Notion Of Sovereignty Research Articles

Sovereignty and Privatizing the Military: An Institutional Explanation

Since the mid-1990s, almost all Western states have privatized military tasks, albeit to varying extents. The article addresses both aspects of the phenomenon: Why did Western states privatize military tasks, and why did they do so to varying extents? The neorealist argument of the market providing a competitive edge for the armed forces and liberalist ‘casualty aversion’ and ‘cost-effectiveness’ explanation both equally fail to provide a comprehensive answer for the privatization of military tasks. Alternatively, the article employs sociological institutionalism, arguing that transnational norms on conventional warfare prescribe the structure and organization of armed forces. If the content of these norms changes, states will adjust their force structure accordingly. Consequentially, states started to privatize military tasks when the requirements changed from self-sufficiency to more market reliance. However, transnational norms have to work their way through domestic norms resulting in variations. The more consistent transnational normative demands are with the domestic structure, the more extensive the former demands are implemented. The crucial domestic variable is the notion of sovereignty. If sovereignty is defined minimally market solutions are embraced and military activities are outsourced extensively. If states hold a broader understanding of sovereignty, they are reluctant to hand over military tasks to the market.

Media and Law

This Special Issue of The International Journal for the Semiotics of Law/Revue Internationale de Semiotique Juridique concentrates on a relatively new and applied area: the application of semiotic methods and approaches to the analysis of media texts with a legal focus. The legal context in each respective article varies widely, from texts dealing with a single trial to those with national and international status, such as the Constitution of the United States. Duncanson explores its realisation in the Hollywood hit movie The Matrix. She employs a complex multimodal analysis of the movie to show some of the ways in which the values and ideals embodied in the Constitution are represented and re-contextualised for the consumption of a broader, more popular audience. Gies’ context is equally broad in its legal textual origins. His article deals with the European Human Rights Act (1998) and its potentially conflictual representations in the British press. Within a Barthian context, Gies examines the parallel ways in which such values and legal principles are conveyed by governmental and other official sources. The notions of sovereignty and religion in Israel are explored by Bogoch and Holzman-Gazit. They use data from a Supreme Court decision on Israeli citizenship and its representation in both the ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ press to analyze the semiotic complexities of nationhood. This is achieved through the lens of the linguistic, visual and paralinguistic features of the two newspapers. Cotterill’s article also draws on a corpus of print and online newspaper texts. It explores the semiotic realisations of variables such as gender and socio-economic status, as well as physical and behavioural representations of the perpetrator in a case of parental kidnapping. The case, and the individuals concerned, are seen to

Contested Sovereignty in a Changing Arctic

Climate change is challenging the notions of permanency and stability on which the ideal of the sovereign, territorial state historically has rested. Nowhere is this challenge more pressing than in the Arctic. As states expand their sovereignty claims northward in pursuit of potential opportunities (in many cases made possible by climate change), these same states are being confronted with the region's increasing territorial indeterminacy (which also is exacerbated by climate change). To investigate how climate change is challenging the territorial imaginaries around which notions of sovereignty historically have been based, we turn to three debates in the contemporary Arctic: the question of sovereignty in the Northwest Passage, conflicts over territorial control in the Arctic Ocean, and the potential for enhanced multilateral governance. Through our study of these debates we engage the Arctic both as a region that is undergoing climate change's most extreme impacts and as a laboratory for understanding how these and similar impacts might modify the spatial organization of political authority across the world.

Rethinking Borders, Violence, and Space

The paper I am proposing draws on my earlier analysis of hard borders, violence, fluid identities and political space. Given our contemporary landscapes of mobility and immobility, failing sovereigns and competing ethnocrats, new global actors, and modes interaction, we need to be rethinking our notions of political association beyond container states and fixed territorial spaces. The practices of fixing identities into differential political statuses and arbitrary geographic borders are particularly dangerous as responses to “crises.” While many pundits suggest that it is the lack of defined or secure borders that encourages violent conflicts, facilitates terror-bent incursions, and tempts traffickers to defy border guards, I argue that it is the proliferation of hard borders (symbolic, legal, and material walls, fences, and frontiers) that incites violence, provides mechanisms for domination, and undermines opportunities for peaceful and sustainable political association. In the face of “hard times,” this is not a utopian argument for world government, but an attempt to rethink the relationship of borders, violence, and space.This paper draws on my earlier interrogation of traditional notions of sovereignty in the context of ongoing processes of fragmentation and integration and my concern that the linkage of citizenship to nationality in this context exposes many individuals to conditions of extreme vulnerability and violence. Using the theme of crises to frame moments of conflict, multiple strains, uncertainty, and vulnerability in symbolic and physical borderlands, the paper will attempt to pose both the dangerous securitizing pressures to close and harden borders and the liberating possibilities of fluidity and malleability, opening and softening of borders. Softening borders undermines the construction of power relations around fixed definitions of difference and institutionalized practices of domination and violence. While the instinct toward closure is often built into narratives of “hard times” and the language of crisis; I hope to offer resistance to this turn through both an analysis of moments of crisis and a re-thinking of borders, violence, and space.

