Neil Walker Research Articles

Surplus or surrender? Afterword to the Foreword by Neil Walker

Abstract This Afterword argues that Neil Walker’s powerful and expansive “sovereignty frame” renders sovereignty with an air of inevitability that risks misrecognizing justifiable claims against sovereignty itself. The frame wraps sovereignty in constitutionalism in ways that gloss over critical attention to both sovereignty’s coercive element and its groundedness in physical space. I argue that the effect of an expansively constitutionalized sovereignty frame reduces, absorbs, or crowds out articulations of other ways to conceptualize relations among and between people in polities and the places in which they are grounded, most notably those examined in Indigenous legal and political theory. The framing of sovereignty may also serve to foreclose its claiming, so that an apparent surplus of sovereignty masks deep and justifiable incompatibilities, tensions, and genuine contestations that cannot be explained as an excess or surfeit.

The sovereignty deficit: Afterword to the Foreword by Neil Walker

Abstract The frenzy of sovereign claiming that Neil Walker describes in his enthralling Foreword reveals more about sovereignty’s deficits, and prevailing anxieties about these deficits, than it evinces the expanding range of sovereignty. Sovereignty is clearly not eroding across the board, but it is far more fissured than Walker’s Foreword article suggests, as more and more modes of governmental power perforate, parse and parry it. Sovereignty captures how some things work, some of the time, and a good measure of political rhetoric and aspiration. As a comprehensive or incisive analytic for contemporary power, however, it is inadequate. This Afterword fleshes out this claim by presenting counter-narratives to each of the five dimensions of Walker’s analysis of contemporary mobilizations of sovereignty: decomposition as a counterpoint to Walker’s story of recomposition; routing around in contrast to his account of raising; ransoming rather than rationing; monomania in lieu of reinforcement; and fetishization instead of reduction. Insofar as people are everywhere today grasping for sovereign determinacy, this may reveal more about the exhaustion of sovereignty’s explanatory power than its continuing salience.

Sovereignty’s rationale: Afterword to the Foreword by Neil Walker

Abstract In this response to Neil Walker’s rich and insightful Foreword essay “The Sovereignty Surplus,” I examine some of the motivational and practical reasons which explain the persistence of the sovereign state form. An insufficient attentiveness to these reasons, I argue, leads Walker to attribute an exaggerated causal significance to his “five Rs” or phenomena of surplus and accrual.

Democracy and sovereignty: Afterword to the Foreword by Neil Walker

Abstract Neil Walker’s analysis in his Foreword article of the centrality of sovereignty to contemporary politics is compelling, in that it reveals the extent to which this concept underpins current theorizing about the state and its legal structure. In this Afterword, I explore two questions that arise from Walker’s analysis: why has sovereignty remained so central to our legal and political thinking? And is the centrality of sovereignty desirable? I suggest that the answer to both questions may have to do with the connection tying modern understandings of sovereignty with the democratic principle of popular power.

Reframing sovereignty for the anthropocene

ABSTRACT Writing on sovereignty has failed to address the challenges associated with planetary climatic change. As debates about the nature of sovereignty return to the fore, there remains little attention paid to how our newly unstable environmental conditions might call for sovereignty to be imagined anew. Drawing on Neil Walker’s account of the ‘sovereignty frame’–as a means of understanding the enduring relevance of sovereignty for contemporary law and politics – this article understands sovereignty as an aesthetic device which constitutively inures political subjects to the ecological forces and relations central to the climate crisis and the broader challenges associated with the Anthropocene. In taking up the task of reframing sovereignty in a way that properly attends to these issues, this article introduces how sovereignty’s spaces, subjects and modes of governance might be reimagined in light of the Anthropocene thesis and the various disruptions it heralds for social life.

The Imaginary and the Unconscious: Situating Constitutional Pluralism

The article interrogates Neil Walker’s theory of constitutional pluralism in order to bring out the importance of ideas for how we theorise the EU legal order. To that end, the article introduces two conceptual tools or prisms, the imaginary and the unconscious. The first part of the article situates Walker’s work in relation to the body of state-centric constitutional theory. It shows the steps Walker takes to attach his theory to past constitutionalisms, and it argues that the focus on theory leads him to blank out the question of state practice. The second part of the article considers the ideas and conceptual moves that pass from the body of constitutional theory to Walker’s theory. What the analysis brings into view is a stock of basic ideas, an imaginary around which Walker’s theory revolves. In the third part the article shows that the continuity between past and present formats of constitutional theory rests upon a determinate, and historically specific, intuition of political life. It argues that the changes Walker shall make to his theory can be explained in terms of the passing of a specific historical conjuncture, in which law could transcribe politics and keep economic rationality at bay.

