Critique Of Sovereignty Research Articles

Social Media, Politics, and Law: The Role of Data in the Brazilian Constitutional Democracy

ABSTRACT Contemporary manifestations of power that exceed the traditional nation-state paradigm undermine Western constitutional democracies’ foundational principles. The Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrates how non-state actors can exercise control and bypass individual political autonomy by exploring personal data and through manipulative practices. In Brazil, similar electoral practices occurred during the 2018 election period, in which political propaganda transcended traditional media outlets through social media platforms, such as WhatsApp and Facebook. This arose as one of the consequences of the political reform established in through Legislative Act no. 13.488/2017. This article proposes an investigation into the intersection between knowledge and power in the mechanism of manipulation of political subjects, considering Michel Foucault’s critique of sovereignty, and conflating this under-standing with Bernard Harcourt’s consideration of “digital power.” The aim is to evaluate the intricacies between digital media, politics, and law, addressing the complexity of power structures in the material and cybernetic space.

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia

Recognition, multiplicity and the elusive international

This article argues that the normative promise of recognition theory in International Relations has become increasingly inadequate to the cross-cutting and intersecting issues characteristic of a globalised and fragmented world. Engaging in critical readings of cosmopolitan forms of recognition theory, the critique of sovereignty and Markell’s influential critique of recognition theory, I suggest that the increasing ontological specificity of recognition theory in IR has come at the expense of its ability to develop links between different areas of international politics. The result is a failure to deal with recognition’s simultaneity, or the co-existence of analytically distinct and internally coherent recognition orders that is characteristic of the international. Building on this insight, I argue that a more historically-sensitive and materialist approach to recognition can be grounded in the concept of multiplicity. By opening recognition up to processes of interaction, and not merely reproduction, multiplicity frames the international more clearly as a historical presupposition, rather than a limit, of recognition. Furthermore, placing recognition struggles within the state, international institutions or transnational movements in relation to each other ensures that IR can contribute to the further development of recognition theory by situating recognition struggles at the intersection of different moral geographies.

The Force of Symbolic Power

Abstract Most contemporary theorization and critique of sovereignty begins from the assumption of effective violence as the hard kernel of modern sovereignty. In this afterword, Hansen reflects on how the histories of provisional, overlapping, and divisible sovereignty in South Asia and elsewhere described in the special section “Rethinking Sovereignty” afford us a more differentiated view of the symbolic force of sovereignty—as a promise and a claim to inalienable property.

Whatever: Giorgio Agamben’s gender trouble

ABSTRACT Feminist scholars interested in the political ideas of Giorgio Agamben have had to negotiate the 'gender-blindness’ of his writing and the absence from his theory of women’s bodies. They are nevertheless sometimes prepared to appropriate the concept of 'bare life’ as if it were in itself relatively unaffected by its original frame, and easily extricated from it. On the contrary, I argue that gender difference poses fundamental problems for the schema of 'bare life’. Female bodies are not simply missing from Homo Sacer, but included as an absence in the universalising 'man’ that is the protagonist of Agamben’s discourse. As such they play an occluded role in founding Agamben’s authority. I explore the implications of this further in more recent works where the female body does play an explicit role, in the form of the 'nymph’. Here I show that this insistently feminine figure, whose political implications have not often been considered, acts as a specular supplement to an ostensibly universal, but implicitly masculine, 'man’. I conclude by exploring the drama of castration in Agamben’s work on art as a function of the mastery to which his writing aspires, and which sits uneasily with his critique of sovereignty.

How to think about cyber sovereignty: the case of China

The cybersphere constitutes a global disagreement space where the contested, ongoing ties that link states and the internet come into being. In this paper, a critique of sovereignty and political economy is offered to evaluate contemporary controversies concerning authority, independence, regulation, and access to communications as matters of relationality, materiality, and disagreement. We review China’s promotion of cyber sovereignty as a complicating episode that reflects the development stresses of the sphere. China wishes to establish guardrails for the practices of multipolar global digital capitalism; yet, it has ushered in a variety of internet-related global issues, including in security, privacy, material well-being, developmental justice, and planetary futures. These complex aims invite and expand the dialectical spaces animating the cybersphere.

