts illustrate these concepts, which are scalable and portable across contexts. Scholars need to think more creatively about the political-military arrangements that emerge and evolve during war. A key policy implication is that there are many ways of forging stability without creating a counterinsurgent Leviathan.

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

Abstract: Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by WENDY BROWN New York, Zone Books (distributed by The MIT Press), 2010, 168 pp., 10 illustration $25.95, 19.95[pounds sterling] cloth, ISBN 978-1-935408-08-6. The future of independent and equal state sovereignties is in doubt, or so Wendy Brown argues in her monograph concerning the recent explosion in state-built border walls for keeping people either 'in' or 'out', and to differentiate between 'us' and 'them'. The author of this slim volume utilises the material, physical and psychological characteristics of walls to highlight a renewal of concern regarding the seeming imperviousness of global capital and other transnational forces to individual sovereign state power. The growing imbalance in strength between the global and the local forms in the author's view the central danger to longstanding frameworks of international relations and power-politics. Professor Brown argues in particular that, while walls may project an image of impregnability, the huge pressures being placed on traditional sovereign frameworks of governance by globalised forces have only strengthened the opposing contexts of virtual power over physical power, of open sourcing over material appropriation, of de-territorialised tentacle of control over fixed territorial limits, and so on. Accordingly, border walls can only project an image of statehood, soothe a growing sense of state powerlessness, and bolster national xenophobia against the 'outside other'. How do walls function as effective communicators? Professor Brown points to three central paradoxes of what walls represent and make visual: the power to open or block, to universalise or to exclude/stratify, and to allow virtual networking or to impose physical barriers to networking. After these binary themes are introduced, she develops two further ideas: first, that state sovereignties are today battling a larger 'sovereignty' of globalisation, in the sense of 'a higher power' or the 'power to decide', as advocated by such theorists as Carl Schmitt; secondly, that states utilise the visual symbolism of walling to project an underlying theological dimension of state power, by helping to produce sovereign awe ('God is on our side'). She develops this latter idea in particular to illustrate her premise that the more walls are built, the more 'real' state power diminishes. In turn, as walls are of dubious efficacy when faced with human inventiveness, wall-building states rely on their walls to project a more intense sense of state power, while in actuality, walls can serve only as visual coda, in the sense of the theatrical projection of a bounded, secure nation when nothing could be further from the case. For example, some walls foster a bunker mentality among those living inside them, while others securitise a way of life. Notable examples of walls today are detailed throughout the book, and include post-apartheid South Africa, which has built a complex internal maze of walls and checkpoints, and maintains a controversial electrified security barrier on its Zimbabwe border; Saudi Arabia, which has a ten-foot-high concrete post structure along its border with Yemen (soon to be followed by a similar wall at the Iraq border); and India, which has walled-out Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma, and has walled-in Kashmir, as well as mining, and placing barbed concertina wire along the Indo-Kashmir border. The building of walls, such as the 'Security Wall' in Israel to contain West Bank and Gazan 'terrorists', or that between the southern U.S. and Mexico, to prevent illegal migration, further illustrates the challenges and insecurities felt by the numerous states whose sovereignty is placed under severe challenge, particularly during the last half century, by the growing transnational flows of capital, people, technology, ideas, violence, and politico-religious loyalties. The importance of international institutions of economic governance such as the IMF and WTO, and in the last quarter century the ever-broader assertions of international law and individual rights, further illustrate a failing Westphalian world order of territorial sovereign states. …

Conducting Research with Tribal Communities: Sovereignty, Ethics, and Data-Sharing Issues

Abstract: Background: When conducting research with American Indian tribes, informed consent beyond conventional institutional review board (IRB) review is needed because of the potential for adverse consequences at a community or governmental level that are unrecognized by academic researchers. Objectives: In this article, we review sovereignty, research ethics, and data-sharing considerations when doing community-based participatory health–related or natural-resource–related research with American Indian nations and present a model material and data-sharing agreement that meets tribal and university requirements. Discussion: Only tribal nations themselves can identify potential adverse outcomes, and they can do this only if they understand the assumptions and methods of the proposed research. Tribes must be truly equal partners in study design, data collection, interpretation, and publication. Advances in protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) are also applicable to IRB reviews, as are principles of sovereignty and indigenous rights, all of which affect data ownership and control. Conclusions: Academic researchers engaged in tribal projects should become familiar with all three areas: sovereignty, ethics and informed consent, and IPR. We recommend developing an agreement with tribal partners that reflects both health-related IRB and natural-resource–related IPR considerations.

Why international norms disappear sometimes

Abstract: This article addresses the empirical puzzle as to why some formerly deeply embedded international norms either incrementally or rapidly lose their prescriptive status and, in the extreme, can even ...

Directorate general for internal policies policy department a: economic and scientific policy

Abstract: The sovereign debt crisis is due to two major flaws of the euro area’s architecture: a doomed approach to fiscal discipline and the lack of a banking union. Adopting a complete banking union has always been a requirement and is now urgently needed. The continuous additions of measures designed to strengthen the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) will fail because this centralised approach is incompatible with budgetary sovereignty. The decentralised approach requires an unbreakable commitment to the no-bailout rule. The other proposals are not justified by economic principles. They may be justified by a political vision, we need more Europe. The timing of this proposals is worrisome, however, as we face a previously unheard loss of public trust in the European institutions.

Unrecognized States in the International System

Abstract: Introduction: Unrecognized States in the International System Nina Caspersen and Gareth Stansfield Part 1: Concepualizing Unrecognized States 1. Theorizing Unrecognized States: Sovereignty, Secessionism, and Political Economy James Harvey and Gareth Stansfield 2. Complex Terrains: Unrecognized States and Globalization Matan Chorev 3. International Actions and the Making and Unmaking of Unrecognized States Klejda Mulaj 4. What do Unrecognized States Tell us About Sovereignty? Stacy Closson Part 2: The Interactions of the Recognized and the Unrecognized State 5. States without Sovereignty: Imitating Democratic Statehood Nina Caspersen 6. After the War Ends: Violence and Viability of Post-Soviet Unrecognized States Kristin Bakke 7. 'Seperatism is the Mother of Terrorism': Internationalizing the Security Discourse on Unrecognized States Pal Kolsto and Helge Blakkisrud 8. The Foreign Policies of Unrecognized States Francis Owtram Part III: Conflict Management and Unrecognized States 9. The Limits of International Conflict Management in the Case of Abkhazia and South Ossetia Stefan Wolff 10. The Politics of Unrecognized States and the Business of International Peace Mediation: Enablers or Hindrance for Conflict Resolution? Antje Herrberg 11. Reintegrating Unrecognized States: Internationalizing Frozen Conflicts Liam Anderson Appendix 1: Maps of Unrecognized States

Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism

Abstract: Sovereignty and the sovereign state are often seen as anachronisms; Globalization and Sovereignty challenges this view. Jean L. Cohen analyzes the new sovereignty regime emergent since the 1990s evidenced by the discourses and practice of human rights, humanitarian intervention, transformative occupation, and the UN targeted sanctions regime that blacklists alleged terrorists. Presenting a systematic theory of sovereignty and its transformation in international law and politics, Cohen argues for the continued importance of sovereign equality. She offers a theory of a dualistic world order comprised of an international society of states, and a global political community in which human rights and global governance institutions affect the law, policies, and political culture of sovereign states. She advocates the constitutionalization of these institutions, within the framework of constitutional pluralism. This book will appeal to students of international political theory and law, political scientists, sociologists, legal historians, and theorists of constitutionalism.

The Crisis of the European Union in the Light of a Constitutionalization of International Law

Abstract: The crisis of the European Union showcases the asymmetry between transnational capacities for political action and social as well as economic forces unleashed at the transnational level. But recovering the regulatory power of politics by way of increased supranational organization frequently arouses fears about the fate of national democracy and of the democratic sovereign threatened to be dispossessed by executive powers operating independently at the global level. Against such political defeatism this contribution takes the example of the European Union to refute the underlying claim that a transnationalization of popular sovereignty cannot be achieved without lowering the level of democratic legitimation. It focuses on three components of every democratic polity - the association of free and equal legal persons, a bureaucratic organization for collective action, and civic solidarity as a medium of political integration - to argue that the new configuration they take at the European level, when compared with the context of the nation-state, does not in principle diminish the democratic legitimacy of the new transnational polity. The contribution continues to argue, however, that the sharing of sovereignty between the peoples and citizens of Europe needs to be better reflected in symmetry between Council and Parliament while political leadership and the media must contribute to a greater sense of civil solidarity.

Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt

Abstract: The central question of the Arab Spring - what democracies should look like in the deeply religious countries of the Middle East - has developed into a vigorous debate over these nations' secular identities. But what, exactly, is secularism? What has the West's long familiarity with it inevitably obscured? In "Questioning Secularism", Hussein Ali Agrama tackles these questions. Focusing on the fatwa councils and family law courts of Egypt just prior to the revolution, he delves deeply into the meaning of secularism itself and the ambiguities that lie at its heart. Drawing on a precedent-setting case arising from the family law courts - the last courts in Egypt to use Shari'a law - Agrama shows that secularism is a historical phenomenon that works through a series of paradoxes that it creates. Digging beneath the perceived differences between the West and Middle East, he highlights secularism's dependence on the law and the problems that arise from it: the necessary involvement of state sovereign power in managing the private spiritual lives of citizens and the irreducible set of legal ambiguities such a relationship creates. Navigating a complex landscape between private and public domains, "Questioning Secularism" lays important groundwork for understanding the real meaning of secularism as it affects the real freedoms of a citizenry, an understanding of the utmost importance for so many countries that are now urgently facing new political possibilities.

Spaces of Refusal: Rethinking Sovereign Power and Resistance at the Border

Abstract: This article investigates local actions that transgress, subvert, and ignore the imposition of sovereign authority at the borders of sovereign states. It describes the creation and gradual securitization of the 4,096-km border between India and Bangladesh, which has culminated with the construction of roads, floodlights, and fences on the majority of the previously open and lightly guarded border. Then, by drawing on interviews with borderland residents, it analyzes the ways that people interact with, talk about, and cross the border in their daily lives. The motives and consequences of these cross-border connections are not precisely captured by the literature on sovereign power and the state of exception, which identifies very little space for resistance, or the literature on dominance–resistance in power relations, which understands most actions as political resistance in a broad milieu of power. To reconcile these conflicting views on resistance, this article proposes spaces of refusal to understand a...

Thinking International Relations Differently

Abstract: 1 Introduction Arlene B Tickner and David L Blaney Section I: Security 2 Security in the Arab World and Turkey: Differently Different Pinar Bilgin 3 Aberystwyth, Paris, Copenhagen The Europeanness of New "Schools" of Security Theory in an American Field Ole Waever 4 Security Theorizing in China: Culture, Evolution and Social Practice Liu Yongtao 5 No Room for Theory? Security Studies in Latin America Arlene B Tickner and Monica Herz Section II: State, Sovereignty and Authority 6 The State of the African State and Politics: Ghosts and Phantoms in the Heart of Darkness Siba Grovogui 7 Contextualizing Rule in South Asia Siddharth Mallavarapu 8 The Latin American Nation-State and the International Fernando Lopez-Alves Section III: Globalization 9 Reading the Global in the Absence of Africa Isaac Kamola 10 Globalization: A Russian Perspective Andrei P Tsygankov 11 Arab Scholars' Take on Globalization Wafaa Hasan and Bessma Momani Section IV:Secularism and Religion 12 Religion, Secularism and the State in Southeast Asia Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid 13 Western Secularisms: Variation in a Doctrine and its Practice Mona Kanwal Sheikh and Ole Waever Section V:The International 14 Contrived Boundaries, Kinship and Ubuntu: A (South) African View of "the International" Karen Smith 15 Social Science Research and Engagement in Pakistan Ayesha Khan

A Question of Agency: Africa in international politics

Abstract: Over recent years African states have become increasingly prominent actors in high-level international politics. This article makes the case for studying Africa's international relations from the point of view of agency. The article outlines contemporary contexts within which questions of African agency have come to the fore and argues a need to think conceptually about agency in international politics in a way that accommodates the range of different agencies at work. The article outlines three elements as foundations for the analysis of African agency: first, a conceptualisation of different dimensions of agency; second, a recognition of the importance of sovereignty in differentiating between state, or state-enabled agents, and others; and third, a temporally embedded approach to agency that historicises contemporary agency. Combined, these elements suggest that future work on African agency would be able to engage seriously with the continent's role in international politics in a way that pre...

Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: A Critical Introduction

Abstract: What can postcolonialism tell us about international relations? What can international relations tell us about postcolonialism? In recent years, postcolonial perspectives and insights have challenged our conventional understanding of international politics. Postcolonial Theory and International Relations is the first book to provide a comprehensive and accessible survey of how postcolonialism radically alters our understanding of international relations. Each chapter is written by a leading international scholar and looks at the core components of international relations – theories, the nation, geopolitics, international law, war, international political economy, sovereignty, religion, nationalism, Empire etc. – through a postcolonial lens. In so doing it provides students with a valuable insight into the challenges that postcolonialism poses to our understanding of global politics.

Three Disputes and Three Objectives: China and the South China Sea

Abstract: : The recent heightening of the competition between China and its neighbors over sovereignty, resources, and security in the South China Sea has drawn the attention of diplomatic and military leaders from many countries that seek to promote stability and security in these globally important waters. For states that ring the South China Sea, its waters represent a zone of rich hydrocarbon and protein resources that are increasingly dear on land as populations exhaust their territories ability to meet their increasing needs. This resource competition alone could be the basis of sharp-edged disputes between the claimants. However, the South China Sea also represents the projection of the cultural consciousness of the centuries-long relationship that each coastal nation has had with its adjoining seas. This fact fuels competing modern-day nationalist tendencies among claimant-state populations, tendencies that in turn magnify the importance of the disputes and, during times of crisis, narrow the options for quiet negotiation or de-escalation. As American leaders discuss policies and strategies in support of regional stability, some have described the complex disputes in the South China Sea as essentially a tangled knot of intractable challenges. Actually, however, there are three severable categories of disputes, each with its own parties, rule sets, and politics. There are disputes over territorial sovereignty, in the overlapping claims to the South China Sea s islands, rocks, and reefs; disputes over which coastal states claim rightful jurisdiction over waters and seabed; and disputes over the proper balance of for military purposes. Unfortunately, the region s states are currently pursuing win-lose solutions to all three of these disputes.

Settler colonial power and the American Indian sovereignty movement: forms of domination, strategies of transformation.

Abstract: The article extends the multi-institutional model of power and change through an analysis of the American Indian Sovereignty Movement. Drawing upon cultural models of the state, and articulating institutionalist conceptions of political opportunities and resources, the analysis demonstrates that this framework can be applied to challenges addressing the state as well as nonstate fields. The rational-legal diminishment of tribal rights, bureaucratic paternalism, commonsense views of tribes as racial/ethnic minorities, and the binary construction of American and Indian as oppositional identities diminished the appeal of “contentious” political action. Instead, to establish tribes’ status as sovereign nations, tribal leaders aggressively enacted infrastructural power, transposed favorable legal rulings across social fields to legitimize sovereignty discourses, and promoted a pragmatic coexistence with state and local governments. Identifying the United States as a settler colonial society, the study suggests...

The Responsibility to Protect: Rhetoric, Reality and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention

Abstract: Introduction: Rhetoric and Reality PART I: THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT: SOUND AND FURY? The Evolution of the Responsibility to Protect The Responsibility to Protect, Authority and International Law Prevention: The Last Refuge of the Unimaginative? Political Will and Non-Intervention PART II: BEYONE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT In Defence of Humanitarian Intervention and the Potential of International Law Understanding the Tension between Sovereignty and Intervention Grasping the Nettle: The Parameters of Viable Reform Conclusion: the Future of Humanitarian Intervention

Post-liberal Regionalism in South America: The case of UNASUR

Abstract: This paper examines the formal features, the political rationale, distinctiveness, potential, and difficulties of post-liberal regionalism, with a particular focus on the case of UNASUR. Through this organization, traditional unionism and aspirations of Latin American regional integration are redefined in a South American geographic and ideational framework. Through this strategy South America became a political and economic construct in order to respond to globalization challenges and to achieve its members’ goals in development, regional autonomy (particularly in regards to the US), international influence and at the same time domestic governance of the involved countries. Nevertheless, the limits of this project’s future are being defined by nationalism, traditional visions of sovereignty and by a regional construction that involve significant institutional limitations, which are product of its intergovernmental logic, internal asymmetries and ambivalent Brazilian leadership