Rethinking the Sovereign in Sovereign Wealth Funds

Nation states are increasingly sharing sovereignty, both with other states and with supranational and non-governmental institutions. In large part, this is the result of a long period of economic and financial globalization, which has undercut territorial notions of sovereignty and varieties of capitalism. In trying to understand this phenomenon, we are drawn to sovereign wealth funds (SWF), as they offer a unique and powerful lens into the changing dynamics of contemporary capitalism, global economic integration and state sovereignty. Indeed, the SWF provides governments a tool for both engaging with new spatial forms as well as resisting them. While politicians may conceptualize the objective of such funds in the most practical terms, they serve an under-appreciated role in maintaining state sovereignty in a globalized (i.e. deterritorializing) world. In this paper, we build on emerging interdisciplinary scholarship concerning the rise of SWFs by broadening the interpretation of the utility of SWFs for the sponsoring government in relation to the practice and constitution of sovereignty. To this end, we offer an innovative, stylized typology of SWFs in relation to the state and its sovereignty. The objective is to better understand the potential long-term significance of SWFs and the factors that might underpin further development of new SWFs in different countries in the future. Moreover, we believe SWFs can be differentiated according to the role they play in sovereignty and what underlies their claims to legitimacy within their respective nation state. As such, by understanding the rise and purpose of SWFs, we hope to better understand the sovereign in SWFs.

Ulrich Haltern. Was bedeutet Souveranitat? * Toni Erskine. Embedded Cosmopolitanism. Duties to Strangers and Enemies in a World of 'Dislocated Communities' * Jeffery L. Dunoff and Joel P. Trachtman (eds.). Ruling the World? Constitutionalism, International Law, and Global Governance

Two notions constantly re-emerge in present-day research on issues arising under the general heading of constitutionalization of international law: sovereignty and cosmopolitanism. The former is regarded as being rather an impediment to the projects of international constitutionalism, the latter as a distant future goal, but both to be reinterpreted and readapted to modern realities and aspirations of researchers engaged in the theorization of international constitutionalism. The three books under review, which appeared during the last three years, represent an excellent illustration of the relationship and tensions existing between sovereignty, cosmopolitanism, and the project of a constitutionalization of international law. It is significant that the titles of two of these books are formulated as questions. Many uncertainties dominate the field. The first and one of the most important of these uncertainties relates to the notion of sovereignty. Ulrich Haltern in his book entitled What does sovereignty mean? (Was bedeutet Souveranitat?) attempts to shed more light on some ways in which the notion of sovereignty continues to shape our understanding of the political and on reasons for the continuing relevance of sovereignty in the modern world, including international law. Haltern describes his approach as a political theology of the notion of sovereignty (politische Theologie des Souveranitatsbegriffs) (at 10). He provides an explanation of one of the paradoxes at the core of the project of international constitutionalism, namely that between increased sophistication of theoretical arguments developed by international lawyers to demonstrate the relevance and force of international law beyond the mere will of states and the continuing political practice of the imposition of the will of dominant state(s) on the world contrary to international rules and prescriptions. Sometimes this paradox is explained in terms of the insufficiency of international law's enforcement mechanisms. This explanation is viewed by Haltern as too simplistic (at 8). �

Post Cold War Evolution of Chinese Thinking on Regional Institutions in Northeast Asia

A review of four periods and a comparison of three regional institutions provide evidence for how serious China has become about multilateralism with its neighbors in Asia. Approval for multilateralism does not mean that China is ready to endorse strong regional organizations that bind their members, especially when it has reservations both about institutions that could undermine its narrow notion of sovereignty and norms that could support US or even Japanese efforts to impose long-feared universal values. If China calculates that limited multilateralism now provides a variety of benefits, to date its support reflects specific circumstances, not general trust in this format. Focusing on the Six-Party Talks as the presumed foundation for regionalism in Northeast Asia offers a concentrated view of strategic thinking toward the area most vital to China's security. In the standoff between North Korea and the United States we are able to assess the degree to which China accepts working with four or five states and the prospects for its active support, if circumstances permit, for the establishment of a peace and security mechanism through the fifth working group that originated in the Joint Agreement of February 2007.

