Sovereignty

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

'Political Conditionality' and Democratisation

Abstract: The use of aid to impose political conditions on recipient countries, to further democratic and government reforms or to punish non‐compliance with earlier demands, is a relatively new feature of the international aid regime. This article evaluates the proliferating donor and academic literature emerging on the subject. At the heart of discussion of democracy/ governance policies are debates about transformation of the state, its relationship to economic development and the decreasing extent to which considerations of sovereignty limit donor interventions. The author argues that, while political conditionalities may assist the development of democratic movements in Africa, there is an irony in that structural adjustment risks undermining the state reforms seen to be essential to them while, equally, democratisation may challenge the processes of economic restructuring being imposed.

Modern law as a secularized and global model : Implications for the sociology of law

Abstract: Law and legal forms now flow very rapidly around world society. This is difficult to understand if we take only a realist and bottom-up view of the law: local processes would engender internationalization only out of rather slowly evolving interaction and interdependence. But it is easy to understand if we add a more institutionalist view of the law - and the sovereignty of the modern State, with which it is now linked - as constructed out of a common and universalistic world cultural frame. In this paper, the authors develop such a view and show its implications. Modern legal systems, worldwide, rest on universalistic and rationalistic cultural assumptions about the natural and moral world outside of society. First, sovereignty is a peculiar claim: it is a claim to autonomous decision power, but under exogenous universal principles and addressed to an exogenous and often universal audience. Second, law, with remarkable uniformity, creates States which are defined by and constituted from legally-assumed societies. Emphasizing the dependence of the authority of modern law on universalistic cultural principles transcending specific societies can help explain distinctive features of modern legal systems: (1) the rapid worldwide diffusion of rather standardized legal principles and arrangements; (2) the ritualistic character of the enactment and implementation of modern law; and (3) the widespread and expansive legal assumption of an integrated and rationalized nature and cosmos. To highlight these implications, the authors contrast the law with organizational rule-making at the other end of the spectrum: rule-making which is not very closely tied to universal principles tends to have a very different character.

Neo-liberal Governance in Canadian Women's Prisons

Abstract: This paper uses recent policy changes in Canadian women's imprisonment to examine the emergence of neo-liberal strategies of penal governing. The first section critically assesses the claim that new strategies of crime control involve a reconfiguration of the responsibilities of state and civil society. In the second section, the logic and interpretive politics of empowerment strategies are evaluated. An emphasis is placed on how 'empowerment', a term previously associated with radical activists and social movements, is now as easily used by the Correctional Service of Canada to legitimate and justify the construction of a regime at five new regional prisons for women. This article refiexively examines the feminist and Aboriginal knowledges that contributed to the construction of empowerment as a legitimate and viable penal reform strategy; and it shows how feminist and Aboriginal reformers' notions of empowerment can be aligned with very different political rationalities and used as a strategy of responsibilization by policy makers and correctional officials. In particular, it shows how these knowledges get linked to penal power and used to create a new regime of governing and reinforce pre-existing relations of power. Finally, a discussion of the reassertion of sovereign and disciplinary power, when it comes to governing those who fail to take responsibility for their own empowerment is provided to show how neo-liberal strategies of government develop alongside, and operate in conjunction with, other forms of power. The recent governmentality literature allows for a more complex analysis of the relations between state power and other modalities of governance, and of how power is exercised over individuals (Hudson 1998: 585). It gives those interested in the sociology of punish ment an opportunity to re-examine the dynamics of penality. Drawing on Foucault's (1991: 102) claim that 'we cannot see things in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a society by government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government', O'Malley

State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples

Abstract: Why are forced displacement, ethnic cleansing and genocide an enduring feature of state systems? In this book, Heather Rae locates these practices of 'pathological homogenisation' in the processes of state building Political elites have repeatedly used cultural resources to redefine bounded political communities as exclusive moral communities, from which outsiders must be expelled Showing that these practices predate the age of nationalism, Rae examines cases from both pre-nationalist and nationalist eras: the expulsion of the Jews from fifteenth century Spain, the persecution of the Huguenots under Louis XIV, and in the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide, and ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia She argues that those atrocities prompted the development of international norms of legitimate state behaviour that increasingly define sovereignty as conditional Rae concludes by examining two 'threshold' cases - the Czech Republic and Macedonia - to identify the factors that may inhibit pathological homogenization as a method of state-building

Realizing the Responsibility to Protect

Abstract: Written prior to the release of the UN Secretary-General's report on implementing the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), this article examines the effort to translate the principle from words into deeds It begins by noting a post-2005 “revolt” against the principle in which a number of states expressed skepticism about the principle and its use in different settings This revolt, the article contends, was largely a product of the continuing association between R2P and humanitarian intervention This association was, in turn, caused by a combination of misplaced commentary and the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty's focus on the intervention question This article maintains that building consensus on the R2P requires a shift in emphasis and proposes three avenues: clarifying the nature of prevention, developing practical measures, and proposing modest proposals for institutional reform