Beyond the ‘Weak State’: Hybrid Sovereignties in Beirut:

Abstract: Depictions of Lebanon in international politics have historically represented it as a ‘weak state’ whose domestic sovereignty is eroded by nonstate actors viewed as anomalies to extirpate. The War on Terror has been no exception. Since at least 2002 international efforts have aimed at reinforcing Lebanon's ‘weak’ domestic sovereignty against ‘extremist elements’. These approaches adopt a classic understanding of sovereignty as the achievable, exclusive, and measurable control by a state over a bounded territory. Such an understanding is misleading and even obstructive of peace for Lebanon. The accepted view of Lebanon as a ‘weak state’ suffering from chronic conflict and the myth of its capital Beirut as cyclically destroyed and reconstructed actually normalise imaginative geographies that ultimately impact on international action. Through the concept of ‘hybrid sovereignties’, this article goes beyond traditional views of legitimate state power and irregular nonstate ‘dissidence’ as dwelling in distinct ...

The Chaos of Humanitarian Aid: Adhocracy in the Republic of Georgia

Abstract: Humanitarianism presents itself as an altruistic enterprise. The growth of humanitarian agencies in the last fifty years, both intragovernmental and nongovernmental, has advanced an agenda for improving the world to protect human rights and human dignity in the aftermath of conflict or disaster.1 As international agencies penetrate, override, or work in concert with nation-states, they increasingly seek not only to preserve human life by providing food, medical care, and short-term shelter but to help victims reestablish themselves socially and economically with everything from psychosocial assistance and peace-building seminars to microcredit and business development courses. Humanitarianism thus presents itself as an apolitical regime of care, one concerned with not only keeping people from dying but making them live.Recently, humanitarianism has been portrayed as not altruistic but nefarious. Critics such as Barnett and Calhoun argue that aid is not a charitable gift but the continuation of politics by other means.2 Fassin and Pandolfi, for example, argue that the pretext of protecting individual human rights allows first-world states to override the principle of national sovereignty which undergirded the international system from World War II until the end of the Cold War and to involve themselves in the politics of third-world states.3 Here is humanitarianism as what Agier calls "the left hand of empire," the use of NGOs and intragovernmental agencies as what Colin Powell famously called "force multipliers" for neo-imperialist military action.4 Even as humanitarians seek to preserve victims' lives, humanitarian aid supposedly reduces socalled beneficiaries to "bare life," stripping them of their individuality, their social statuses, and their capacities for political action.5 Humanitarianism is thus presented as a regime of violence as well as care, seeking not just to keep people from dying but to make them live in particular ways as dominated political subjects.6Michel Agier presents this argument in its strongest form when he calls humanitarianism "totalitarianism."7 Alleging that humanitarianism is "in secret solidarity with the police order," Agier calls it a "powerful and enduring apparatus" that embodies the Western world's "desire to control" the Third World.8 He writes, "In this moment of lurching toward the limit of power over life, the humanitarian world becomes a totalitarianism, which has the power of life (to make live or survive) and the power of death (to let die) over the individual it considers the absolute victim."9 It seems ironic that humanitarianism, as a paradigm of post-Cold War politics, should be couched in the same terms as the critique of Communism, one of the central paradigms of the Cold War. (Indeed, it is not just the phraseology of totalitarianism that underlies the critique of both Cold War and post-Cold War politics; the two depend on the same text, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.)10 Yet if there is one thing that the anthropology of Cold War Eastern Europe has shown clearly, it is that totalitarian Communist regimes were far less total than their Western critics ever realized. In taking Communist officials at their word about their practices of rule, rather than paying attention to the problems of everyday life caused by how officials really did exercise power, Western analysts grossly overestimated Soviet regimes' ability to control all of social life and thereby completely missed the forces that undermined supposedly "totalitarian" state socialist power. Whatever the impulses of the Communist system were, totalitarianism was not total. It was the interrelationship between attempts at repression and domination and the way that people responded to lapses of power in everyday life that formed the dynamics of the system and, eventually, undermined it.11In this essay, I would like to suggest that like Cold War- era Communist regimes, new regimes based on humanitarianism are much more limited in their reach than their ambitions might suggest. …