The Right to Migrate: A Reflection on Immigration and Catholic Social Teaching

In recent years much of the discussion and debate about immigration in the United States, as well as around the world, has equated immigration to risk. One version of this association, drawing on notions of sovereignty, national security and citizenship, portrays immigrants as a risk to society -- troublesome strangers, at best, a dangerous and expendable commodity, at worst. The narrative of immigrants as a risk has drawn an increasingly vocal if not militant following in recent years and fueled a rash of harsh immigration measures in countries around the world. In the United States it has rendered even moderate talk of immigration reform a political Achilles heel and allowed for voices calling for the expulsion of those already here and the fencing out of those who might come to gain traction in the media and popular culture. Another narrative, to be sure, has begun to surface. Turning the onus of the relation between risk and immigration on its head, it portrays immigrants as people at risk, casualties of the nation-state and the predatory nature of modern capitalism. It alerts us, on the one hand, to the suffering of those who leave their homes for life in another country.

Special Issue for GR2P: Africa's Responsibility to Protect Introduction

AbstractThe introduction sketches the recent development of the 'responsibility to protect' norm and emphasises its African roots, both in terms of its conceptualisation and implementation and with particular respect to two tragedies—the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the crisis in Darfur since 2003—that have lent urgency to the norm's formulation and widespread international adoption. The number and extent of R2P cases in Africa are outlined and the roles of the African Union and Africa's regional organisations in implementing the norm are briefly considered. The introduction acknowledges the importance of examining R2P through African perspectives. Referencing the justifications and primary principles for action upon which the norm is founded, the authors also assess the relative strengths of competing notions of sovereignty in Africa. The essay further considers how R2P has come to be seen as a mechanism that can bolster the capacity of weak states to fulfil their sovereign responsibilities to their own citizens, and how new international obligations imposed upon states, and particularly those adopted in Africa, have made significant inroads into the old concept of sovereignty as territorial integrity and freedom from external interventions.

Contested Sovereignty: The International Politics of Regime Change in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

At the conclusion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s 1999 air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Savezna republika Jugoslavije: SRJ) the United States publicly committed itself to a policy of regime change towards the Belgrade government presided over by Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. In addition, the May 1999 indictment of Milosevic by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for crimes against humanity marked an unprecedented act of judicial intervention that challenged hitherto dominant conceptions of the norm of Westphalian sovereignty. Those acts – state promotion of regime change and the indictment of a sitting head of state by an international criminal tribunal – both require an examination of the role of external agency in either bringing about or acting as a catalyst for regime change. The role of external agency in promoting domestic change has provoked a debate within the literature as to whether or not a causal relationship exists between external intervention and domestic change; however, understandings of the normative implications of external intervention remain underdeveloped. Normative appeals by both interveners and the subject of intervention sought to redefine sovereignty. The Milosevic regime attempted to use the Westphalian notion of sovereignty to fend off external pressure, while Western powers legitimized their intervention through appeals to humanitarian norms and by direct appeals to citizens of the SRJ. Therefore, the purpose of this essay is twofold: it examines the contestation and the attempts to redefine state sovereignty on the part of states, and empirically assesses whether or not causal links can be identified between external agents and regime change in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in October 2000.

Biopolítica e soberania na pós-modernidade: Foucault e a crise do Estado-nação como questão para um diagnóstico do presente

This text aims to criticize present time adopting Foucault’s critic of political reason, deployed in the search of those forms of rationality that defined the general economy of power in Western civilization. In this sense, this paper emphasizes foucauldian thought, considering its contemporariness, its models of analysis and the critics which contest such contemporariness. These models, outpointing the biopower, oppose the traditional conception of modern power, once it is juridically structured around the notion of sovereignty. At last, in the terms of this interpretative switch, it focus on the relevance of the crisis of Nation-State as one of the events that bring up the actual difference, with its dangers and its potentialities.

Fighting HIV and AIDS: Reconfiguring the State?

US$10 billion goes to fight HIV and AIDS annually. This money has been accompanied by the introduction of quasi-governmental bodies, a mushrooming of civil society actors and high-level political commitments of states and international agencies. This article argues that the multiplicity of actors involved in the HIV and AIDS response has led to a re-modelling of the state in East Africa. Moreover, this re-modelling does not exist in isolation of wider trends within the global political economy, but is instead led by the World Bank as part of its wider governance reform agenda in which notions of sovereignty and partnership are challenged under the rubric of ownership. The article considers the role of the National AIDS Councils, the president, civil society and the Ministries of Health in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda within the World Bank's Multi-Country AIDS Program to explore this relationship.

