Definition Of Sovereignty Research Articles

The therapeutic decision as a reason of quarrel

The therapeutic decision usually is a regalia prerogative of the practitioner. However it seems to be contested. From three definition of sovereignty, given by classical author of political science and the observations of the current practices and needs (new attitude and need of the patients, changes in training’s methods, use of new numeric tools) is illustrated this phenomenon of the decisions making field’s degradation. Without a resistance to all current form of concurrence in the field of therapeutic decision, a transformation of the profession of practitioner in dento-maxill-ofacial orthopedics on a simple executive or animator of the care process in this field is expected. The practitioner awareness and a reenforcement of the training resources could limit the impact.

Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers

Reviewed by: Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers Evan C. Rothera Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s. Edited by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Pp. 228. Notes, index.) Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers have assembled a collection of essays that analyze North American state-making in the 1860s by employing a continental perspective "that seeks to look across and beyond the traditional nation-centered approach to this period" (1). As Towers helpfully explains, people typically associate sovereignty with government power and define it as "a right to decide and therefore to rule" (2). However, some scholars have cautioned against ascribing tidy definitions to the term. Moreover, many definitions of sovereignty have roots in the nineteenth century. Thus, this volume is as much about multifarious understandings of sovereignty as about how people contested and remade sovereignty and the relationships between nations and empires. Part I, "Making Nations," contains chapters by Steven Hahn, Andrew Smith, Pablo Mijongos y González, and Robert Bonner. Hahn analyzes the United States from the "inside out" and the "southside north" to illustrate "connections that have long been difficult to conceive" (32). Smith argues that ideas about racial and ethnic hierarchies played a critical role in the creation of the Canadian Confederation. Mexico and the United States experienced constitutional revolution, Mijongos y González observes, whereas Canada followed a path of constitutional gradualism, but despite the divergent paths, all three nations arrived at a similar endpoint. Bonner notes the importance of images to sovereignty and examines how mass-circulated images "distilled and shaped popular engagement with capital cities" (80). Part II, "Indigenous Polities," features chapters by Jane Dinwoodie, Ryan Hall, and Marcela Terrazas y Basante. Dinwoodie focuses on Eastern Cherokees and Bayou Lacombe Choctaws to reveal how Indigenous communities in the U.S. Southeast "fought to sustain a world of contested and [End Page 351] persistent sovereignties" (122). Hall analyzes treaty-making between the Blackfoot and U.S. and Canadian authorities. Blackfoot leaders attempted to make treaties that preserved their own sovereignty as they faced similar expansionist states on both sides of the border. Terrazas y Basante observes that Mexicans, U.S. settlers, and Indigenous people understood sovereignty, territory, and free transit in different ways and illustrates how Mexicans saw Indian raids as a threat to the nation's sovereignty. Part III, "The Complications of the Market," includes chapters by Christopher Clark, Benjamin H. Johnson, and Mary P. Ryan. Clark explores the relationship between ideas about the role of land and sovereignty and illustrates how farm populations shaped state power and market forces. Johnson focuses on Louis Riel and Juan Cortina to narrate national histories from border areas. Defeat in the Cortina War and the North-West Rebellion replaced "longstanding aspirations for autonomy and self-determination" among ethnic Mexicans and Métis with "violent incorporation into national communities" (215). Ryan concludes by analyzing San Francisco, California, to demonstrate how cities were key political players. Anyone interested in Texas and the Southwest will particularly enjoy Terrazas y Basante and Johnson's chapters. In many respects, Remaking North American Sovereignty is truly a transnational volume. The chapters began as conference papers at a conference held in Canada. The resulting volume features contributions by scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Mexico that focus on Mexico, the United States, and Canada. However, the definition of North America in this volume—encompassing the three aforementioned nations—is too narrow. Weaving the nations of the Caribbean and Central America into this volume would have allowed the contributors to say even more about sovereignty and nation-states. This point aside, the contributors illustrate the richness of their topics and provide models for other scholars interested in exploring sovereignty and nation-states in the nineteenth-century world. These lively essays will appeal to a general as much as a scholarly audience and many would make excellent additions to graduate seminars. Evan C. Rothera The University of Texas at Dallas Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Pooling, Gaining or Losing Sovereignty? Conflicting Definitions of Irish Sovereignty in the Political Discourse on European Integration

This article aims at using the multi-faceted dimensions of the concept of sovereignty as a theoretical framework to better understand the Irish political discourse on European integration and to clarify the changing positions of various actors on the issue, notably in relation to the 2008 financial crisis. First, the article reminds the reader of the various definitions of sovereignty and how the old Westphalian definition has been recently challenged by international law and international relations scholars who consider the impact of globalisation and interdependence on state relations and who therefore question the mere existence of absolute sovereignty in today’s world. In a second part, the study analyses and categorises the arguments used during the referendum campaigns between 1972 and the financial crisis, in order to show how the concept of sovereignty contributed to fostering both pro- and anti-EU treaty positions. The third part will address the consequences of the financial crisis on the positioning of political actors. The debate on Ireland’s sovereignty was reinvigorated by the developments relating to the country’s economic situation and the EU/IMF bail-out package which considerably limited the ability of the government to determine its own economic policies. We will show that the ‘loss of sovereignty’ arguments gained ground among the traditionally pro-integration parties and groups. It reassessed the role of the citizen in legitimizing the decision-making process.

What does the notion of “sovereignty” mean when referring to the digital?

This article analyzes how the notion of “sovereignty” has been and is still mobilized in the realm of the digital. This notion is increasingly used to describe various forms of independence, control, and autonomy over digital infrastructures, technologies, and data. Our analysis originates from our previous and current research with activist “tech collectives” where we observed a use of the notion to emphasize alternative technological practices in a way that significantly differs from a governmental policy perspective. In this article, we review several publications in order to show the difference, if not diverging ways in which the notion is being conceptualized, in particular by different groups. We show that while the notion is generally used to assert some form of collective control on digital content and/or infrastructures, the precise interpretations, subjects, meanings, and definitions of sovereignty can significantly differ.

Performing Inequality in Mediterranean Diplomacy

Early modern Mediterranean diplomacy was marked by multiple and contrasting claims to superiority which derived from competing normative orders. These practices are the focus of the first part of this paper, which shows how claims to superiority were performed in the practice of diplomacy and how stable and pacific relations could be maintained within a context of competing normative orders. Instead of privileging the religious divide between Islam and Christianity, the paper suggests that a better understanding of how multiple universalisms interacted with each other in practice may better explain the apparently paradoxical durability of pacific relations between Muslim and Christian rulers in the wider Mediterranean area of the early modern period. The second part reframes the transformations in Franco-Tunisian diplomatic practice from the late eighteenth century onward within the context of a global history of growing imbalances. The espousal of definitions of sovereignty derived from the European ius gentium to the exclusion of all others led to a redefinition of who had the rights and honors to engage in foreign relations. The early modern pluralism evolved into an increasingly unequal bipolarity, finally resulting in the economic, military and symbolic predominance of allegedly ‘civilized’ European powers over the ‘uncivilized’ rest.

La Constitución de Cádiz y la filipina de Malolos: Similaridades y diferencias

El principal objetivo de este trabajo es realizar un análisis comparativo de la Constitución de Cádiz de 1812 y la Constitución de Malolos de 1899. Comenzaremos exponiendo el contexto histórico-político en que cada una de ellas fue aprobada para posteriormente pasar a estudiar varios aspectos fundamentales: sus estructuras, su definición de la soberanía, la forma de gobierno que implantan, la separación de poderes y los derechos fundamentales reconocidos.Recibido: 12 abril 2018Aceptado: 25 junio 2018Publicación en línea: 03 agosto 2018

Unsettled Sovereignty and the Sea: Mobilities and More-Than-Territorial Configurations of State Power

How do mobilities associated with oceans and the resources inside of them shape the spatial and temporal dimensions of state sovereignty? As an entry point into this question, this article explores the fifty-year, multistate struggle over access to, and control over, highly migratory tuna stocks in the Pacific Ocean, focusing on the historical relationship among Pacific Island states, the United States, and the United States–flagged tuna fishing fleet. The analysis corroborates scholarship in resource geography and political geography that demonstrates that sovereignty is neither inherently territorial nor exclusively organized on a state-by-state basis, enhancing it to show that the lively nature of oceans and mobile global capital extracting resources from them create a wide range of political possibilities for state influence. The findings reveal that to gain control over, or access to, mobile ocean resources, states construct and express sovereignty in relation to each other and the interests of global capital. At times, multiple and conflicting legal institutions and definitions of sovereignty over the same set of resources can simultaneously be in play. The result is temporally and spatially dynamic sovereignty that is continuously negotiated among “foreign” and “national” interests forced together by fluid ocean materialities and the mobile nature of transnational fishing capital vying for extraction privileges. This analysis reveals mobilities as generative of more-than-territorial institutional innovations that continuously remake the spatial contours of state sovereignty over resources.

What Does the Concept of 'Sovereignty' Mean in Digital, Network and Technological Sovereignty?

In this paper, we are interested in the notion of sovereignty as it is applied to “the digital.” Indeed, the notion of “sovereignty” has increasingly been used in recent years to describe various forms of independence, control and autonomy over digital infrastructures, technologies and contents. Although the notion of “sovereignty” seems to gain significance in digital discourses and associated scholarly literature, our preliminary analysis shows that while this notion is generally used to assert some form of collective control of digital content and/or infrastructures, the interpretation, subject, means and definition of sovereignty can significantly differ. See here for the published version: Couture, S., & Toupin, S. (2019). What does the notion of “sovereignty” mean when referring to the digital? New Media & Society, 21(10), 2305‑2322. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819865984

Jean Bodin: dalla tolleranza alla libertà religiosa

SOMMARIO: 1. Premessa - 2. Dalla tolleranza alla possibilita di “riconoscere nel cuore un Dio incorporeo e altissimo” - 3. La liberta religiosa aconfessionale nella definizione della sovranita assoluta - 4. La potesta aconfessionale della sovranita statale e il separatismo - 5. Dalla ragion di Stato della “suprema potesta statale” alla liberta religiosa nell’esercizio della giurisdizione - 6. Conclusione. J ean Bodin from Tolerance to Religious Freedom ABSTRACT: Absolutism, in France, rises also in order to resolve conflicts, affirming the national community and the interests of the State. This is an evaluation that leads to thinking, above all, about J. Bodin and Les le livres de la Republique and to “read” the relationship between and religious liberty. Bodin indicates the limits of tolerance - that is based on the dogma of the exclusive confessional salvation - that reveals to freedom in the theorization of the absolute State. The freedom to manifest own conviction does not undergo to any presumption of exclusive salvation because it intends to proclaim publicly, but also privately, what the individual perceives in consciousness. A dimension of secularism really particular, that reveals the difficult political condition of the wars of religion. The coexistence of the only God, which divine laws sanction in the definition of sovereignty, suggests an overcoming of the confessionism. The civil legal significance of confessions lives the confessional dimension of interreligious dialogue for an understanding of the incorporeal and supreme God of the Colloquium Heptaplomeres.

Sovereignty, Territory, and Population in Jean Bodin’s République

This article offers a re-interpretation of Jean Bodin’s Six livres de la République (1576), a work that deeply transformed European political discourse at the time of the French Wars of Religion and that had important repercussions on the later ‘reason of state’ tradition. Highlighting the ties between Bodin’s definition of sovereignty in Book 1 and his discussion of demographic growth and territorial expansion in Books 4, 5, and 6, the article shows that Bodin’s critical contribution to early modern political thought, far from being limited to his reframing of the juristic concept of souveraineté or maiestas, extends to his novel understanding of the territory as a non-juridical ‘technologie politique’ (Michel Foucault). Through an examination of Bodin’s work and its later reception, the article argues that Bodin’s insights about territorial and demographic matters played a fundamental role in the early modern ‘territorialisation de la politique’ (Romain Descendre), in that they helped redefine the very terms in which the notion of territory would be understood and discussed in the following decades.

Cádiz a debate: Actualidad, contexto y legado

In many ways this is the most sophisticated and useful book to date on the Cortes, or parliament, that met in the port city of Cádiz from 1810 to 1814 and produced the first written constitution of the Spanish monarchy in 1812, and the impact of the revolutionary change in political thought that swept the Hispanic world. The volume is a collection of 20 essays first delivered at a 2012 conference in Mexico City marking the 200th anniversary of the Constitution of 1812, and, notably for such a collection, all the essays adhere to the subject closely. Roughly a third of the offerings relate to peninsular Spain—the origins, meaning, and legacy of the Cádiz experience—while two-thirds relate to Spanish America—the reception, implementation, and impact of the constitution.The volume's editor, Roberto Breña, introduces the collection with an essay on historiographical changes since about 1990. José María Portillo Valdés explains that Bourbon imperialization of the Spanish monarchy prior to 1812 laid the foundations for the outbreak of liberal constitutionalism during the crisis of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, from 1808 to 1814. In perhaps the most arresting essay, on Cádiz and the fables of Western historiography, Gabriel Paquette argues that the political philosophy of Spanish American independence was more radical by far than that of the American Revolution, criticizes Anglo and French bias in writing the history of European liberalism, and insists that putting Cádiz at the center shows that the “era of revolutions” is a fable and that the United States is not exceptional (p. 59).In his discussion of “the empire that wanted to be a nation,” Tomás Pérez Vejo discusses who was a citizen under the constitution and shows that since citizenship was based on ethnicity, the Spanish nation was not created as Cádiz imagined it. Federica Morelli considers spatial elasticity in the definition of sovereignty, pointing out that often citizenship was inclusive and ambiguous at the same time. On whether the Cádiz Constitution was a mere copy of the radical French constitutions, José Antonio Aguilar Rivera insists that it was not and that the constitution's dependence on historicism meant that there was no clear demarcation between the new (in the constitution) and the old (in existing Spanish laws and political structures).Discussion of the impact and meaning of the Constitution of 1812 follows, focusing on the creation of elected provincial deputations and city councils, elements that were both old and new, as were the heightened disputes between cities and provincial deputations as they sought preeminence in the new system. There is consideration of the relation between Mexican federalism and the Spanish constitutional tradition, disputes over sovereignty, the role of Cádiz in Central America, and the whole theme of the variable degree of implementation of the constitution in different American territories. It was barely implemented, if even noticed, in Río de la Plata, Chile, and New Granada, because full-fledged wars of independence were underway or had already occurred. Yet it had lasting impact in Mexico.The largest group of essays concerns the permutations of the Constitution of 1812 in New Spain and its influence during the wars of independence, during the first independent regime (1821–1824), and on the Mexican Constitution of 1824. For example, Marco Antonio Landavazo points out that most Mexican insurgents had complaints against Cádiz but also accepted many of its ideas and its language. For the insurgency it was politically impossible to accept the Cádiz Constitution, while it had major influence on the Constitution of Apatzingán. Jaime Olveda emphasizes that Mexican viceroy Francisco Javier Venegas retracted his oath to the constitution. Moisés Guzmán Pérez makes some rather sharp, if not totally clear, criticisms of non-Mexican historians on the subject, while emphasizing that Mexican indigenous communities rarely recognized the constitution, that its implementation was regional only, and that the insurgency must be placed at the center of any consideration.There are even essays on regions of America not often at the center of studies on the influence of Cádiz—particularly Gregorio Alonso's on Vicente Rocafuerte, the president of Ecuador; Andréa Slemian's on the influence of Cádiz on the administration of justice in the Brazilian empire; and Juan Luis Ossa Santa Cruz's on monarchism and republican militarism in Chile from 1810 to 1823.While there are too many to mention them all here, these essays are all innovative and thoughtful. They indicate the substantial changes in historical views of the meaning of the Cádiz experience while illustrating the central role of political thought in the revolutionary struggles for independence in Spanish America. Even if exaggeration must be avoided in favor of nuance and divergence of opinion, the influence of Cádiz cannot be ignored in the history of this most critical era in Spanish and Spanish American history.

"Darse la mano es como desarmar una bomba": Division by Language and Reconciliation through Touch in Los informantes by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Jacques Derrida, in one of his last projects, took touch as an analytical point of departure for the study of a selection of texts by Jean-Luc Nancy. He interprets the meaning of to touch in Nancy's work as a setting-in-motion, a trope which can be observed in the novel Los informantes (2004) by Juan Gabriel Vasquez. This article observes an intertextual relationship between Los informantes and a chapter from Nancy's The Sense of the World entitled Politics II: Subject, Citizen, Sovereignty, Community, (K)not. Tying. Seizure of Speech. The narrator and his father are read as allegorical representations of Nancy's definitions of sovereignty and democracy, respectively. When mapped onto the historic and contemporary Colombian political landscape, the flaws associated with these concepts suggest the need for a new form of community based on interdependence and being-in-common, critically explored in the novel through the character of Angelina, a physiotherapist. Set against a trend in Colombian and Latin American writing of incorporating the themes of Nazism and the Second World War, this article—contrary to previous studies—finds that therapy through language (talking or writing) is not the key to healing the divides of the past. The meaningful encounters demonstrated by Angelina and others involve physical contact and affection: these are the encounters that promote reconciliation.

Brexit: Weighing Sovereign Gains and Losses

Theresa May has promised to make Britain once again ‘a sovereign and independent country.’ That is not as simple as it sounds. Brexit is bound to be accompanied by both gains and losses in sovereignty. By leaving the European Union the UK loses the co-decisional powers it has by virtue of participating in the EU’s supranational institutions. Whether the freedom gained can be used to enter into compensatory bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements, as Brexit proponents argue, is anything but certain. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the situation more closely. It begins in Part I with a definition of sovereignty, and in Part II goes on to examine the political situation prevailing in the UK and the EU. Part III, by looking at the upcoming negotiations, is an attempt to weigh de jure and de facto gains and losses. It is doubtful whether the massive Brexit effort will pay off. At the end of the day, Great Britain will hardly be more sovereign and independent.

U.S. Patent Extraterritoriality within the International Context

Globalization has prompted the evolution of our definition of sovereignty. In the patent context, this has arisen amidst a recent focus on the extraterritorial reach of patent remedies. Some of the theoretical challenges are examined in a recent series of decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. These decisions evidence the tensions that arise in when transnational conduct is evaluated within the Westphalian framework developed in the 1600’s. In essence, resolving them requires grappling with the problems that arise “where the reality of human interaction, with its plural sources of norms, seems to be chafing against the strictures traditional conceptions of sovereignty impose.” Paul Schiff Berman, From International Law to Globalization, 43 Colum. J. of Transnat’l 485, 528 (2005). Strict adherence to perfect Westphalian borders is not the current normative world order. Boundaries have become more porous, sometimes through agreement. Treaties, agreements, and other forms of cooperation subject domestic law to external obligations. Another example is the multinational cooperation undertaken to mitigate the impact of climate change, which is an inherently global phenomenon. Corporations engage in global commerce, wield influence over foreign governments, and engage in activities that influence foreign economies. Foreign intervention is justified to address human rights violations and, in some cases, security. Other rationales have been asserted to extend U.S. law beyond its shores. For example, the Supreme Court has authorized extraterritorial jurisdiction for the federal courts to hear petitions for habeas corpus brought by prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, in part because the U.S. had exercised “complete jurisdiction and control” over the territory and acted as the petitioners’ custodians. All of these examples represent shifts in the law’s treatment of territorial reach. Recently, a series of appellate cases have considered extraterritoriality of the nation's intellectual property laws. This paper considers these cases in their international context. Although this line of extraterritoriality cases turns on the interpretation of a domestic statute, 35 U.S.C. section 284, the issues raised cannot be fully resolved without understanding the global implications. Essentially, there are several difficulties that arise when damages for infringement of a U.S. patent are authorized for overseas conduct. Among others, such a solution would be contrary to over a century of law that establishes that such conduct is legal. Further, extraterritorial damages are contrary to the structure and purpose of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (the “TRIPS Agreement”), and likely to introduce economic distortions. Further, there are difficulties are identified as “the legitimacy of unilateralism by a handful of nations seeking to impose their legal and regulatory will over the entire globe.”

Ethics of decisionism: Carl Schmitt’s theological blind spot

In his elaborate historical study Die Diktatur of 1919, C. Schmitt prepares the grounds for his famous definition of sovereignty. Sovereign, as Schmitt will write in his Political Theology five years later, is the one who decides on the state of exception. The following essay analyses the theological origins of Schmitt’s understanding of sovereignty. The problem of sovereignty and his controversy with Hans Kelsen’s programme of legal positivism is the starting point for Schmitt to formulate a general outline of a theory of decisionism. Decisionism as political theory is based on the concept of a rightful deviation from law by personal decision-making in concrete circumstances. The problem of a rightful deviation from law, which will be the focus of my attention, is a well-known problem in legal philosophy and theology. In the following essay, it will be demonstrated how Schmitt evades the theological nature of the problem by drawing attention to Die Diktatur in which the problem of a rightful deviation from law was first systematically analysed. The essay does not primarily intend to explain the absence of the theological and ethical discourses about rightful deviation from law in Schmitt’s work. The aim of the essay is rather to detect a “blind spot” in Schmitt’s general outline of a theory of decisionism and to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of decisionism as theo-political theory.

SPOŁECZNA KONSTRUKCJA NIEPODLEGŁOŚCI KOSOWA

Artykuł stanowi próbę analizy suwerenności Kosowa z zastosowaniem społecznej teorii stosunków międzynarodowych. Przedstawia ewolucję definiowania suwerenności oraz ukazuje konflikt zasady samostanowienia narodów i integralności terytorialnej na przykładzie Kosowa. Prezentuje znaczenie norm i wartości dla funkcjonowania środowiska międzynarodowego. Wskazuje, jaki wpływ odegrały czynniki niematerialne (głównie tożsamość narodowa) na ukształtowanie interesów narodowych, w tym niepodległego państwa. Kultura, historia i mity narodowe mają kluczowe znaczenie dla kreowania zachowań obu stron konfliktu. Artykuł prezentuje główne wyznaczniki suwerenności Kosowa – terytorium, ludność, władzę.

The Great Criminal, the Exception, and Bare Life in James Joyce’s <em>Ulysses</em>

In twentieth and twenty-first centuries, theories of state increasingly grappled with ethical questions raised by specters of colonial violence that give rise to equally violent nationalist revolutions. In few places has this violence been so sustained and long-drawn-out as in Ireland, and James Joyce directly confronts rhetorical and physical violence of this conflict in Ulysses (1921-22).1 This article uses theories of origins of state offered by two of Joyce's German contemporaries-jurist Carl Schmitt and literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin-to think through interdependent ethics of violence, narratives of national origins and sovereignty, and role of would-be citizen in Joyce's novel. I propose that, in character of Leopold Bloom, Ulysses develops strategies for negotiating violence and conceptualizing a form of citizenship that is more inclusive than those offered by prevailing colonial and nationalist models. Bloom's actions attempt to imagine an Irish future beyond terms offered by these models. These actions can be situated relative not only to critique formulated by novel's engagements with Irish nationalism but also to broader concerns of those interested in questions of how state power rhetorically legitimizes itself.Violence and Sovereign: Benjamin, Schmitt, AgambenBenjamin's Critique of Violence (1921) and Schmitt's Political Theology: Four Essays on Concept of Sovereignty (1922) each provide an origin story for sovereign state.' Schmitt's work famously opens Sovereign is he who decides on and work as a whole focuses on structure and maintenance of sovereignty.3 According to Schmitt, sovereign's power rests on his ability not to enforce but rather abrogate law and declare a state of emergency; this power includes ability to define terms of both emergency and its resolution. As a result, the legal order rests on a decision and not on a norm becausethe sovereign produces and guarantees situation in its totality. . . . The essence of state's monopoly . . . must be juristically defined correctly, not as monopoly to coerce or rule, but as monopoly to decide. . . . The decision parts here from legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to law it need not be based on law.4Schmitt's sovereign has power not simply to establish law but also to determine when that law should be suspended, to decide what constitutes emergency and exception, and thus to produce rather than simply react to juridical situation.When this definition of sovereignty is read in tandem with Benjamin's account of state origins, it becomes evident that Schmitt's account elides or underestimates violence of sovereign decision over both law and norm. If legal order rests on an original decision on exception that defines boundaries, both temporal and geopolitical, of state, then that decision arises out of a violence that is inherent to act of distinguishing inside from outside, exception from norm. This dynamic forms context for Benjamin's Critique of Violence, in which he treats theories of law that take as justification for violent means as ethically inadequate; his essay concludes that the violence of an action can be assessed no more from its than from its ends, but only from law of its suggesting with distinction between effects and ends that neither intended nor unintended results of an act can serve as a basis on which to judge its ethical status.1Faced with a lack of criteria for judging violence, Benjamin writes anatomy of (foundational) violence, one that closely resembles Schmitt's sovereign decision:The function of violence in lawmaking is twofold, in sense that lawmaking pursues as its end, with violence as means, what is to be established as law, but at moment of instatement does not dismiss violence; rather, at this very moment of lawmaking, it specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence, but one necessarily and intimately bound to it, under title of power. …

The Political Theory of the Disruption 1

Of political principles, says a distinguished authority,2 whether they be those of order or of freedom, we must seek in religious and quasi-theological writings for the highest and most notable expressions. No one, in truth, will deny the accuracy of this claim for those ages before the Reformation transferred the centre of political authority from church to state. What is too rarely realised is the modernism of those writings in all save form. Just as the medieval state had to fight hard for relief from ecclesiastical trammels, so does its modern exclusiveness throw the burden of a kindred struggle upon its erstwhile rival. The church, intelligibly enough, is compelled to seek the protection of its liberties lest it become no more than the religious department of an otherwise secular society. The main problem, in fact, for the political theorist is still that which lies at the root of medieval conflict. What is the definition of sovereignty? Shall the nature and personality of those groups

Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty

Schmitt's definition of sovereignty is also an attempt to read against the grain Western legal and political history. And yet, this highly unorthodox reconstruction not only reveals the boundaries of Western medieval and modern thought, but also hides them again behind new transhistorical principles. I construct Schmitt's ambivalent gesture by turning his short text into a series of quasisymptoms, which hint to his own historical context, as well as to more general features of Western thought. In particular, I propose reading the association of sovereignty with the state of exception as a rationalization of the catastrophe of the First World War, and I suggest an analogy with Freud's post-war invention of the death drive. Though Schmitt rightly emphasizes the contextual determination of past politico-legal conceptualizations, he puts forth a narrative that transcends these very historical determinations. Hence, whilst Schmitt underlines the theological roots of Western juridico-political discourse, he still operates within the decontextualized conceptual space produced by medieval theological speculation, and re-enacted by modern naturalism. From within this claustrophobic theoretical space, even the exception is recaptured as a principle. On the contrary, a genealogical understanding of sovereignty both discloses the latter's metaphysical underpinnings and undermines its foreverness.

Rethinking sovereignty with reference to history and anthropology

While legal practice and scholarship are driven by the use and understanding of complex legal terminology, there has been little effort to incorporate the humanistic scholarship of anthropologists and historians into theoretical or practical accounts of these words and their usages. This paper attempts to historicise and complicate a term that serves as a bridge or meeting point between the legal and the political; sovereignty has been conceptualised since the sixteenth century as both a framing device that produces unity within the state while establishing mutual equality within the interstate order, and as the capacity to make law without being subject to that law. Recent anthropological literature has challenged the personification implicit in political–theoretical definitions of sovereignty, arguing instead for a theory of sovereignty that can be applied to ‘complicated’, post-colonial contexts, where legal orders are plural or overlapping and the state is weak or non-existent. What such critiques cannot explain, however, is how the concept of the ‘sovereign state’ became so central to political discourse on a global scale. This paper draws upon legal historical case-studies concerned with the production of the colonial or post-colonial state or the deployment of ‘sovereignty’ as a justificatory concept in colonial settings. In doing so, this paper argues for understanding sovereignty both as a practice across time and space that organises legal institutions and as a justificatory strategy in the intellectual and social history of those institutions, an approach that allows scholars to draw upon the insights of political theorists, anthropologists and historians. While primarily intended to instigate a broader interdisciplinary conversation, this paper also suggests a preliminary conclusion: sovereignty has historically been deployed as a means of including that which cannot be considered the same, mediating the colonial tension between ‘otherness’ and legal homogeneity.