Sovereignty

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

Reaching Out and Incorporating Chinese Overseas: The Trans-territorial Scope of the PRC by the End of the 20th Century

Abstract: Examining the policies of the PRC towards Chinese overseas, this paper argues that since the 1990s China has been actively extending its territorial reach to encompass Chinese living outside the sovereignty of the Chinese state. Gradual changes in conceptions and methods to establish allegiances and attract increased financial investments and remittances have re-configured the Chinese state's relationships to Chinese living overseas. By analysing official documents, and through interviews with officials in Fujian (1998–2000), the author identifies two major political shifts in conceptualization. The first appeared in the late 1970s when Chinese citizens living mainly in South-East Asia were again recognized as an important source of revenue to China. A decade later, new policies were introduced appealing to ethnic Chinese and “new migrants” who had left China after 1978. It is discussed how this political adjustment fundamentally transformed the approach towards the Chinese overseas from passive anticipation of being able to gain resources to active state liaison with ethnic Chinese by calling upon their cultural and national loyalties to China.

The organic crisis of the British state:putting Brexit in its place

Abstract: The Brexit vote was a singular event that is one symptom of a continuing organic crisis of the British state and society and a stimulus for further struggles over the future of the United Kingdom and its place in Europe and the wider world. This crisis previously enabled the rise of Thatcherism as a neoliberal and neoconservative project (with New Labour as its left wing) with an authoritarian populist appeal and authoritarian statist tendencies that persisted under the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition (2010–2015). The 2015 election of a Conservative Government, which aimed to revive the Thatcherite project and entrench austerity, was the immediate context for the tragi-comedy of errors played out in the referendum. The ensuing politics and policy issues could promote the disintegration of the UK and, perhaps, the EU without delivering greater political sovereignty or a more secure and non-balkanized place for British economic space in the world market.

Sovereignty: Outline of a Conceptual History

Abstract: Until recently scholars treated the concept of sovereignty with indifference, their eyes glazing at the very mention of it. At least this was so for scholars from the United States, as Steven Krasner, himself a prominent US scholar, has noted, no doubt autobiographically.’ Times change: the concept of sovereignty has experienced a burst of attention in the field of international relations: Why a concept so common and yet so little cultivated, to use Leibniz’s words, should suddenly receive such attention, much of it from scholars in the United States, is itself a question worthy of attention. Any answer, I want to argue, must address the condition of modernity, for it is modernity’s career to which the concept of sovereignty has been ineluctably tied. With modernity taken for granted, the conceptual intelligibility and normative implications of sovereignty went largely unchallenged. With the dramatic appearance in the last few years of serious scholarly debates about modernity’s accomplishments and prospects, the concept of sovereignty has come under unaccustomed scrutiny. Modernity confronts a different sensibility, and perhaps a new world in the making-a world in which sovereignty must figure differently, if at all. What do I mean by “modernity”? Between 1600 and 1800, or thereabouts, the main features of modernity became clear. First and most

Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The figure of Cicero 2. A classical landscape 3. State and empire 4. The limits of sovereignty and obligation 5. The common good, toleration and freedom of thought 6. 'Alternatives' to the common good 1774-1776 Conclusion Bibliography Index.