Contested Sovereignty: The International Politics of Regime Change in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

At the conclusion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 1999 air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Savezna republika Jugoslavije: SRJ) the United States publicly committed itself to a policy of regime change towards the Belgrade government presided over by Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević. In addition, the May 1999 indictment of Milošević by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity marked an unprecedented act of judicial intervention that challenged hitherto dominant conceptions of the norm of Westphalian sovereignty. Those acts – state promotion of regime change and the indictment of a sitting head of state by an international criminal tribunal – both require an examination of the role of external agency in either bringing about or acting as a catalyst for regime change. The Milošević regime attempted to use the Westphalian notion of sovereignty to fend off external pressure; events leading to the regime change of October 2000 suggest that this defence was inadequate, as Western powers legitimized their intervention through appeals to humanitarian norms and by direct appeals to citizens of the SRJ.

Left Behind: The Messianic without Sovereignty

In his recent book The Weakness of God, deconstructionist theologian John Caputo proposes what he terms a theology of the event that rests on an alternative conception of transcendence wherein rather than God being identified with sovereign power, God is instead identified with everything the world casts out and leaves behind. By identifying with those who are left behind, the mark of the incarnate God remains on the one who was left for dead. The messianic, so conceived, far from being a title of power or exclusion, is instead a weak force indicated by God's solidarity with the poor and the outcast. By drawing on the critique of notions of sovereignty from Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Hent de Vries and Jacques Derrida, this article explores this alternative theological rendering of transcendence and the messianic specifically with an eye towards its possibilities for an alternative political theology to that of Carl Schmitt. Whereas Schmitt's political theology sanctions a legal order that rests upon the transcendent authority of the sovereign and, as such, provides one of the most scathing and influential critiques of modern liberal democracy, what if this transcendent authority were subjected to an immanent critique wherein the politico‐theological concept of sovereignty has been displaced, if not rendered anachronistic, by the secularizing and democratizing forms of contemporary life? In this way, Schmitt's critique of liberalism need not be accompanied by the concomitant rejection of democracy; instead, the kingdom of God might be reconceived democratically as the rule of all by all and, thus, realize the secular promise of theology.

Kosovo and the Advent of Sovereignty as Responsibility

This article investigates the impact of NATO's 1999 intervention in Kosovo on the notion of sovereignty as responsibility. It argues that the intervention provided an important catalyst that brought to light a broad consensus about sovereignty as responsibility and highlighted areas in need of refining. International debate about the intervention brought to light a broad consensus around the principle that sovereigns do not have unlimited rights to treat their citizens however they please but highlighted concerns about the modalities of operationalizing such a principle. Not least, states were concerned about the potential for unilateral armed intervening. As such, the debate sparked by NATO's intervening revolved more around second-order questions about the authority to intervene and prudential questions about its impact on regional stability than on the question of whether international society should be engaged in a domestic humanitarian crisis. This pointed to the idea that a grand consensus on sovereignty as responsibility might be possible if its scope for justifying armed intervention was constrained to only those cases where the Security Council authorizes action. It was precisely this formula that emerged from the 2005 World Summit.

A Heterotopian Analysis of Maritime Refugee Incidents

Given the persistent significance of states in the determination of legal identities of people on the move, a consideration of the construction of people as legal (or illegal) migrants, refugees, or asylum-seekers must also recognize that these determinations take place in conjunction with the simultaneous processes through which spaces such as sovereign states or ships carrying asylum-seekers are constructed. A heterotopian analysis of the Tampa and the SIEVX of 2001 allows for a consideration of the ways in which notions of sovereignty, territory and governmentality work to stabilize ambiguous situations produced by the conflictual discourses of human rights and state power.

CUSTODIAL SOVEREIGNTY: RECONCILING SOVEREIGNTY AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES AMONGST THE VESTIGES OF COLONIALISM

The rapid deterioration of the environment has become a threat to the survival of mankind and concerted action of all states is required in order to overcome the current problems. The perplexing question that arises is whether and how the notion of sovereignty can face up to the global environmental challenge? It is therefore important to reconcile the concept of sovereignty with the need for a global approach to problems of an environmental nature. This approach furthermore needs to take account of the dynamics of the North-South relationship. In this article the author introduces the notion of ‘custodial sovereignty’ as a solution to the problem.

