Showing papers on "Sovereignty published in 2015"

The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty

Abstract: The White Possessive explores the links between race, sovereignty, and possession through themes of property: owning property, being property, and becoming propertyless. Focusing on the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson questions current race theory in the first world and its preoccupation with foregrounding slavery and migration. The nation, she argues, is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession. Moreton-Robinson reveals how the core values of Australian national identity continue to have roots in Britishness and colonization, built on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty. Whiteness studies are central to Moreton-Robinson’s reasoning, and she shows how blackness works as a white epistemological tool that bolsters the social production of whiteness—displacing Indigenous sovereignties and rendering them invisible in a civil rights discourse, sidestepping issues of settler colonialism. Throughout this critical examination Moreton-Robinson proposes a bold new agenda for critical Indigenous studies, one that involves deeper analysis of the prerogatives of white possession within the role of disciplines.

Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States

Abstract: Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States Audra Simpson, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.Audra Simpson's book, Mohawk Interruptus, is an achievement of scholarship. It delivers what it promises, has a strong authorial voice that is both in keeping with rigorous academic prose and that is easily understandable by a wide readership. Her examples are rich, engaging, and accessible. She combines sophisticated theoretical analysis with rich ethnographic detail, making for a challenging but enjoyable read. Her stories, I imagine, would resonate with individuals inside and outside the communities she renders visible, quite deliberately foregrounding her ethical relation to the Mohawks of Kahnawa:ke. The stories she shares are clear, poignant, respectful, and at times simultaneously humorous and horrifying. Simpson seemingly effortlessly weaves her own embodied subjectivity, with rich ethnography, political theory, and compelling narrative in this excellent, robust, and nuanced study.Simpson makes three claims in this book: (1) "sovereignty may exist within sovereignty," and that such nested sovereignty has implications for the seemingly settled conditions of settler colonialism (p. 10-11); (2) there exists an alternative to "recognition" which is "refusal"; (3) hitherto this point, and as a result of their Western, institutional, and statist forms of analysis (p. 11), neither political theory nor anthropology have offered the conceptual tools required to make sense of Indigenous politics and their challenge to settler colonialism (p. 177). Simpson makes Mstrong arguments to support these claims throughout the book, presenting interruption and refusal as political forms and strategies, ultimately achieving what she sets out to do. Throughout her work, Simpson offers some compelling conceptual tools that launch a rigorous challenge to historical and contemporary forms of anthropology.Using the three signposts of "membership" (p. 13), "detention and recognition" (p. 18), and "refusing to play the game" (p. 25), Simpson deftly navigates the reader through her argument. Her argument builds methodically, and for this reason I structure my review in a way that mirrors the arc of her argumentation. She first maps a genealogy of history and context to orient the reader, she admits in a partial and event-driven way, to Kahnawa:ke (Chapter 2). She does this particularly to signal that the territorial history shapes the complex questions of membership that she later tracks throughout the monograph. This context is essential to her third claim: to make sense of the complexities of membership in Indigenous communities, conceptual tools that account for histories of colonialism and the ongoing dispossession upon which settler states are premised and maintained are required.Simpson moves to construct her ethnography of refusal (Chapter 4), arguing that if "we take this historical form of ethnological representation into account, we might then be able to come up with techniques of representation that move away from 'difference' and its containment, from the ethnological formalism and fetishism" (p. 97) that she describes in Chapter 3. In her articulation of ethnographic refusal, Simpson offers both a theoretical and experiential ethics of refusal in her writing, indicating her purposeful inclusion and refusal in the context of ongoing dispossession and colonialism. This is a deeply political and ethical move, in keeping with the refusals and interruptions that she documents throughout the monograph. This refusal is buttressed by her exploration of the "ethnographic limit" of her research and writing, punctuated by her questions to herself that guide the arrival at enough: "Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? …

Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment

Abstract: As an overseas department of France, Guadeloupe is one of a handful of non-independent societies in the Caribbean that seem like political exceptions-or even paradoxes-in our current postcolonial era. In Non-Sovereign Futures, Yarimar Bonilla wrestles with the conceptual arsenal of political modernity-challenging contemporary notions of freedom, sovereignty, nationalism, and revolution-in order to recast Guadeloupe not as a problematically non-sovereign site but as a place that can unsettle how we think of sovereignty itself. Through a deep ethnography of Guadeloupean labor activism, Bonilla examines how Caribbean political actors navigate the conflicting norms and desires produced by the modernist project of postcolonial sovereignty. Exploring the political and historical imaginaries of activist communities, she examines their attempts to forge new visions for the future by reconfiguring narratives of the past, especially the histories of colonialism and slavery. Drawing from nearly a decade of ethnographic research, she shows that political participation-even in failed movements-has social impacts beyond simple material or economic gains. Ultimately, she uses the cases of Guadeloupe and the Caribbean at large to offer a more sophisticated conception of the possibilities of sovereignty in the postcolonial era.

Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World

Abstract: Freedom Time reconsiders decolonization from the perspectives of Aime Cesaire (Martinique) and Leopold Sedar Senghor (Senegal) who, beginning in 1945, promoted self-determination without state sovereignty. As politicians, public intellectuals, and poets they struggled to transform imperial France into a democratic federation, with former colonies as autonomous members of a transcontinental polity. In so doing, they revitalized past but unrealized political projects and anticipated impossible futures by acting as if they had already arrived. Refusing to reduce colonial emancipation to national independence, they regarded decolonization as an opportunity to remake the world, reconcile peoples, and realize humanity’s potential. Emphasizing the link between politics and aesthetics, Gary Wilder reads Cesaire and Senghor as pragmatic utopians, situated humanists, and concrete cosmopolitans whose postwar insights can illuminate current debates about self-management, postnational politics, and planetary solidarity. Freedom Time invites scholars to decolonize intellectual history and globalize critical theory, to analyze the temporal dimensions of political life, and to question the territorialist assumptions of contemporary historiography.

The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime, and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil

Abstract: List of Illustrations Foreword Preface Acknowledgments PART ONE. SURVIVING Introduction. Sovereignty by Consensus 1. Surviving Sao Paulo 2. Regulations of Killing PART TWO. KILLING 3. Homicide 4. Resistencias 5. The Killing Consensus 6. A Consensus Killed PART THREE. DEBATE 7. The Powerful? 8. Toward an Ideal Subordination? Notes Bibliography Index

The debate on food sovereignty theory: agrarian capitalism, dispossession and agroecology

Abstract: This contribution reviews recent critiques of the food sovereignty framework. In particular it engages with the debate between Henry Bernstein and Philip McMichael and analyzes their different conceptualizations of agrarian capitalism. It critically identifies tendencies in food sovereignty approaches to assume a food regime crisis, to one-sidedly emphasize accumulation by dispossession and enclosure and thereby to overlook the importance of expanded reproduction, and to espouse a romantic optimism about farmer-driven agroecological knowledge which is devoid of modern science. Alternatives to current modernization trajectories cannot simply return to the peasant past and to the local. Instead, they need to recognize the desires of farmers to be incorporated into larger commodity networks, the importance of industrialization and complex chains for feeding the world population, and the support of state and science, as well as social movements, for realizing a food sovereign alternative.

The Right of Self-Determination of Peoples: The Domestication of an Illusion

Abstract: The right of self-determination of peoples holds out the promise of sovereign statehood for all peoples and a domination-free international order. But it also harbors the danger of state fragmentation that can threaten international stability if claims of self-determination lead to secessions. Covering both the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century independence movements in the Americas and the twentieth-century decolonization worldwide, this book examines the conceptual and political history of the right of self-determination of peoples. It addresses the political contexts in which the right and concept were formulated and the practices developed to restrain its potentially anarchic character, its inception in anti-colonialism, nationalism, and the labor movement, its instrumentalization at the end of the First World War in a formidable duel that Wilson lost to Lenin, its abuse by Hitler, the path after the Second World War to its recognition as a human right in 1966, and its continuing impact after decolonization.

Grasping for the Ends of the Earth: Framing and Contesting Polar Sovereignty, 1900-1955

Abstract: ............................................................................................................................. ii Co-Authorship Statement .................................................................................................. iv Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................. v Table of

Globalization and Capitalist Geopolitics: Sovereignty and state power in a multipolar world

Abstract: FROM THE BACK COVER: Globalization and Capitalist Geopolitics is concerned with the growth of transnational corporate power against the backdrop of the decline of the West and the struggle by non-Western states to challenge and overcome domination of the rest of the world by the West. At the centre of the study is the problematic status of the US as guarantor of global security and imperial nation in decline. The declining power of America in a multipolar world places a question mark under the future of Western leadership of globalization. Woodley interrogates the structure of contemporary world order and examines competing approaches to globalization and global capitalism in international relations and international political economy. He engages with key scholars in the field, and provides an authoritative yet accessible commentary on debates on globalization and geopolitics in the wake of the global financial crisis. In a period of increasing geopolitical insecurity and geoeconomic transition, this book is a major contribution to the debate on globalization. It is a key resource for students and scholars seeking a deeper understanding of the historical and economic determinants of neoliberal capitalism, the impact of global economic convergence for Western economies, and the implications of globalization for the reconstruction of contemporary world order. ***** NOTICE: This book is available on OAPEN: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=625755. It is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 International (AT-NC-ND): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode

Constructing the International Economy

Abstract: Introduction: Constructing the International Economy by Rawi Abdelal, Mark Blyth, and Craig ParsonsPART I. MEANING1. Shrinking the State: Neoliberal Economists and Social Spending in Latin America by Jeffrey M. Chwieroth2. The Meaning of Development: Constructing the World Bank's Good Governance Agenda by Catherine Weaver3. Institutionalized Hypocrisy and the Politics of Agricultural Trade by Mlada BukovanskyPART II. COGNITION4. Frames, Scripts, and the Making of Regional Trade Areas by Francesco Duina5. Imagined Economies: Constructivist Political Economy, Nationalism, and Economic-based Sovereignty Movements in Russia by Yoshiko M. HerreraPART III. UNCERTAINTY6. Firm Interests in Uncertain Times: Business Lobbying in Multilateral Service Liberalization by Cornelia Woll7. Trade-offs and Trinities: Social Forces and Monetary Cooperation by Wesley W. WidmaierPART IV. SUBJECTIVITY8. Moby Dick or Moby Doll? Discourse, or How to Study the "Social Construction of" All the Way Down by Charlotte Epstein9. Bringing Power Back In: The IMF's Constructivist Strategy in Critical Perspective by Jacqueline Best10. The Ethical Investor, Embodied Economies, and International Political Economy by Paul LangleyRe-constructing IPE: Some Conclusions Drawn from a Crisis by Rawi Abdelal, Mark Blyth, and Craig ParsonsReferences Index

Human Rights Institutions, Sovereignty Costs and Democratization

Abstract: Why do countries join international human rights institutions, when membership often yields few material gains and constrains state sovereignty? This article argues that entering a human rights institution can yield substantial benefits for democratizing states. Emerging democracies can use the ‘sovereignty costs’ associated with membership to lock in liberal policies and signal their intent to consolidate democracy. It also argues, however, that the magnitude of these costs varies across different human rights institutions, which include both treaties and international organizations. Consistent with this argument, the study finds that democratizing states tend to join human rights institutions that impose greater constraints on state sovereignty.

Translating the Politics of Food Sovereignty: Digging into Contradictions, Uncovering New Dimensions

Abstract: Food sovereignty, as a movement and a set of ideas, is coming of age. Rooted in resistance to free trade and the globalizing force of neoliberalism, the concept has inspired collective action across the world. We examine what has changed since food sovereignty first emerged on the international scene and reflect on insight from new terrain where the movement has expanded. We argue that to advance the theory and practice of food sovereignty, new frameworks and analytical methods are needed to move beyond binaries—between urban and rural, gender equality and the family farm, trade and localism, and autonomy and engagement with the state. A research agenda in food sovereignty must not shy away from the rising contradictions in and challenges to the movement. The places of seeming contradiction may in fact be where the greatest insights are to be found. We suggest that by taking a relational perspective, scholars can begin to draw insight into the challenges and sticking points of food sovereignty by ...

Land and food sovereignty

Abstract: Land and food politics are intertwined. Efforts to construct food sovereignty often involve struggles to (re)constitute democratic systems of land access and control. The relationship is two-way: democratic land control may be effected but, without a strategic rebooting of the broader agricultural and food system, such democratisation may fizzle out and revert back to older or trigger newer forms of land monopoly. While we reaffirm the relevance of land reform, we point out its limitations, including its inability to capture the wide array of land questions confronting those implicated in the political project of food sovereignty. Our idea of the land framework of food sovereignty, described as ‘democratic land control’ or ‘land sovereignty’, with working peoples’ right to land at its core, is outlined, with a normative frame to kick-start a debate and possible agenda for future research.

Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880–1930

Abstract: In the United States of America today, debates among, between, and within Indian nations continue to focus on how to determine and define the boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizenship. From the 1880s and into the 1930s, many Native people participated in similar debates as they confronted white cultural expectations regarding what it meant to be an Indian in modern American society. Using close readings of texts, images, and public performances, this book examines the literary output of four influential American Indian intellectuals who challenged long-held conceptions of Indian identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Kiara M. Vigil traces how the narrative discourses created by these figures spurred wider discussions about citizenship, race, and modernity in the United States. Vigil demonstrates how these figures deployed aspects of Native American cultural practice to authenticate their status both as indigenous peoples and as citizens of the United States.

Natural powers: from the bio-economy to the eco-economy and sustainable place-making

Abstract: The current intensification of efforts to develop post-carbon solutions to the global food/energy security problems is developing a highly contested policy/technology/production/consumption arena. The paper examines how current attempts to resolve these new productivist priorities are embedded in combinations of sustainability, security, sovereignty and resource governance concerns. These concerns are coming together with the new contested framings of the bio-economy and the eco-economy. The framings hold different implications for social and spatial development. The paper argues that it is important to apply and connect a critical ‘post normal’ sustainability science approach to developing the place-making properties of the eco-economy model, as well as examining the implications of the wider and more dominant bio-economic framing. The analysis shows that to achieve synergies between sustainability, security, sovereignty and effective resource governance, a more place-based eco-economic model needs to be progressed.

Sovereignty at What Scale? An Inquiry into Multiple Dimensions of Food Sovereignty

Abstract: Food sovereignty has struggled to make inroads into changing the structures and processes underlying the corporate food regime. One reason is that scale is still underspecified in the politics, strategies, and theories of food sovereignty. We suggest that much can be learned from examining the multiple dimensions of scale inherent in ongoing food sovereignty struggles. A gap exists between these in vivo experiments and the maturing academic theory of scale. The concept of ‘sovereignty’ can be opened up to reveal that movements, peoples, and communities, for example, are creating multiple sovereignties and are exercising sovereignty in more relational ways. Relational scale can aid movements and scholars to map and evaluate how spatial and temporal processes at and among various levels work to reinforce dominant agri-food systems but could also be reconfigured to support progressive alternatives. Finally, we apply relational scale to suggest practical strategies for realizing food sovereignty, usin...

‘A Direct Act of Resurgence, a Direct Act of Sovereignty’: Reflections on Idle No More, Indigenous Activism, and Canadian Settler Colonialism

Abstract: In the winter of 2012, the Canadian political scene was shaken by the emergence of ‘Idle No More', a collection of protests directed by and largely comprised of Indigenous peoples. Originally, a response to a variety of legislation that was being passed through the Canadian government at the time, Idle No More spread across the country and around the world. In this paper, I argue that, drawing from Indigenous nationhood movements that extend back through five centuries, Idle No More represents a renewed assertion of Indigenous sovereignty in opposition to settler colonisation. Through transgressive actions, Idle No More has brought online activism into alignment with embodied defences of land and place, challenging Canadian sovereignty and Settler identity in multiple and creative ways. However, settler colonial tendencies in Canadian politics have sought to reinscribe Idle No More within established, generic political binaries. This paper positions Idle No More as a ‘movement moment’ that reveals...

De-Constructing the Chinese Nation

Abstract: Most Sinologists view the Chinese nation as a relatively recent development, one that made the transition from empire to nation only around the turn of the twentieth century. This contrasts with the view of the Chinese nationalists and the ordinary people of China that their country is an ancient body that has evolved into present times. This split in the understanding of the Chinese nation cannot be easily resolved by Western theories of nationalism, whose assumptions are deeply embedded in modernization theory. In this paper, I propose a few alternative categories, inspired in part by post-modernist theories and in part by a comparative perspective, to understand both the question of the history of the nation as well as the related one about the nature of national identity. In the problematique of modernization theories the nation is a unique and unprecedented form of community which finds its place in the oppositions between empire and nation, tradition and modernity, and centre and periphery. As the new and sovereign subject of history, the nation embodies a moral force that allows it to supersede dynasties and ruling segments, which are seen as merely partial subjects representing only themselves through history. By contrast, the nation is a collective subject whose ideal periphery exists outside itself poised to realize its historical destiny in a modern future. ' To be sure, modernization theory has clarified many aspects of nationalism. But in its effort to see the nation as a collective subject of modernity, it obscures the nature of national identity. I propose instead that we view national identity as founded upon fluid relationships; it thus both resembles and is interchangeable with other political identities. If the dynamics of national identity lie within the same terrain as other political identities, we will need to break with two assumptions of modernization