BRICS: Sovereignty power and weakness

Abstract: The BRICS’ impact can be evaluated based on the degree of political coherence among them, as well as their capacity to influence the international system. This article will from the outset assume that the BRICS form a heterogeneous coalition of often competing powers that share a common fundamental political objective: to erode Western hegemonic claims by protecting the principle which these claims are deemed to most threaten, namely the political sovereignty of states. The BRICS form a coalition of sovereign state defenders. While they do not seek to form an anti-Western political coalition based on a counter-proposal or radically different vision of the world, they are concerned with maintaining their independence of judgment and national action in a world that is increasingly economically and socially interdependent. They consider that state sovereignty trumps all, including, of course, the political nature of its underpinning regimes. Thus, the BRICS – even the democratic ones – fundamentally diverge from the liberal vision of Western countries.

Sovereignty: God, State, and Self

Abstract: Throughout the history of human intellectual endeavor, sovereignty has cut across the diverse realms of theology, political thought, and psychology. From earliest Christian worship to the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx, the debates about sovereignty-complete independence and self-government-have dominated our history. In this seminal work of political history and political theory, leading scholar and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain examines the origins and meanings of sovereignty as it relates to all the ways we attempt to explain our world: God, state, and self. Examining the early modern ideas of God which formed the basis for the modern sovereign state, Elshtain carries her research from theology and philosophy into psychology, showing that political theories of state sovereignty fuel contemporary understandings of sovereignty of the self. As the basis of sovereign power shifts from God, to the state, to the self, Elshtain uncovers startling realities often hidden from view. Her thesis consists in nothing less than a thorough-going rethinking of our intellectual history through its keystone concept. The culmination of over thirty years of critically applauded work in feminism, international relations, political thought, and religion, Sovereignty opens new ground for our understanding of our own culture, its past, present, and future.

Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua

Abstract: For West Papua and its people, the promise of sovereignty has never been realized, despite a long and fraught struggle for independence from Indonesia. In "Laughing at Leviathan", Danilyn Rutherford examines this struggle through a series of interlocking essays that drive at the core meaning of sovereignty itself - how it is fueled, formed, and even thwarted by pivotal but often overlooked players: those that make up an audience. Whether these players are citizens, missionaries, competing governmental powers, nongovernmental organizations, or the international community at large, Rutherford shows how a complex interplay of various observers is key to the establishment and understanding of the sovereign nation-state. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from YouTube videos to Dutch propaganda to her own fieldwork observations, Rutherford draws the history of Indonesia, empire, and postcolonial nation-building into a powerful examination of performance and power. Ultimately she revises Thomas Hobbes, painting a picture of the Leviathan not as a coherent body but a fragmented one distributed across a wide range of both real and imagined spectators. In doing so, she offers an important new approach to the understanding of political struggle.

The New Arab Cold War: rediscovering the Arab dimension of Middle East regional politics

Abstract: This article provides a conceptual lens for and a thick interpretation of the emergent regional constellation in the Middle East in the first decade of the 21st century. It starts out by challenging two prevalent claims about regional politics in the context of the 2006 Lebanon and 2008–09 Gaza Wars: Firstly, that regional politics is marked by a fundamental break from the ‘old Middle East’ and secondly, that it has become ‘post-Arab’ in the sense that Arab politics has ceased being distinctly Arab. Against this background, the article develops the understanding of a New Arab Cold War which accentuates the still important, but widely neglected Arab dimension in regional politics. By rediscovering the Arab Cold War of the 1950–60s and by drawing attention to the transformation of Arab nationalism and the importance of new trans-Arab media, the New Arab Cold War perspective aims at supplementing rather that supplanting the prominent moderate-radical, sectarian and Realist-Westphalian narratives. By highlighting dimensions of both continuity and change it does moreover provide some critical nuances to the frequent claims about the ‘newness’ of the ‘New Middle East’. In addition to this more Middle East-specific contribution, the article carries lessons for a number of more general debates in International Relations theory concerning the importance of (Arab-Islamist) non-state actors and competing identities in regional politics as well as the interplay between different forms of sovereignty.