Introduction

Introduction

Global Governance, Sustainability and the Earth System: Critical Reflections on the Role of Global Law

AbstractThis article begins by questioning the capacity of the concept of sustainable development to stabilize social reproduction and foster global justice. Based on interdisciplinary perspectives on global governance, it discusses the way in which global law fails to cope with the resonance of advanced capitalism in the world society and ecological systems. Our analysis focuses on the regulatory and institutional features of three interwoven functional regulatory regimes (global finance, energy, and environmental protection), which demonstrate structural governance dysfunction at the expense of ecological integrity and justice in the global realm. The article further examines the capacity of global law to foster a ‘compositive’ and ‘compensatory’ contribution to global justice and the stability of the Earth system through global constitutionalism. In this context, it concludes that Neil Walker's global law approach provides a fertile analytical framework for describing the patterns of interaction between different species of global law but proves to be particularly ‘slippery’ in its normative propositions regarding the gap between global law and justice. Drawing from the Earth system approach, we argue in favour of a global material constitutionalism, recognizant of ecosystemic boundaries and socio-environmental impacts of the global socio-economic metabolism. We consider that the gap between global law and global justice is best addressed by devising more deliberative patterns of transnational governance, as well as ecosystem and human rights approaches, in order to accommodate the fair and equitable internalization of material limits across global regulatory regimes that act as functionally differentiated economic constitutions of advanced capitalism.

Aileen McHarg, Tom Mullen, Alan Page and Neil Walker (eds), The Scottish Independence Referendum: Constitutional and Political Implications

Aileen McHarg, Tom Mullen, Alan Page and Neil Walker (eds), <i>The Scottish Independence Referendum: Constitutional and Political Implications</i>

Neil Walker, Intimations of Global Law

Neil Walker, <i>Intimations of Global Law</i>

Transnational Organization, Transnational Law and the Ambiguity of Interpol in a World Ruled with Law

Abstract Using the practical empirical example of the Interpol Organization, the paper explores the relationship between transnational organization and transnational law. Pace Jessup’s pioneering work in 1956, the central questions surrounding the notion of transnational law have involved understanding the use of legal tools in an administrative grey area of global governance across a range of legal institutions. This essay demonstrates how Interpol constituted as itself a formal ‘Intergovernmental Organization’ with its own self-governing structure and explores the use of one of its most powerful legal tools: the Red Notice. As a formally constituted igo with transnational reach and legally subject to its own constituted governance processes, Interpol is an example of what Neil Walker calls ‘constitutionalism beyond the State’. A fortiori, Interpol mobilizes a range of legal tools from transnational public international law and criminal law, as well as those of its own constitutional order, in making up its organization. Following Terence C. Halliday and Gregory Shaffer, and based on this empirical case study, the essay argues that Interpol is an important constituent element in the broader ‘transnational legal order’ of global policing. The challenge for socio-legal scholarship is to reveal how the transnational legal order of which Interpol is a part, is shaped by a variety of actors using different kinds of legal instruments because the institutional patterns thereby established have consequences for future developments. The transnational legal order of global policing is a synecdoche of global governance more generally and the specific case of Interpol provides the basis of some general claims about how to understand the concept of law under transnational conditions. The essay argues that Interpol is but a small constituent element of an evolving global system of rule with law. Rule with law emphasizes that in all practical circumstances legal tools are in the hands of knowing social actors. Understood this way, law is practical politics undertaken by means of legal tools. Interpol is but one element of a vast transnational legal order that has no democratic basis and which needs to be progressively uncovered through piecemeal empirical case studies. Read against the backdrop of broad socio-legal theory, such case studies offer critical insights concerning contemporary transnational legal ordering.

The Slipperiness of ‘Global Law’†

What is ‘global law’? What is specifically global and specifically legal about global law? Is it even coherent to define law by reference to its ‘globality’? These are just some of the questions taken up by Neil Walker in his new book, Intimations of Global Law. In this review essay, I engage critically with Walker’s response to these and other questions. Whilst I believe that Walker’s mapping of different ‘species’ of global law is useful and informative in revealing a ‘state of the art’ of globalising legal trends, his effort to draw these various and not necessarily commensurate species together into a coherent meta-theorisation of global law is, I believe, far less convincing. Walker’s conceptualisation of global law is self-defined by reference to its openness, its intimated quality and its ‘adjectival’ categorisation—characteristics that leave the concept of global law somewhat ‘slippery’ and malleable to the point of its non-utility in actually helping to guide law’s direction, resolve normative disputes or remedy apparent accountability deficits and injustices at the global level.

Constituent power, boundaries and identity: On the justificatory depth of constitutionalism - A rejoinder to Neil Walker

Constituent power, boundaries and identity: On the justificatory depth of constitutionalism - A rejoinder to Neil Walker

Neil Walker, Intimations of Global Law

Journal Article Neil Walker, Intimations of Global Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Get access Neil Walker, Intimations of Global Law ( Cambridge University Press, 2014) David Kenny David Kenny *Assistant Professor of Law, Trinity College Dublin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 63, Issue 4, Fall 2015, Pages 1053–1060, https://doi.org/10.5131/AJCL.2015.0031 Published: 01 October 2015

Sovereignty and the International Protection of Human Rights

Journal of Political PhilosophyVolume 24, Issue 4 p. 427-445 Original Article Sovereignty and the International Protection of Human Rights† Cristina Lafont, Cristina Lafont Philosophy, Northwestern UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Cristina Lafont, Cristina Lafont Philosophy, Northwestern UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 02 November 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12086Citations: 8 †An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Yale Political Theory Workshop “Justification beyond the State” in December 2014. I am very grateful to Darrel Moellendorf, Scott Shapiro, and Neil Walker for their constructive and thorough comments as well as to the workshop's audience for raising very interesting questions. I also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Political Philosophy for their helpful comments and suggestions. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume24, Issue4December 2016Pages 427-445 RelatedInformation

In This Issue

In This Issue

Late Sovereignty in Post-Integration Europe: Continuity and Change in a Constitutive Concept

This paper examines the state of sovereignty in post-integration Europe. Drawing on linguistic approaches to law and IR, it interrogates Neil Walker’s conception of ‘late sovereignty’, in terms of how it manages the problem of continuity and change in concepts in transition as well as the constitutive and regulative rules of late sovereignty games. The transition from what the paper calls ‘high sovereignty’ to ‘late sovereignty’ entails a broadening of the range of actors who play late sovereignty games to include non-sovereign state entities such as the EU, a redefinition of the ‘particularising’ element of ultimate authority from territory to function, and an evolution of the criteria for what constitutes a ‘good’ sovereignty claim as stipulated by the regulative rules of late sovereignty games. It concludes by assessing the relevance of late sovereignty for the trilateral relationship between the non-continental territories of EU Member States, the Member states themselves and the EU.

Foundation Stone of Modern Public Law According to Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker: Positive Constitution or Pre-Positive Idea of Ius Publicum?

The aim of this paper is to analyse the academic value of the view which states that even the highest positive law known as the constitution cannot be seen as the foundational stone of the modern public law. For the proponents of this view like Martin Loughlin of the London School of Economics and Political Science, this foundation actually lies in the pre-positive idea of ius publicum. Furthermore Neil Walker of the University of Edinburgh while challenging certain aspects of Loughlin's view, presents suggestions regarding how constitutive public law can adapt to the various challenges it faces in a modern, globalised world. These suggestions shall also be analysed.

Book Review: Europe’s Constitutional Mosaic, edited by Neil Walker, Jo Shaw and Stephen Tierney. (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2011)

Book Review: <i>Europe’s Constitutional Mosaic</i>, edited by Neil Walker, Jo Shaw and Stephen Tierney. (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2011)

Europe's Constitutional Mosaic – Edited by Neil Walker, Jo Shaw and Stephen Tierney

European Law JournalVolume 18, Issue 2 p. 323-325 Europe's Constitutional Mosaic – Edited by Neil Walker, Jo Shaw and Stephen Tierney Suvi Sankari, Suvi Sankari Centre of Excellence ‘Foundations of European Law and Polity’, University of HelsinkiSearch for more papers by this author Suvi Sankari, Suvi Sankari Centre of Excellence ‘Foundations of European Law and Polity’, University of HelsinkiSearch for more papers by this author First published: 17 February 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2011.00599.xCitations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume18, Issue2March 2012Pages 323-325 RelatedInformation