Sovereignty

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

The State of Globalization Legal Plurality, Overlapping Sovereignties and Ambiguous Alliances between Civil Society and the Cunning State in India

Abstract: The successful global diffusion of formal democracy has gone hand in hand with the hollowing out of its substance. Ever more realms of domestic public policy are removed from the purview of national legislative deliberation and insulated from popular scrutiny. Rhetoric of accountability has accompanied the increasing unaccountability of international financial and trade organizations, transnational corporations as well as of states and NGOs. The new architecture of global governance characterized by legal plurality and overlapping sovereignties has facilitated a game of ‘passing the blame’ among these four actors. There is a curious ambivalence in current debates on globalization about the role of the state, which is conceived of as both central and marginal. Globalization is seen to be marked by the decline of both the external and the internal sovereignty of the state. Contrary to such a view, it will be argued here that the state is both an agent and an object of globalization. Although inadequate, the state remains indispensable as its laws and policies play a key role in transposing neo-liberal agendas to the national and local levels. If in the age of globalization and of economic Empire, political violence has been replaced by legal violence, resistance to it is also articulated in the language of law. This paper focuses on the dynamic of legal politics against impoverishment and dispossession caused by the new global designs of intellectual property protection, biodiversity conservation and privatization of the commons in India. The case studies in this paper point to the emergence of intertwined structures of rule, overlapping sovereignties and complex processes of legal transnationalization that have reconfigured the relations between law, state, and territoriality. If welfare states were concerned with the redistribution of risk and resources, cunning states seek to redistribute responsibility. Sensitivity to the history of colonialism would be an important corrective to the presentism and Westerncentrism of analyses of (legal) globalization.

The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns

Abstract: With the unrelenting unrest in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the Sudan, the plight of refugees has become an increasingly discussed topic in international relations. Why do we have refugees? When did the refugee 'problem' emerge? How can the refugee ever be reconciled with an international system that rests on sovereignty? Looking at three key periods - the inter-war period, the Cold War and the present day - Emma Haddad demonstrates how a specific image has defined the refugee since the international states system arose in its modern form and that refugees have thus been qualitatively the same over the course of history. This historical and normative approach suggests new ways to understand refugees and to formulate responses to them. By examining the issue from an international society perspective, this book highlights how refugees are an inevitable, if unanticipated, result of erecting political borders.

The state, war, and the state of war: The strength of states

Abstract: In the conventional international relations literature, states are primarily characterized in terms of power, that is, in their capacity to achieve and defend their purposes either through persuasion or coercion and, if necessary, to defeat their adversaries in war. Histories of international politics as well as their theoretical renderings in neorealism thus concentrate on the activities of the “powers” which are usually defined as the great powers of a particular era. There is a strong correlation between the status of a great power and its immediately available military resources. The concept of a “power” thus traditionally has been linked closely to the phenomenon of war. But war in the second half of the twentieth century has not been predominantly a great power activity. As the tables in chapter 2 demonstrate, most war since 1945 has occurred in the Middle East, Africa, Central America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, and more recently in the Balkans and the Central Asian former Soviet republics. If war is the topic of contemporary analysis, then academic analysts' long love affair with the great powers will have to change. Since 1945, the great powers have primarily responded to the problem of war in and between weak states. They have not themselves been the sources of war, as they had been between the seventeenth century and 1945. To study war, then, the new focus will have to be on states other than the “powers.” Theories of international relations will have to veer away from Rousseau's insights and recognize that anarchy within states rather than between states is the fundamental condition that explains the prevalence of war since 1945.

Governing the Global Polity: Practice, Mentality, Rationality

Abstract: A key debate within International Relations (IR) centers on the character of globalization and what globalization means for the principle of state sovereignty and for the power and functioning of states. Among theorists, realists who argue in favour of the continued importance of states confront constructivists who contend that a number of political entities challenge states while the logic of globalization itself undermines their sovereignty. Drawing on the literatures on state formation and social theory, particularly the works of Weber and Foucault, Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending question the terms of the realist-constructivist debate. Through a series of detailed case studies, they demonstrate that the growing importance of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations (IOs) tends to increase the power of states, because states are able to draw on them indirectly in the effort to uphold social order. Neumann and Sending conclude that the power of states not only depends on the predominance of the states-based system in global politics, but ultimately rests on the individual states' social power. Furthermore, the key to globalization is the neo-liberal rationality of government--a rationality that is creating a global polity where new hierarchies among states as well as between states and other actors have emerged.