Sovereignty

About: Sovereignty is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 25909 publications have been published within this topic receiving 410148 citations.

Trying to Have Your Cake and Eating It: How and Why the State System Has Created Offshore

Abstract: From modest beginnings in the wholesale financial market specializing in government debt, offshore has expanded rapidly, penetrating and then dominating an ever growing portion of international economic life. This article reflects on the relationship between offshore and the concept of state sovereignty. My argument is that far from escaping the state, offshore is intimately connected with the state system. The concepts of sovereignty and national self-determination played simultaneously an enabling and constraining role in the development of offshore. Furthermore, having “created” offshore, sovereignty and self-determination are themselves constrained and (re-)enabled in turn. Offshore therefore is not a diminution of state sovereignty but a legally defined realm marking differential levels of intensity by which states propose to apply their regulation. Such a bifurcation of juridical space represents a process by which the state is reimagining its relationship to its territory.

A Belated Awakening: National and International Responses to the Internal Displacement of Kurds in Turkey

Abstract: Internal displacement has replaced the flows of border-crossing refugees as the major form of forced migration across the world in the past two decades. International organizations seek to have a central role in providing assistance to internally displaced persons (IDPs) although this phenomenon comes under the traditional realm of state sovereignty, in contrast to the refugee regime, which is part of international law. The evolving international IDP regime has triggered policy and scholarly debates about various aspects of state responsibility and international assistance. On one hand, when states fail to provide protection to the displaced, the decision to take international action is often selective and depends to a large extent on the balance of geopolitical interests of powerful donor states. On the other hand, extant international humanitarian assistance practices also face criticism for having created new modes of power over displaced groups. The displacement of several hundred thousand people in the Kurdishpopulated southeastern region of Turkey during the 1990s and recent deliberations about how to protect and assist them constitute a very important case which demonstrates the nexus between the workings of the interstate system, state sovereignty and the regulation and control of target populations. After years of neglecting the plight of people evicted from their homes in the course of the armed conflict with Kurdish guerillas,

The Expansion of the State

Abstract: The state has come to be a major focus of political and historical sociology in recent years. In the growing literature, there appears to be an underemphasis on the cultural and institutional contexts of the state's emergence and expansion. Two distinct issues are crucial: (a) the evolution of society as a collective actor, including the establishment of sovereignty and the expansion of its jurisdiction; and (b) the degree to which this sovereignty and jurisdiction are structured within a particular bureaucratic organization. We first review studies of the emergence of states in formerly stateless polities. We then discuss the processes of state formation and nation building in the Western system. Finally, we review more specialized theoretical works concerning classes, the world economy, and the construction of national institutions. The literature discussed has added considerably to macrosociology. More work is needed, however, in which the state is viewed as an institution that is essentially cultural in nature and that derives from a wider rationalizing project.

The development of American citizenship, 1608-1870

Abstract: The concept of citizenship that achieved full legal form and force in mid-nineteenth-century America had English roots in the sense that it was the product of a theoretical and legal development that extended over three hundred years. This prize-winning volume describes and explains the process by which the cirumstances of life in the New World transformed the quasi-medieval ideas of seventeenth-century English jurists about subjectship, community, sovereignty, and allegiance into a wholly new doctrine of "volitional allegiance." The central British idea was that subjectship involved a personal relationship with the king, a relationship based upon the laws of nature and hence perpetual and immutable. The conceptual analogue of the subject-king relationship was the natural bond between parent and child. Across the Atlantic divergent ideas were taking hold. Colonial societies adopted naturalization policies that were suited to practical needs, regardless of doctrinal consistency. Americans continued to value their status as subjects and to affirm their allegiance to the king, but they also moved toward a new understanding of the ties that bind individuals to the community. English judges of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries assumed that the essential purpose of naturalization was to make the alien legally the same as a native, that is, to make his allegiance natural, personal, and perpetual. In the colonies this reasoning was being reversed. Americans took the model of naturalization as their starting point for defining all political allegiance as the result of a legal contract resting on consent. This as yet barely articulated difference between the American and English definition of citizenship was formulated with precision in the course of the American Revolution. Amidst the conflict and confusion of that time Americans sought to define principles of membership that adequately encompassed their ideals of individual liberty and community security. The idea that all obligation rested on individual volition and consent shaped their response to the claims of Parliament and king, legitimized their withdrawal from the British empire, controlled their reaction to the loyalists, and underwrote their creation of independent governments. This new concept of citizenship left many questions unanswered, however. The newly emergent principles clashed with deep-seated prejudices, including the traditional exclusion of Indians and Negroes from membership in the sovereign community. It was only the triumph of the Union in the Civil War that allowed Congress to affirm the quality of native and naturalized citizens, to state unequivocally the primacy of the national over state citizenship, to write black citizenship into the Constitution, and to recognize the volitional character of, the status of citizen by formally adopting the principle of expatriation.