Sovereignty

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

Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace

Abstract: Maps Introduction 1. Origins of the Conflict 2. The Kashmir-India Debacle 3. The War in Kashmir 4. Sovereignty in Dispute 5. Pathways to Peace Notes Glossary Acknowledgments Index

Regulating Globalization? The Reinvention of Politics

Abstract: This article explores the political implications of the growing enmeshment of human communities with each other over time and the way in which the fate of peoples is determined increasingly by complex social, economic and environmental processes that stretch across their borders. Examining the growing interconnections between states and societies, the article focuses on the transformations that are under way in the form and nature of political community. It does not argue that globalization has simply eroded the nature of sovereignty and autonomy. Rather, it seeks to show how there has been a reconfiguration of political power, which has created new forms of governance and politics - both within states and beyond their boundaries. The consequences of globalization for democracy and accountability are also examined. While the article shows that the idea of government or of the state can no longer be simply defended as an idea suitable to a particular, closed political community or nation-state, it sets for...

Biopolitical Beijing: Pleasure, Sovereignty, and Self-Cultivation in China's Capital

Abstract: In this article, life-cultivation arts (yangsheng) in Beijing are presented as a form of political practice. These technologies of the self include physical exercise, nutrition, and transforming one's attitudes and habits. Drawing on interviews and on popular health literature, these ethnographic findings suggest that China is no exception in the field of modern biopolitics, despite its indigenous political philosophies, its long history of imperial bureaucracy, and its more recent revolutionary history of Maoist socialism. Nonetheless, the particular convergence of power and life is deeply historical (i.e., nonmodern) in instructive ways. Local and historically inflected approaches to spirit, pleasure, and health define the political in relation to the achievement of the good life.

When production and consumption meet: cultural contradictions and the enchanting myth of customer sovereignty

Abstract: The central cultural contradiction of capitalism, argued Bell some 25 years ago, was the existence of rationalized, disciplined production alongside free and hedonistic consumption. This paper argues that this thesis, although overstated, has resonance within contemporary capitalism. The paper then considers the question of how this contradiction is managed when production and consumption meet directly within the service interaction. On the production-side rationalization is joined by customer-orientation, and on the consumption-side management promotes consumption of the enchanting myth of sovereignty. Here the customer is meant to experience a sense of being sovereign. At the same time the space is created for the customer to be, potentially, substantively directed and influenced to follow the requirements that flow from the rationalized elements of production. Key aspects of the service interaction, including the menu and its presentation, the display of empathy and aesthetic labour, and the use of naming within the service interaction, are analysed in terms of the promotion of the enchanting myth of sovereignty. Consumption, however, is a fragile process, and remains, to an important degree, ‘unmanageable’. The analysis, therefore, also examines how the promotion of the enchanting myth of sovereignty systematically creates the conditions for the myth's negation.