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience

Abstract: Prologue 1. Toward a Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic 2. Imperial Sovereignty: the Limits of Liberalism and the Case of Mysore 3. Trollopian "Foreign Policy": Rootedness and Cosmopolitanism in the Mid- Victorian Global Imaginary 4. "India is a Bore": Imperial Governmentality in The Eustace Diamonds 5. "Dark, Like Me": Archeology and Erfahrung in Armadale and The Moonstone 6. The Adulterous Geopolitical Aesthetic: Romola contra Madame Bovary 7. Where Liberals Fear to Tread: E. M. Forster's Queer Internationalism 8. The Mad Men in the Attic: Seriality and Identity in the Narrative of Capitalist 8. The Mad Men in the Attic: Seriality and Identity in the Narrative of Capitalist Globalization Coda: The Way We Historicize Now

Biopolitics and Power in Putin’s Russia

Abstract: In Putin’s third term, official rhetoric has become a normative, moralizing discourse promoting Russian traditional values as opposed to the “moral decay” of the West. This “biopolitical turn” in Russian politics–a redefining of the boundaries of the Russian political community and extension of state sovereignty into private lives–is part of the authoritarian drift of the Russian political regime.

Food Sovereignty and the Recognition of New Rights for Peasants at the UN: A Critical Overview of La Via Campesina's Rights Claims over the Last 20 Years

Abstract: This article explores how human rights framing by the transnational agrarian movement La Via Campesina (LVC) has evolved over the last 20 years. It discusses how the movement has worked towards institutionalizing new categories of rights, such as the ‘right to food sovereignty’ and the ‘rights of peasants’, thereby contributing to the creation of new human rights standards at the United Nations (UN). It also critically addresses some of the challenges the movement has been confronted with when framing its demands in terms of rights. Its overall argument is that LVC has managed to tap the potential of the rhetoric of rights to find common ground, thanks to its innovative use of non-codified rights. This has enabled activists to ‘localize’ human rights and make them meaningful to their various contexts. However, it contends that further advancing the movement's goals will require serious consideration of some of the key limits of the human rights framework.

The politics of sustainable development opposition: State legislative efforts to stop the United Nation’s Agenda 21 in the United States

Abstract: The Tea Party exploded on the US political scene with President Barack Obama’s election and scholarly research focuses on its role in national issues. However, Tea Party and property rights advocates, among others, also fiercely oppose sustainability city planning issues, recently having legislation introduced in 26 US states to stop such practices. They perceive planning as directly connected to the United Nation’s 1992 document, Agenda 21: the Rio Declaration on Development and Environment. The counter-narrative suggests the UN seeks to restrict individual property rights and American sovereignty. Meanwhile, Agenda 21-related planning is favourably considered and practiced worldwide. Through a mixed-methods approach using quantitative and case-based research, we track the opposition’s emergence through the introduction and sometimes adoption of state legislation. We draw conclusions and implications for research and practice using a theoretical framework routed in scholarship from planning, geography, p...

Exploring the ‘localisation’ dimension of food sovereignty

Abstract: The ‘localisation’ narrative is at the heart of food sovereignty in theory and practice, in reaction to the ‘distance’ dimension in the dominant industrial food system. But while it is a central element in food sovereignty, it is under-theorised and largely unproblematised. Using the theoretical concepts of food regime analysis, uneven geographical development and metabolic rift, the author presents an exploratory discussion on the localisation dimension of food sovereignty, arguing that not all local food systems are a manifestation of food sovereignty nor do they all help build the alternative model that food sovereignty proposes. The paper differentiates local food systems by examining character, method and scale and illustrates how local food systems rarely meet the ideal type of either food sovereignty or the capitalist industrial model. In order to address five forms of distance inherent in the global industrial food system, localisation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for food sovereign...

Princely Education in Early Modern Britain

Abstract: In the sixteenth century, Erasmus of Rotterdam led a humanist campaign to deter European princes from vainglorious warfare by giving them liberal educations. His prescriptions for the study of classical authors and scripture transformed the upbringing of Tudor and Stuart royal children. Rather than emphasising the sword, the educations of Henry VIII, James VI and I, and their successors prioritised the pen. In a period of succession crises, female sovereignty, and minority rulers, liberal education played a hitherto unappreciated role in reshaping the political and religious thought and culture of early modern Britain. This book explores how a humanist curriculum gave princes the rhetorical skills, biblical knowledge, and political impetus to assert the royal supremacy over their subjects' souls. Liberal education was meant to prevent over-mighty monarchy but in practice it taught kings and queens how to extend their authority over church and state.

The third space of sovereignty: the postcolonial politics of U.S.-Indigenous relations

Abstract: Settler states – including the USA – have a long history of imposing artificial boundaries on Indigenous peoples, then casting those boundaries as natural and always-present. The edge of the reserv...

Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism

Abstract: What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one's actions. In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.