scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Topic

Sovereignty

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


Papers
More filters
Book
04 Jun 2001
TL;DR: In this paper, Patricia Ingham argues that late medieval English Arthurian romance has broad cultural ambitions, offering a fantasy of insular union as an "imagined community" of British sovereignty.
Abstract: During and after the Hundred Years War, English rulers struggled with a host of dynastic difficulties, including problems of royal succession, volatile relations with their French cousins, and the consolidation of their colonial ambitions toward the areas of Wales and Scotland. Patricia Ingham brings these precarious historical positions to bear on readings of Arthurian literature in Sovereign Fantasies, a provocative work deeply engaged with postcolonial and gender theory. Ingham argues that late medieval English Arthurian romance has broad cultural ambitions, offering a fantasy of insular union as an "imagined community" of British sovereignty. The Arthurian legends offer a means to explore England's historical indebtedness to and intimacies with Celtic culture, allowing nobles to repudiate their dynastic ties to France and claim themselves heirs to an insular heritage. Yet these traditions also provided a means to critique English conquest, elaborating the problems of centralized sovereignty and the suffering produced by chivalric culture. Texts such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, and Caxton's edition of Malory's Morte Darthur provide what she terms a "sovereign fantasy" for Britain. That is, Arthurian romance offers a cultural means to explore broad political contestations over British identity and heritage while also detailing the poignant complications and losses that belonging to such a community poses to particular regions and subjects. These contestations and complications emerge in exactly those aspects of the tales usually read as fantasy-for example, in the narratives of Arthur's losses, in the prophecies of his return, and in tales that dwell on death, exotic strangeness, uncanny magic, gender, and sexuality. Ingham's study suggests the nuances of the insular identity that is emphasized in this body of literature. Sovereign Fantasies shows the significance, rather than the irrelevance, of medieval dynastic motifs to projects of national unification, arguing that medieval studies can contribute to our understanding of national formations in part by marking the losses produced by union.

72 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors identify and critically assess three particular modes of regional governance in current Africa with regard to how they are related and by whom, for whom, and for what purpose they are erected.
Abstract: _ _ The profound implications of globalization, regionalization, and the restructuring of the nation-state have made it necessary to transcend the conventional obsession with national government and recognize the emergence of new and revised authority and gover nance structures, both "above" and "below" the level of national gov ernment. The political and institutional landscape is in transformation. In response, I suggest in this article that there is a need to think in terms of more complex, multilevel modes of governance, in which the state is reorganized and assumes different functions and where nonstate actors also contribute. The study transcends the limitations in the debate on governance by (1) bringing in the regional dimension in contrast to the current empha sis on either "global governance" or "good governance" at the national level; and (2) considering informal and private aspects of governance as opposed to the excessive focus on formal and public modes of gover nance. The purpose of this article is therefore to identify and critically assess three particular modes of regional governance in current Africa with regard to how they are related and by whom, for whom, and for what purpose they are erected. Critical international political economy (IPE) provides a useful ana lytical perspective for this endeavor, because it transcends state-centric ontology and rationalist epistemology and is concerned with structural and social change; historical power structures, emphasizing contradic tions in them; and change and transformation expressed in normative terms.1 That is, the critical perspective seeks to unmask the injustices and power relations built into the prevailing order and thereby to contribute to the emancipation of the excluded. It does so by avoiding state-centrism and instead problematizing the "state-society complex." The critical perspective does not take states as givens, but neither does it wish them

72 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Ruth Iyob1
TL;DR: The authors examines the new norms in bilateral, regional and international relations that evolved in the wake of the emergence of the Eritrean state which had successfully challenged the hegemonic claims of both the imperial and Afro-Marxist Ethiopian state.
Abstract: This article examines the new norms in bilateral, regional and international relations that evolved in the wake of the emergence of the Eritrean state which had successfully challenged the hegemonic claims of both the imperial and Afro-Marxist Ethiopian state. The analysis proceeds from a retelling of the events in 1998 which precipitated the break between the Ethiopian and Eritrean partners of the old alliance against the Mengistu regime, then examines the structural anomalies in the alliance and their consequences. The evidence examined here suggests that two inter-related phenomena help to shed light on the structural, historical and philosophical underpinnings of the 1998–2000 Ethio–Eritrean conflict: (1) the asymmetry of vision between diasporic and hegemonic states, leading to a clash of interests; (2) the failure of both post-war regimes to formalise their ‘understandings’ into formal treaties based on international law.As the two countries pursued different systems of economic and political governance, the cluster of informal understandings unravelled amidst conflicting interpretations of issues relating to sovereignty: territorial jurisdiction and citizenship. What emerges is a picture – seen from below rather than from above – of the norms and rules that govern the conduct of interstate relations between Africa's most recent and oldest sovereign states.

72 citations

Book
04 Dec 2006
TL;DR: The authors defined the early-Stuart empire in America and mapped the English empire in North America using letters patent and the acquest of dominion to defend sovereignty and possession in the New World.
Abstract: Introduction 1. Sovereignty, empire, and law in a New World context 2. Defining the Elizabethan empire in America 3. Letters patent and the acquest of dominion 4. Defending sovereignty and possession in the New World 5. Mapping the English empire in North America 6. Negotiating the early-Stuart empire in America Bibliography Index.

72 citations

01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that democracy and liberalism share the same fundamental normative premise, namely the principle of individual sovereignty, that they complement each other in their respective principal foci, namely citizen sovereignty and private autonomy, but that frictions between the two ideals have arisen at the level of their institutional implementation.
Abstract: The growth of the democratic welfare state has been accompanied by significant restrictions on individual liberty, raising doubts about the sustainability of the ideals of liberalism in democratic polities. The principal claim of this paper is that, adequately understood, liberalism and democracy represent complementary ideals. The argument in support of this claim is based on a distinction between three levels at which liberalism and democracy can be compared, namely the level of their "institutional embodiment," the level of their principal focus, and the level of their underlying normative premise. It is argued that democracy and liberalism share the same fundamental normative premise, namely the principle of individual sovereignty, that they complement each other in their respective principal foci, namely citizen sovereignty and private autonomy, but that frictions between the two ideals have arisen at the level of their institutional implementation. It is conjectured that the threat that the democratic welfare state has posed to the ideals of liberalism must be attributed to particular institutional realizations of the ideal of democracy, not to the ideal itself. It is discussed what kinds of reforms in political institutions are needed in order for liberalism and democracy to be in harmony, not only at the level of their normative premises but also at the level of their institutional implementation.

72 citations


Network Information
Related Topics (5)
Politics
263.7K papers, 5.3M citations
91% related
Democracy
108.6K papers, 2.3M citations
90% related
Globalization
81.8K papers, 1.7M citations
87% related
Human rights
98.9K papers, 1.1M citations
86% related
Ideology
54.2K papers, 1.1M citations
83% related
Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20241
20231,775
20223,691
2021802
20201,086
20191,042