Sovereignty

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

Becoming Abject: Rape as a Weapon of War:

Abstract: Organized rape has been an integral aspect of warfare for a long time even though classics on warfare have predominantly focused on theorizing ‘regular’ warfare, that is, the situations in which one army encounters another in a battle to conquer or defend a territory. Recently, however, much attention has been paid to asymmetric warfare and, accordingly, to phenomena such as guerrilla tactics, terrorism, hostage taking and a range of identity-related aspects of war such as religious fundamentalism, holy war, ethnic cleansing and war rape. In fact, war rape can be taken as a perfect example of an asymmetric strategy. In war rape the soldier attacks a civilian (not a fellow combatant) and a woman (not another male soldier), and does this only indirectly with the aim of holding or taking a territory. The primary target here is to inflict trauma and through this to destroy family ties and group solidarity within the enemy camp. This article understands war rape as a fundamental way of abandoning subjects: rape is the mark of sovereignty stamped directly on the body, that is, it is essentially a bio-political strategy using (or better, abusing) the distinction between the self and the body. Through an analysis of the way rape was carried out by the predominantly paramilitary Serbian forces on Bosnian soil, this article theorizes a two-fold practice of abjection: through war rape an abject is introduced within the woman’s body (sperm or forced pregnancy), transforming her into an abject-self rejected by the family, excluded by the community and quite often also the object of a self-hate, sometimes to the point of suicide. This understanding of war rape is developed in the article through a synthesis of the literature on abandonment (Agamben, Schmitt) and abjection (Bataille, Douglas, Kristeva) and concomitantly it is argued that the penetration of the woman’s body works as a metaphor for the penetration of enemy lines. In addition it is argued that this bio-political strategy, like other forms of sovereignty, operates through the creation of an ‘inclusive exclusion’. The woman and the community in question are inscribed within the enemy realm of power as those excluded.

European Integration and the Nationalities Question

Abstract: 1. Introduction: European Integration and the Nationalities Question Section A. Theoretical and Comparative Approaches 2. Europe, the State and the Nation 3. The Evolving Basis of European Norms of Minority Rights: Rights to Culture, Participation and Autonomy 4. National Minorities and EU Enlargement: External or Domestic Incentives for Accommodation? 5. Autonomy, Power-Sharing and Common Citizenship -- Principles for Accommodating National Minorities in Europe 6. Kin-States Protecting National Minorities: Positive Trend or Dangerous Precedent? 7. Minorities, Violence, and Statehood on the European Periphery 8. The Impact of Post-Communist Regime Change and European Integration on Ethnic Minorities: The 'Special' Case of Ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe 9. Cross-border Minorities and European Integration in Southeast Europe: The Hungarians and Serbs Compared Section B. Case-Studies 10. From 'Full National Status' to 'Independence' in Europe -- The Case of Plaid Cymru - The Party of Wales 11. Nations Without States in the EU: the Catalan Case 12. Scottish Autonomy and European Integration: The Response of Scotland's Political Parties 13. Basque Nationalism: Sovereignty, Independence and European Integration 14. Liberalising Estonia's Citizenship Policy: The Role of the European Union, OSCE and Council of Europe 15. Europe's Limits: European Integration and Conflict Management in Northern Ireland 16. Breton Identity Highlighted by European Integration 17. Baltic Identities and Interests in a European Setting: A Bottom-Up Perspective 18. EU Accession and Conflict Resolution in Theory and Practice: the Case of Cyprus

International Integration and Democracy: No Love at First Sight

Abstract: With an eye on the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), NAFTA and the European Union (EU), I propose to show the intuitively predictable correlation between, on one hand, the level of integration of each and, on the other hand, the nature and intensity of the discourse about the democracy-legitimacy deficit surrounding them. I offer a grid of the normative-institutional as well as social-empirical factors that may help to estimate the respective levels of integration, and I suggest operative definitions of the principal concepts employed. A tension prevails between the currently expanding acceptance of the idea of democracy and the growth of diverse international organizations and regimes. These institutions are seen as unsupervised by national parliaments and undemocratic in their structure and functioning. Having noted briefly the essential characteristics of the four organizations which relate to the discourse, I ask whether?if indeed there is "a democratic deficit"?the modern representative democracy could serve as a model for amelioration? Is a "participatory," civic republican version an option? Or are idiosyncratic solutions called for, tailored to the level of integration and specific goals of the particular institutions? In this context, I take note not only of the evolution and many variants of the state-based practice of democracy and constitutionalism, but also of the changing face of state "sovereignty" and of the international system, all three in the process of interaction with each other. I explore ideas for the reduction of the democracy-legitimacy deficit by measures to be taken both in the national legal orders and at the level of the four institutions. In the case of WTO and EU, these suggestions have become linked to proposals for more or less radical structural reforms, which broaden significantly the scope and tenor of the discourse. I end with some generalizations about both possible "palliative" measures and "grand and desperate cures" for international institutions at large.

Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations:

Abstract: Sankaran Krishna (*) Aren't all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves they want to preserve? Richard Wright This article argues that the discipline of international relations was and is predicated on a systematic politics of forgetting, a willful amnesia, on the question of race. Historically, the emergence of a modern, territorially sovereign state system in Europe was coterminous with, and indissociable from, the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the "new" world, the enslavement of the natives of the African continent, and the colonization of the societies of Asia. Specifically, I will argue that the discipline of international relations maintains its ideological coherence via two crucial strategies of containment that normalize the coeval emergence of modern sovereignty and dispossession on a global scale: these strategies are "abstraction" and "redemption." In this article, I flesh out the argument vis-a-vis "abstraction"; for, reasons of space, however, I can have no more than an adumbrated discussion of "redemption." First, IR discourse's valorization, indeed fetishization, of abstraction is premised on a desire to escape history, to efface the violence, genocide, and theft that marked the encounter between the rest and the West in the post-Columbian era. Abstraction, usually presented as the desire of the discipline to engage in theory-building rather than in descriptive or historical analysis, is a screen that simultaneously rationalizes and elides the details of these encounters. By encouraging students to display their virtuosity in abstraction, the discipline brackets questions of theft of land, violence, and slavery--the three processes that have historically underlain the unequal global order we now find ourselves in. Overattention to these details is disciplined by professional practices that work as taboo: such-and-such an approach is deemed too historical or descriptive; that student is not adequately theoretical and consequently is lacking in intellectual rigor; so-and-so might be better off specializing in com parative politics or history or anthropology; such-and-such a question does not have any direct policy relevance; and so on. A second strategy of containment in IR discourse is the idea of deferred redemption. This operates by an eternal deferment of the possibility of overcoming the alienation of international society that commenced in 1492. While "realistically" such overcoming is regarded as well-nigh impossible, its promise serves as the principle by which contemporary and historical violence and inequality can be justified and lived with. Redemptive strategies of containment are reflected in a wide variety of IR discourses: Kant's idea of perpetual peace as consequent upon international war and dispersion; the possibility of an international community epitomized in organizations such as the United Nations; the promise of international socialism; the discourse of capitalist modernization on the Rostowian model; and more recently, the "end of history" under the regime of globalization. All these strategies hinge on the prospect of deferred redemption: the present is inscribed as a transitional phase whose violent and unequal cha racter is expiated on the altar of that which is to come. In the first section of my article, I illustrate an exemplary act of abstraction that is central to the self-construction of the discipline of international relations--the depiction of nineteenth-century Europe as a pacific zone (the Hundred Years' Peace) orchestrated by diplomatic virtuosity. I offer a brief reading of this same century from the vantage of outside the imperium to illustrate the possibilities of contrapuntal readings of international-relations discourse. In this section, I further elaborate what I mean by "strategies of containment" and how they have worked to constitute IR discourse as a "political unconscious. …

Complex sovereignty : reconstituting political authority in the twenty-first century

Abstract: 1 Reconstituting Political Authority: Sovereignty, Effectiveness, and Legitimacy in a Transnational Order Louis W. Pauly and Edgar Grande 2 World Risk Society and the Changing Foundations of Transnational Politics Ulrich Beck 3 Restructuring World Society: The Contribution of Modern Systems Theory Mathias Albert 4 Governance: A Garbage Can Perspective B. Guy Peters 5 Globality and Transnational Policymaking in Agriculture: Complexity, Contradiction, and Conflict William D. Coleman 6 Financial Crises, the United Nations, and Transnational Authority Louis W. Pauly 7 Reconstituting Political Authority in Europe: Transnational Regulatory Networks and the Informalization of Governance in the European Union Burkard Eberlein and Edgar Grande 8 The Primitive Realities of North America's Transnational Governance Stephen Clarkson with Sarah Davidson Ladly, Megan Merwart, and Carlton Thorne 9 Public-Private Partnerships: Effective and Legitimate Tools of Transnational Governance? Tanja A. Borzel and Thomas Risse 10 The Private Production of Public Goods: Private and Public Norms in Global Governance Tony Porter 11 Contested Political Authority, Risk Society, and the Transatlantic Divide in the Regulation of Genetic Engineering Grace Skogstad 12 The Informalization of Transnational Governance: A Threat to Democratic Government Michael Th. Greven 13 Complex Sovereignty and the Emergence of Transnational Authority Edgar Grande and Louis W. Pauly References Contributors Index