How to Think about Cyber Sovereignty: The Case of China

The cybersphere constitutes a global disagreement space. There, the contested, ongoing ties that link states and the internet come into being. A critique of sovereignty and political economy is offered to evaluate contemporary controversies concerning authority, independence, regulation, and access to communications as matters of relationality, materiality, and disagreement. We review China’s promotion of cyber sovereignty as a complicating episode that expresses development stresses of the sphere. China wishes to establish guardrails for the practices of multipolar global digital capitalism; yet, it has ushered in an Internet keyed variety of global issues--security, privacy, material well-being, developmental justice, and planetary futures. These complex aims invite and expand the dialectical spaces animating the cybersphere.

Can Jewish Ethics Speak to Sovereignty?

Abstract Sovereignty remains one of the most contested political issues of our time. Prominent scholars on the American left have argued that Jewish ethics provides useful resources for the critique of sovereignty. Against these scholars, this article contends that the fixation upon Jewish values is liable to hinder the development of a forceful rejoinder to sovereignty's defenders. To temper the enthusiasm for ethics as a framework for arbitrating conflicts over sovereignty, this article revisits an internal Zionist debate surrounding the relationship between ethics and politics. Drawing on the work of Jakob Klatzkin (1882-1948), this article argues that critics of sovereignty should downplay ethics, focusing instead on cultivating the political imagination required to envision and defend non-sovereign regimes.

Harold Laski's International Functionalism: A Socialist Challenge to Federalism

ABSTRACTHarold Laski argued for international functionalism from his distinctive socialist perspective. He opposed the existing international system based on the principle of state sovereignty. He also criticised the international federalism proposed as an alternative to the existing system. Although Laski began to devise and present his functionalist case in the 1920s, the circumstances of the following decade led him to adopt and adapt some Marxist ideas and to place less emphasis on functionalism. During and after the Second World War he reconsidered the possibilities for international functional organisation. Although fragmented and undeveloped, his functionalist theory was innovative. By the end of the 1940s he had expressed it in a variety of publications as he reflected on the international conditions of that decade. Unlike what is probably the most well-known functionalist case of the early to mid-twentieth century – that of David Mitrany – Laski's argument bears affinities with the later neofunctionalist theorists. Laski's functionalism was underpinned by the critique of sovereignty which made his political philosophy distinctive. Reasons can be detected for the changes in his attitude to and emphasis on functionalism.

The Morrígan, the Land, and an Ecocritical Critique of Sovereignty and Warfare in Early Ireland

The Morrígan, the Land, and an Ecocritical Critique of Sovereignty and Warfare in Early Ireland

Hospitality and the Nation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

<p>In the summer of 1795, when Mary Wollstonecraft journeyed to Scandinavia, she was disillusioned with human society and the possibility of meaningful relation with others. She had recently been in Paris, where she had seen many of her moderate revolutionary friends executed under Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and by the time of her arrival in Scandinavia her unsatisfactory relationship with Gilbert Imlay was coming to an end. The book that resulted from this journey, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, is remarkable for its critique of sovereignty and the reification of difference inherent to the construction of national borders and the drives of commercial exchange. The article argues that Wollstonecraft insists upon openness to the people and cultures she encounters through configuring epistemology as a twin process of experiential contact and sceptical inquiry. This a process that remains inherently and necessarily ethical because it resists the structures of tyranny, domination, and control, which Wollstonecraft perceives to be afflicting late-eighteenth-century Europe, whilst simultaneously allowing for a re-conception of politics and justice according to the demands both of the present and the not-yet-formalised future.</p>

Exception and governmentality in the critique of sovereignty

This article investigates the relation between exception and governmentality in the critique of sovereignty. It argues that the problem of sovereignty is not only expressed between the accounts of sovereignty that exception and governmentality articulate, but also within each of those accounts. Taking Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt as the paradigmatic theorists of governmentality and exception, respectively, this article engages in close readings of the texts in which these concepts are most thoroughly elaborated: Security, Territory, Population and Political Theology. These readings demonstrate that the spatiotemporal expression of the problem of sovereignty within exception and governmentality renders these concepts indistinguishable from one another in terms of their relation to the boundaries of political order. Schmitt and Foucault’s accounts of sovereignty should thus not be read as opposites, but as expressions of the limits of modern political authority. Efforts to develop a critique of sovereignty through typologies of exception or governmentality are bound to reinstantiate the spatiotemporal limits expressed by the principle of state sovereignty.