Legitimate Political Authority and Sovereignty: Why States Cannot be the Whole Story

States are believed to be the paradigmatic instances of legitimate political authority. But is their prominence justified? The classic concept of state sovereignty predicts the danger of a fatal deadlock among conflicting authorities unless there is an ultimate authority within a given jurisdiction. This scenario is misguided because the notion of an ultimate authority is conceptually unclear. The exercise of authority is multidimensional and multiattributive, and to understand the relations among authorities we need to analyse this complexity into its different aspects. Instead of ultimate authorities we can have actors endowed with superior authority over others in one regard, but not necessarily in another. And this limited superiority is sufficient for resolving conflicts. There is no need for ultimate authorities. Having discarded the notion of sovereignty we can embrace a different conception of legitimate authority, one that is not interested in the pedigree of actors, but in their capacity to serve its subjects. If states wish to retain their central role in the domain of political authority, they will have to earn it.

American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier. By Patrick Griffin. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. xii, 368 pp. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8090-9515-5.)

In American Leviathan, Patrick Griffin examines the development of society and political ideology in the trans-Appalachian West between 1763 and 1795. The book provides a comprehensive narrative of the impact of frontier warfare on western settlements from the Seven Years' War to the end of the eighteenth century. Yet this is much more than a simple narrative, for Griffin seeks to explain how “common men and women helped construct new notions of sovereignty, and in the process gained unprecedented political rights” (p. 10). While much of the historical narrative is well known, from works such as Eric Hinderaker's Elusive Empires (1997), Griffin's important contribution to the scholarship of the revolutionary frontier lies in his discussion of the processes that led to the development of a distinct frontier ideology. Griffin identifies both philosophical and ideological changes among frontier settlers. He argues that western settlers increasingly developed a philosophy similar to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, who had argued over a century earlier that where people were alone in a state of nature, society would be violent and disordered, and only a “leviathan,” a powerful central state, could bring order and stability. Thus, rather than individualism being central to the creation of western identity and political ideology, Griffin argues that ultimately it was the role of the state.

AUTONOMY, TAKING ONE'S CHOICES TO BE GOOD, AND PRACTICAL LAW: REPLIES TO CRITICS

Philosophical Books Vol. 49 No. 2 April 2008 pp. 125 –137 AUTONOMY, TAKING ONE’S CHOICES TO BE GOOD, AND PRACTICAL LAW: REPLIES TO CRITICS andrews reath The University of California, Riverside I Several essays in my book try to understand what Kant means by autonomy and how that concept figures in his foundational project. Since political and juridical terminology runs through much of Kant’s moral theory, I suggest that he models autonomy on a notion of sovereignty. I interpret autonomy not as a motivational capacity, but as the sovereignty of the will over itself: the rational will is not bound to any outside authority and it has the capacity to give universal law. I shall begin with an overview of some of these themes. Since Samuel Kerstein asks whether I am interpreting or defending Kant, let me first say something about my approach. My guiding aim is to reconstruct the underlying ideas and arguments so as to make them philosophically success- ful, where ‘reconstruction’ permits pushing an idea farther in a certain direc- tion than Kant did. My approach is interpretive, since I accept the constraint that the ideas that I develop should have a firm basis in the texts and the underlying arguments. Without claiming that there is a uniquely right reading, I want to get at the deep structure of concepts and arguments that animate the movements of thought in Kant’s texts. But I am also engaged in defending Kant, in that I am trying, as far as I can, to make the arguments work out. Thus a second constraint is that the ideas and arguments attributed to Kant turn out to be philosophically successful. These two constraints are not always compatible, and that is one reason why Kant is hard work (and sometimes frustrating). II To provide background for my responses, I begin with some remarks about the role of autonomy in the overall trajectory of the Groundwork that may clarify the senses in which Kant thinks that moral requirements are laws that the will gives to itself. (Here I am more concerned to lay out an overall picture of what goes on in the Groundwork than to defend it.) Kant thinks that it is part of common moral thought that moral requirements apply with absolute necessity and that we take them to be categorical imperatives. Once this feature of common moral thought is brought to our attention, the question that sets the problematic of the Groundwork naturally arises: how could there be normative requirements with this kind of necessity? Groundwork III attempts to ground the authority of moral requirements in a dual necessity. Greatly simplified, it argues that the Categorical Imperative [CI] is the constitutive or internal principle of a necessary self-conception. First, the CI is the constitutive principle of free Philosophical 2008 The Books Author. Vol. Journal 49 No. 2 compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. © 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ , UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA