Sovereignty

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

Selected Conceptual Issues in Border Studies

Abstract: The paper is based on first results of the EUBORDERSCAPES project supported by the 7th European Framework Programme and revisits a number of major themes and concepts that have been important for the development of border studies in recent years. It also investigates emerging research perspectives that appear to be important drivers of conceptual change from the perspective of human geography. The authors stress that the present state of debate indicate that contemporary border studies question the rationales behind everyday border-making by understanding borders as institutions, processes and symbols. A particular attention is paid to the process of reconfiguring state borders in terms of territorial control, security and sovereignty and to the nexus between everyday life-worlds, power relations and constructions of social borders.

The State is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty

Abstract: This article examines the relationship between settler colonialism and Indigenous women’s life and death. In it, I examine the incredulity and outrage that obtained to a hunger strike of (Chief) Theresa Spence and the murder of Loretta Saunders. Both affective modes were torn from the same book of exonerating culpability from a public that denied an historic and political relationship between Indigenous women’s death and settler governance. The paper argues that in spite of this denial, these deaths worked effectively to highlight the gendered, biopolitical life of settler sovereignty.

State sovereignty as social construct: Contested sovereignty: the social construction of colonial imperialism

Abstract: The constitutive interplay between state and sovereignty enters into fundamental debates on the nature of the international system. From a realist or liberal perspective, the state is an independent actor in exchange, competition, and conflict with other states. States emerge as organized powers that demand recognition and are constrained only by a web of voluntary compacts. From this perspective, a theoretical focus on sovereignty is misleading when it directs attention toward a derivative realm of understandings and interpretations, and away from the relations of power and interest that generate behavior. In institutional and poststructuralist accounts, by contrast, the state is seen as embedded within a larger cultural framework. Sovereignty is viewed here as a social status that enables states as participants within a community of mutual recognition. From this perspective, a focus on the state misleads when it treats political actors as natural or exogenous, while directing attention away from the larger community and culture that construct states with specific capacities and warrants. International legal theory parallels the opposition between realist and institutional accounts in debates over whether international recognition is declaratory or constitutive of statehood. A declaratory theory holds that states exist independent of recognition and that recognition signals that other states have become aware of a new state; a constitutive theory holds that states have no standing in the absence of recognition, which can be said to construct them as international persons.

Stateless in South Asia: The Making of the India-Bangladesh Enclaves

Abstract: “Only in the eyes of the law are we indians.” With these words Anu Chairman sketched the position of tens of thousands of people living beyond the reach of state and nation in dozens of enclaves in South Asia. Much of the recent wave of literature on the nation is concerned with critiquing an earlier generation of scholars who tended to assume a correspondence between nations and states. In the new literature, the connections among nation, state, territory, sovereignty, history, and identity are all problematized. Nations are seen as being socially constructed in many different ways. Thus, there are nations without states, new nations that are invented before our eyes while older ones disintegrate, and older diasporic nations that are being joined by a host of new transnational communities. Nations are now conceived as more fluid, malleable, and unpredictable than ever before.

Black Politics: Inside the Complexity of Aboriginal Political Culture

Abstract: Contents ..Forward by Patrick Dodson..Acknowledgments ..Interviewees ..Abbreviations and acronyms ..Introduction ..1 A history of policy failure ..2 Autonomy and dependency ..3 Sovereignty and citizenship ..4 Tradition and development ..5 Individualism and collectivism..6 Indigeneity and hybridity..7 Unity and regionalism ..8 Community and kin ..9 Elders and the next generation ..10 Men, women and customary law ..11 Mourning and reconciliation ..Epilogue: Looking to the future..Notes ..Bibliography ..Index