Sovereignty

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

The energy crises revealed by COVID: Intersections of Indigeneity, inequity, and health

Abstract: The global COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a justice crisis. It also brings to light multiple ongoing, underlying social crises. The COVID-19 crisis is actively revealing crises of energy sovereignty in at least four ways. First, there are many whose access to basic health services is compromised because of the lack of energy services necessary to provide these services. Second, some people are more vulnerable to COVID-19 because of exposure to environmental pollution associated with energy production. Third, energy services are vital to human wellbeing, yet access to energy services is largely organized as a consumer good. The loss of stable income precipitated by COVID-19 may therefore mean that many lose reliable access to essential energy services. Fourth, the COVID-19 crisis has created a window of opportunity for corporate interests to engage in aggressive pursuit of energy agendas that perpetuate carbon intensive and corporate controlled energy systems, which illuminates the ongoing procedural injustices of energy decision making. These four related crises demonstrate why energy sovereignty is essential for a just energy future. Energy sovereignty is defined as the right for communities, rather than corporate interests, to control access to and decision making regarding the sources, scales, and forms of ownership characterizing access to energy services. Energy sovereignty is a critical component in the design of a post-COVID-19 energy system that is capable of being resilient to future shocks without exacerbating injustices that are killing the most vulnerable among us.

Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s

Abstract: In the 1920s, revolution, war, and imperialist aggression brought chaos to China. Many of the dramatic events associated with this upheaval took place in or near China's cities. Bound together by rail, telegraph, and a shared urban mentality, cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing formed an arena in which the great issues of the day - the quest for social and civil peace, the defense of popular and national sovereignty, and the search for a distinctively modern Chinese society - were debated and fought over. People were drawn into this conflicts because they knew that the passage of armies, the marching of protesters, the pontificating of intellectual, and the opening and closing of factories could change their lives. David Strand offers a penetrating view of the old walled capital of Beijing during these years by examining how the residents coped with the changes wrought by itinerant soldiers and politicians and by the accelerating movement of ideas, capital, and technology. By looking at the political experiences of ordinary citizens, including rickshaw pullers, policemen, trade unionists, and Buddhist monks, Strand provides fascinating insights into how deeply these forces were felt. The resulting portrait of early twentieth-century Chinese urban society stresses the growing political sophistication of ordinary people educated by mass movements, group politics, and participation in a shared, urban culture that mixed opera and demonstrations, newspaper reading and teahouse socializing. Surprisingly, in the course of absorbing new ways of living, working, and doing politics, much of the old society was preserved - everything seemed to change and yet little of value was discarded. Through tumultuous times, Beijing rose from a base of local and popular politics to form a bridge linking a traditional world of guilds and gentry elites with the contemporary world of corporatism and cadres.

Understanding Third World Politics: Theories of Political Change and Development

Abstract: List of Tables and Figures - Introduction - PART 1: PRELIMINARIES - The Idea of a 'Third World' - Theories of Imperialism and Colonialism - PART 2: THEORIES OF POLITICAL CHANGE - Modernisation and Political Change - Development and Structural Differentiation - Neo-Colonialism and Sovereignty - Dependency, Peripherality and Development - PART 3: INSTITUTIONS - The State and Authoritarianism - Political Parties and Pluralist Politics - Bureaucracy and Political Power - Military Intervention in Politics - PART 4: CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO - Nationalism and Secession - Peasants, Workers and Revolution - Stability, Democracy and Development - Bibliography - Index

The world trade constitution

Abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that the World Trade Organization (WTO) necessarily poses a threat to sovereignty and representative government within its member nations. Professors McGinnis and Movsesian refute this view. They argue that the WTO can be understood as a constitutive structure that, by reducing the power of protectionist interest groups, can simultaneously promote international trade and domestic democracy. Indeed, in promoting both free trade and accountable government, the WTO reflects many of the insights that inform our own Madisonian Constitution. Professors McGinnis and Movsesian reject recent proposals to grant the WTO regulatory authority, endorsing instead the WTO's limited adjudicative power as the better means to resolve the difficult problem of covert protectionism. They develop a series of procedure-oriented tests that would permit WTO tribunals to invalidate covert protectionism without supplanting national judgments on labor, environmental, health, and safety policies. Finally, they demonstrate that the WTO's emerging approach to the problem of covert protectionism largely comports with the democracy-reinforcing jurisprudence they recommend, and they offer some suggestions for reforms that would help prevent the organization from going astray in the future.