Fra konstituerende magt til destituerende magt:

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s conception and critique of sovereignty has won him wide and well-deserved acclamation. In this article, however, it is argued that Agamben’s conception of sovereignty is somewhat misplaced, and, as a consequence, his positive political project of developing a ‘destituent power’ (as opposed to constituent power) is highly deficient in terms of construing a popular and viable political alternative. The critique of Agamben is developed through a close reading of Aristotle’s Politics and his notion of kurion. It is argued that Agamben’s flawed conception of sovereignty reemerges symptomatically in his extremely problematic reading of Aristotle’s Politics, and that a viable political alternative to both Agamben’s own project and the conception of politics that he criticizes can be developed through an alternative and closer reading of Aristotle.

State Personhood, Abjection and the United States’ HIV Travel Ban

This article understands the United States’ 23-year ban on travellers with HIV/AIDS through the lens of state personhood metaphors and the concept of abjection. Using insights from queer theory as a critique of sovereignty, it argues that the practices and discourses that brought about and sustained the ban, from 1987 until its lifting in 2010, relied upon implicit understandings of the state as a national body free from disease. Having shown the heuristic power of metaphors of the state as a body or person, the article goes on to argue that this identification of the American state as a homeostatic and healthy space facilitates the securitisation of mobility and public health and in turn the exclusion of people living with HIV (PLHIV). This rejection of PLHIV, sustained by conservative political discourse as much as by medical screening, nevertheless shows the impossibility of the state attaining its desired purity against HIV/AIDS and its associated sexual and racial imaginaries. The article concludes with an empirical overview of the context of the travel ban through to its lifting in 2010 and a discussion of the role of queer theory as a critique of state sovereignty.

Agamben, Postcoloniality, and Sovereignty in South Korea

AbstractThis paper examines modern Korean politics through the framework of Giorgio Agamben's theories of sovereign power, bare life, and the state of exception. Though his political analysis draws from the European history, we contend that the nature of his method attests to the possibility of analogical examples in non‐Western places. Thus, we argue that a postcolonial encounter with Agamben may enrich our understanding of sovereignty and political geography. In the Korean context, such an analysis needs to consider that sovereign power has been shaped by the itineraries of colonialism and empire. Korea's political space is deeply marked by the legacy of Japanese colonialism, the imperial interventions by the U.S., and the division of the peninsula. Thus, Korea offers a valuable lens through which to read Agamben's critique of sovereignty. Our paper offers such a reading to argue that a state of exception functions as the underlying nomos for postcolonial Korea.

Surrender: An Essay on the Theory of Sovereignty and Alternative Possibilities

Paul W. Kahn, in Sacred Violence, stresses that the popular sovereign of liberal democracy remains sovereign nonetheless, and so the demand for sacrifice maintains a powerful hold on the civic conscience. A distinction in Hobbes’s Leviathan between contract and covenant provides the basis for a critique of the so-called social contract tradition, including its liberal variants, which argues that it persists in the mistake of characterizing as voluntary that which is not, and thus continues to justify a collective fantasy of transcendental authority. If we accept Kahn’s defense of an indissoluble theoretical link between sovereign power and sacred violence in the modern political imaginary, then an effort to move away from this bloody paradigm requires us to conceptualize an alternative to sovereignty or to the violent experience of the sacred or, likely, both. In the effort to re-imagine politics as a realm of freedom and power in direct opposition to sovereignty and violence, I take for granted both Arendt’s understanding of power and her critique of sovereignty; Bakunin’s materialist theory of anarchism and the fertile metaphysical speculations of novelist Henry Miller then provide inspiration for a principle of surrender that may act as alternative experience of the sacred.

The Crossroads of Power: Michel Foucault and the US/Mexico Border Wall

This paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault in order to analyze the constellation of political strategies and power at the US/Mexico border wall. These strategies, however, are incredibly diverse and often directly antagonistic of one another. Thus, this paper argues that in order to make sense of the seemingly multiple and contradictory political strategies deployed in the operation of the US/Mexico border wall, we have to understand the coexistence and intertwinement of at least three distinct types of power at work there: the sovereign exclusion of illegal life, the disciplinary detention of surveilled life, and the biopolitical circulation of migratory life. By doing so this paper offers an original contribution to two major areas of study: in Foucault studies this paper expands the existing literature on Foucault by analyzing the crossroads of power particular to the US/Mexico border wall, which has not yet been done, and in border studies this Foucauldian approach offers a unique political analysis that goes beyond the critique of sovereignty and toward an analysis of coexisting strategies of power.

Sovereign Gratitude: Hegel on Religion and the Gift

AbstractIn this paper I argue that one of the most important impulses that structure Hegel’s account of religion is the need to show gratitude for the gift of creation. Beginning with the “Love” fragment and 1805-6 Realphilosophie, I first explore what it means to see God’s relationship to spirit as one of externalization or divestment (Entäusserung). Then, relying on the Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, I argue that Hegel takes Christianity to be the Consummate Religion because it not only offers its own divestment to match God’s, but actually takes itself to participate in God’s own divestment. This leads to a discussion of revealed religion in the Phenomenology, which, in contrast to simpler forms of religion such as the worship of luminous being (Lichtwesen), is able to conceive of a divine generativity in which spirit actively participates. I conclude by identifying two political implications of the centrality of divestment in Hegel’s account. First, it means that, since Hegel takes Christianity to be unique in its representation of divine divestment, he cannot be a simple pluralist on religious truth. Second, Hegel’s emphasis on divestment in his various accounts of religion helps set up his critique of sovereignty from the standpoint of philosophy or absolute knowing. While religion still clings to a vision of humanity as sovereign over nature, its origin in gratitude for creation proves to be incompatible with this vision.

Political Theology Without Sovereignty: Some 20th Century Examples (Voegelin, Maritain, Badiou)

Is political theology necessarily a discourse on sovereignty – as Schmitt argues? This paper questions such an assumption and presents three alternative conceptions of political theology which advance a critique of sovereignty and suggest the possibility of a “democratic” political theology. Voegelin, Maritain and Badiou – three very different thinkers – can be read as carrying out a critique of Schmitt’s conception of political theology in that they question the theory of representation that undergirds Schmitt’s account. For Voegelin, as for Schmitt, a people can only exist as a political actor if it is represented: but Voegelin argues that such “existential” representation is not the only form of representation that matters politically – to the contrary, he argues that the sovereign, “existential” representative needs to stand under the philosopher and the religious thinker as representatives, in the political sphere, of a more universalist idea of truth and salvation than the one made possible by political representation. Maritain, for his part, advances a theory of democracy for which the representatives of the people must not be sovereign, but instrumental to the achievement of a common good that is understood in terms of a charter of universal human rights. The bearer of such universal human rights is, in Maritain, a conception of human “nature” which is also evidently theological in nature. Lastly, Badiou’s reading of Paul’s political theology argues that radical democratic universalism can only take the form of a fidelity to an “impossible” event that comes to be “true” in the posterior building of a community of faith. The purpose of this paper is then three-fold: a) to show that a non-sovereign political theology is possible; b) to discuss the critiques by Voegelin, Maritain and Badiou to the early modern (Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau), sovereignty-centered conceptions of political representation; c) to show the ways in which an alternative discourse on political theology functions within a variety of universalist discourses on democracy.

Introduction: Feminist State Theory

his is an interesting historical moment to reflect on feminist state theory. Both the response to the global financial meltdown and the widely celebrated U.S. presidential election signal a faith in the role and promise of state- based politics. Yet it is also true that currents of recent scholarship in a variety of settings have decentered the state. Political theorists of violence, law, and biopolitics have expanded the concept of sovereignty to address distinctly non- state- based contexts, while transnational feminist studies of citizenship have critically dismantled the logic of state sovereignty. The field of development studies has elabo rated the need to broaden notions of security beyond military understandings to include the fulfillment of basic needs, and feminist analyses of violence against women have creatively recast our understanding of security. Feminist scholars have also scrutinized the internally contradictory and disciplinary apparatuses of welfare policies. Across various regions, feminists are contesting both the paring down of the state’s welfare responsibilities and the intensification of security functions in post- 9 /11 geopolitical alliances. When taken together, this historical conjuncture and these various critiques of sovereignty, security, and welfare call for more complex modes of engagement with states. Within feminist theory, states occupy a vexed space. Whereas states have often supported feminist goals, states are also the locus of many of the problems that occupy feminists, such as militarism, moral regulation, and the cheapening of women’s labor. This special section of the journal explores this central, and old, tension within feminist state theory, offering a perspective that foregrounds geographic location. This emphasis on location emerges from a philosophical suspicion of the universalizing gestures of state theory. Despite the feminist normative opposition to views from nowhere in particular that purport to be relevant everywhere, feminist state theory has staged its key debates with little specification of state contexts. Geographic coordinates and national histories remain largely undescribed in classics within the field of feminist state theory. 1 What do we mean when we speak of “the state,” and how does location inflect our understandings? The articles in this section presume that feminists in different locations vary in their relationship to states and that these differences potentially affect the orientation of their theoretical scholarship on the state.