Sovereignty

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

Conversations with a Polish populist: Tracing hidden histories of globalization, class, and dispossession in postsocialism (and beyond)

Abstract: Building on the work of Jonathan Friedman and of Andre Gingrich and Marcus Banks, I explain the rise of populist, neonationalist sensibilities in Poland as a set of defensive responses by working-class people to the silences imposed by liberal rule. I trace in detail a sequence of all-around dispossessions experienced by Polish working-class sodalities since 1989, when activists with substantial legitimacy among organized workers had claimed de facto and de jure control over assets crucial for working-class reproduction. “Democratization” and “markets” were shrewd legal ways by which the new liberal capitalist state reappropriated and recentralized those assets from local constituencies. Meanwhile, the reputation of workers, whose fights with the party-state had been essential for regaining national sovereignty and establishing parliamentary democracy, was systematically annihilated in the public sphere by discourses of “internal orientalism.”[postsocialism, dispossession, class, neonationalism, populism, neoliberalism, globalization, privatization, Europe]

Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminacy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State?

Abstract: In this essay I offer a thesis about secularism as a modern historical phenomenon, through a consideration of state politics, law, and religion in contemporary Egypt. Egypt seems hardly a place for theorizing about modern secularity. For it is a state where politics and religion seem to constantly blur together, giving rise to continual conflict, and it thus seems, at best, only precariously secular. These facts, however, go to the heart of my thesis: that secularism itself incessantly blurs together religion and politics, and that its power relies crucially upon the precariousness of the categories it establishes. Egypt's religious-political ambiguities, I argue, are expressions of deeper indeterminacies at the very foundation of secular power. In what follows, I elaborate my thesis, how it differs from other, similar sounding arguments, and the shift in perspective on secularism that it entails. I begin with a famous Egyptian apostasy case.

Acquiring Empire by Law: From Roman Doctrine to Early Modern European Practice

Abstract: What role did the Roman legal concept of res nullius (things without owners), or the related concept of terra nullius (land without owners), play in the context of early modern European expansion? Scholars have provided widely different answers to this question. Some historians have argued that European claims based on terra nullius became a routine part of early modern interimperial politics, particularly as a response by the English and French crowns to expansive Iberian claims supported by papal donations. Others have countered that allusions to terra nullius marked a temporary phase of imperial discourse and that claimants relied more often on other rationales for empire, rarely mentioning res nullius or terra nullius and often explicitly recognizing the ownership rights, and even the sovereignty, of local polities and indigenous peoples.

Recognizing Indigenism: Canadian Unity and the International Movement of Indigenous Peoples

Abstract: It is rare that circumstances in world history are favorable to the creation of a new kind of global political entity. Nationalism and the nation-state were novelties in the nineteenth century, as E. J. Hobsbawm (1990) convincingly demonstrates, but their connection with modernity was concealed by nationalist identifications with natural ties, permanent homelands, archaic cultures, and timeless bonds of common history. A similar global movement, which I refer to here as "indigenism," has gained momentum over the last few decades largely out of the notice of observers, pundits, and theorists of international events. This movement, it is true, is smaller in scale, more fragile, less turbulent than the nationalist upheavals of the past two centuries, but it nevertheless has the potential to influence the way states manage their affairs, and even to reconfigure the usual alignments of nationalism and state sovereignty. The use of the term 'indigenous'1 in reference to original inhabitants of a givI would like to thank Robert Epstein, David Maybury-Lewis and Jon Bankson for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. The Grand Council of the Crees provided invaluable logistical support, above all in getting me through the doors of the Palais des Nations for Working Group meetings in the summer and fall of 1996, and in making available its archive at the embassy in Ottawa. The staff at doCip and the League of Nations archive in Geneva brought some very compelling material to my attention, and Ted Moses and Robert Epstein were often able to expand on issues not covered fully by the written record. The Pimicikamak Cree Nation of Cross Lake, Manitoba gave me a firsthand comparative perspective during the later stages of revision that has subtly influenced my thinking on the main issues. I In the legal literature the term "indigenous" has developed as "an accident of history" (Barsh, cited in Muntarbhorn), while in the anthropological literature (for example Maybury-Lewis 1997:7-11) similar problems of social and historical diversity are gathered within an ill-defined category. The most commonly recognized features of indigenous peoples are: descent from original inhabitants of a region prior to the arrival of settlers who have since become the dominant population; maintenance of cultural differences, distinct from a dominant population; and political marginality resulting in poverty, limited access to services, and absence of protections against unwanted "development." These features can be found in Cobo's (1986) provisional definition: