Sovereign Actors Research Articles

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND GENETIC PARAMETERS IN SOME CHARACTERISTICS F1 HYBRID OF EGGPLANT UNDER PROTECTIVE CULTIVATION

Two field experiments were carried out in the Department of Horticulture and landscape design - College of Agriculture - Al-Anbar University for the seasons 12-01-2018 and 10-08-2018, five locally pure lines of eggplant were planted in the first season (PH-1001, P2 K-1004, P3-A -1006, P4- N-1007, P5- A-1011) is introduced into a full-fledged full-flip counter to produce 20 reciprocal and reverse hybrids. The seeds of the fathers and their hybrids were sown with the comparative hybrid Barcelona, a Spanish hybrid in the same location in the season 2018-2019 and the RCBD and full three replicates (ie, each plastic house was a duplicate of 3 houses each house area of 150 m 2, to study the evaluation of parents and hybrids and estimate some landmarks Genotype and type of gene action Parents (P1, P2, P4) showed a clear and complex effect for most studied traits, giving an average yield (2684.67, 3245.33 and 2898.67 gm). Plant-1 and Reverse Hybrid (2x1) 4932.00 g-Plant-1w .Edit weight of the fruit, reaching 173.10 gm fruit -1 and 188.11 gm fruit -1 of the above-mentioned hybrids sequentially. The reverse hybrid (2x1) showed the highest hybrid vigor per plant yield 51.97%. The results showed that significant differences were found for the mean GCA, SCA and RCA squares for most studied traits. father 2 showed the best positive effect of the GCA to plant yield and number of fruits. The hybrid crossover (1x2) showed the effect of the SCA in plant yield 1411.5. Non-incremental genetic variance values were higher than the additional variance values for most studied traits, including outcome. The inheritance rate in the broad sense was high in most studied traits, while the narrow inheritance rate was low in most studied traits, which was reflected in the average degree of sovereignty, which was greater than one for most studied traits, so we conclude that the advantage of superior parents in breeding programs to produce superior hybrids A distinctive outcome because it was under the influence of the sovereign act of the gene.

Reclaiming Indigeneity: Recent Publications at the University of Arizona Press

Colonial voices have often attempted to silence Indigenous voices, but contemporary publisher the University of Arizona Press is dedicated to disseminating scholarly texts that give voice to colonized peoples. The press’s fall 2017 catalogue is particularly interesting because of its dedication to Indigenous activism, publishing three texts that depict varied ways in which Indigenous communities are attempting to overcome stereotypes and colonial trauma while also reflecting upon one another, allowing for new discussions to build within academia and beyond. Native Apparitions focuses on visual sovereignty and reclaiming Indigenous identity, Sovereign Acts includes various contributions that add to political activism and explore issues of sovereignty, while Marking Indigeneity elaborates on Tongan communities, in particular, the concepts of time and space in contemporary society. Highlighting current trends within one press’s catalogue, this review discusses the authors’ expressed need to reclaim Indigenous identities, cultures, and languages separately, yet it also examines larger Indigenous concerns across multiple communities.

PAHAM KEDAULATAN NEGARA DITINJAU DARI SIFAT UNIVERSILATAS HUKUM INTERNASIONAL

The power of theories regarding the principle of sovereignty and equality of the state began to diminish. Every independent country is a sovereign country. they are free to make policies to regulate the economic, political, legal and other systems within their country, however, today's development experiences a shift in meaning, what was previously the authority or full sovereign action of a country has diminished its understanding when the interests of other countries are disrupted or international needs require state sovereignty to be subject to universal rules and highest norms (erga omnes). In this study using a normative juridical approach and descriptive analytical research specifications. The data used in this study are secondary data consisting of primary, secondary and tertiary legal materials. Data obtained through library studies in the form of legislation, books, journals, and authoritative electronic media. The results of this study are 2 (two) explanations, namely First. that state sovereignty does not conflict with the international legal system, that state sovereignty can be used in the framework of forming an international legal system. Secondly, the universality of international law provides restrictions on the sovereignty of the state to be applied properly and the principle of respecting universal values ​​in order to maintain human dignity and their life.

DACA, DAPA, and Discretionary Executive Power: Immigrants Outside the Law

Author(s): Volpp, Leti | Abstract: In June 2012, President Barack Obama announced the creation of DACA, a program which instructed executive branch officials to exercise their administrative discretion to defer the deportation of eligible applicants. Two years later, in November 2014, President Obama announced the DAPA program, which expanded DACA and extended this exercise of discretion to parents of U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Both announcements were met by controversy. Critics charged that, by altering the legal regime from one in which undocumented immigrants were to be deported to one of “executive amnesty,” President Obama exceeded his authority, turning him into an “emperor” or a “king.” The President’s supporters insisted, rather, that President Obama was acting fully within his executive authority. Understanding this debate requires one both to delve into the complicated legal context, and to look beyond legal doctrine. The controversy reflected broader concerns about discretionary executive power and the law, linked to anxiety regarding the sovereign’s head of state as “he who decides on the state of exception.” It also derived from specific concerns about President Obama as the embodiment of the sovereign: his racialized body, depicted as illegitimate and foreign, furthered the perception of his policies as illegal. Lastly, the fact that undocumented immigrants are not perceived as members of the body politic helped to produce this vision of DACA and DAPA as lawless action. In this telling, the sovereign actor, the beneficiaries of his action, and the act itself were all cast as illegitimate through a mutually reinforcing logic; all were exceptions that stood “outside the law.”

Introduction: A Conceptual Framework for Engagement with de facto States

Secessionist de facto states, by their very nature, sit outside of the international system. Having unilaterally declared independence from their parent state, they are invariably prevented from joining the United Nations, and thus taking their place as members of the community of universally recognised countries. While the reasons for such punitive approaches have a logic according to prevailing political and legal approaches to secession, it is also recognised that isolation can have harmful effects. Ostracising de facto can not only hinder efforts to resolve the dispute by reducing their willingness to engage in what they see as an asymmetrical settlement process, it can also force them into a closer relationship with a patron state. For this reason, there has been growing interest in academic and policy circles around the concept of engagement without recognition. This is a mechanism that provides for varying degrees of interaction with de facto states while maintaining the position that they are not regarded as independent sovereign actors in the international system. As is shown, while the concept has its flaws, it nevertheless opens up new opportunities for conflict management.

Obvious but Invisible: Ways of Knowing Health, Environment, and Colonialism in a West Coast Indigenous Community

AbstractThis paper interrogates the specific workings and stakes of slow violence onIndigenousground. It argues that despite similarities with other environmental justice struggles, Indigenous ones are fundamentally distinct because of Indigenous peoples' unique relationship to the polluted or damaged entity, to the state, and to capital. It draws from Indigenous studies, history, anthropology, geography, sensory studies, and STS, to present results from research with the Mowachaht Muchalaht First Nation, an Indigenous people on the west coast of British Columbia. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this community used successive strategies to try to render its knowledge about health, environment, and authority visible to the settler state. Each strategy entailed particular configurations of risk, perceptibility, and uncertainty; each involved translation between epistemologies; and each implicated a distinct subject position for Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the state. The community's initial anti-colonial, environmental justice campaign attempted to translate local, Indigenous ways of knowing into the epistemologies of environmental science and public health. After this strategy failed, community leaders launched another that leveraged the state's legal epistemology. This second strategy shifted the balance of risk and uncertainty such that state actors felt compelled to act. The community achieved victory, but at a price. Where the first strategy positioned the community as a self-determined, sovereign actor; the second positioned it as a ward of the state. This outcome illustrates the costs that modern states extract from Indigenous peoples who seek remedial action, and more generally, the mechanisms through which the colonial present is (re)produced.

Sovereignty in the City: The Tacticalization of 'Disallowed' Life

In this paper, I perform close readings of several of the narratives included in the This American Life podcast in order to rethink sovereignty outside of the framework of the state as it is lived and practiced in everyday circumstances. Drawing on Bonnie Honig’s reformulation of sovereignty as a modality of power that is not possessed by a singular authority but instead embodied in the collective activity of a people, I use these narratives to assist in theorizing a politics that seeks not emancipation but rather the enactment of futures that are more egalitarian. Such a politics is best conceived a struggle against forms of violence enacted at specific sites rather than as expressions of unified forms of domination. To undertake this analysis, I begin by briefly outlining Honig’s line of inquiry, after which I turn to the specific narratives documented by This American Life, reading them not merely as the chronicles of life in Englewood but as theoretically fecund exemplars of collective and individual sovereignty. Finally, I conclude by exploring what the reading of such narratives as instances of sovereignty can reveal for us regarding politics more generally. Conceiving of the characters in these narratives as sovereign actors seeking to survive rather than as either helpless sufferers (those who experience violence) or criminals (those who act violently) helps to illuminate the complex political dynamics that sustain poverty and produce violence in locales such as Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood.

Global Governance of Trade in the Era of Competing Commercial Legal Orders: Harmonious Fragmentation, Conflicts or Spontaneous Coherence?

Sovereign actors have lost the lion’s share of their discretion to regulate terms of trade over the last century. The increased cross-border interactions between private merchants have led to the spontaneous creation of autonomous global order of private commercial contracting (the micro-level) while the growing number of various trade-related intergovernmental arrangements has led to the emergence of the global administrative law (on the macro-level) further standardising the terms of cross-border trade. En masse, there is a clear case for identifying the odds of maintaining liberal legal trade order combined with high-standards (labour, social environmental etc) in the increasingly geo-politically polycentric world. The time is ripe for proposing a structuralist/institutional analysis of the current dynamics in the global trade governance, and for analysing one by one, which institutions of private and public trade-related legal order (such as private dispute resolution, model laws, technical standards, intellectual property, competition law or rules of government procurement) will most likely be subject to harmonious fragmentation, which will be torn by conflicts between various sovereign actors, and which will remain spontaneously coherent. In other words, the time is ripe for identifying which existing legal institutions (and merchants’ preferences as to specific jurisdictions, fora etc.) have been mostly locked-in thanks to network effects and cannot be easily replaced (like in the case of railway gauges, vehicle propulsion, nuclear reactors, video recorders or keyboard layouts). One could predict a harmonious fragmentation of various trade customs in the course of the shift from sea to land-trade where new or modified institutions tailored for land-trade-routes would not be in conflict with the existing maritime-law. Conflicts are likely to persist as to the technical standards whereas path-dependence and strong network-effects will likely cement existing globally harmonised intellectual property right for many years to come. However, each legal institution or field of regulation needs its own thorough examination.

Finding the “Sovereign” in “Sovereign Immunity”: Lessons from Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau

ABSTRACTThe doctrine of “sovereign immunity” holds that the U.S. government cannot be sued without its consent. This is not found in the Constitution’s text; it is justified on philosophical grounds as inherent to being a sovereign state: a sovereign must be able to issue commands free from constraint. The sources of this understanding of sovereignty—Hobbes, Bodin, and others—are, in turn, condemned by opponents of sovereign immunity as absolutists whose doctrines are incompatible with limited, constitutional government. This debate, and thus the usual conception of sovereign immunity, rests on a fundamental mistake. Hobbes and his peers were careful to avoid the conflation of government with sovereignty. “Sovereign” immunity, then, is an imposter doctrine that protects government officials by falsely draping them in the sovereign’s cloak. The only sovereign actor, in the American polity, is the people in the act of making or amending the Constitution. Our true, Hobbesian sovereign immunity is nothing more than our unbounded freedom to enact constitutional law.

Sovereign Development: A Grand Strategy for Pakistan

Although Pakistan has never been even accused of any complicity in 9/11, during 2005-2013 U.S. drones killed some 80,000 Pakistanis (49,000 civilians); and associated domestic subversion and terrorism, another 50,000 persons. Pakistan needs to defend its citizens, better. This requires sovereign action by the government to formulate and execute a grand strategy integrating a counter-propaganda offensive, defence, diplomacy, and an expanded conception of development that includes national security (sovereign development). By way of context, the paper identifies four emergent trends that have affected Pakistan, and are likely to be of significance in the years ahead: (1) The re-birth of nationalism in the West; (2) The dominance of “War by Narrative” in the war for oil and Israel; (3) The economic emergence of Sino-Russian Eurasia; and (4) The emergence of militant extremism in India. Together they spell the further weakening of international mechanisms of peace-keeping and the consequent end of globalism as the West turns toward greater nationalism and neo-mercantile economics. While the rise of China and Russia may offset the turn to greater militarism in India, contingent threats to Pakistan's security are likely to rise. To meet these threats, the paper outlines a four-point grand strategy of sovereign development which would provide an overall integrated approach to: (1) Strategic communication; (2) Defence; (3) Diplomacy; and (4) Development. It concludes by identifying some constraints to implementation and suggesting ways to overcome them.

Sovereign Development: Outline of a Grand Strategy for Pakistan

During 2005-2013, missiles fired from US drones led to verified deaths of some 80,000 Pakistanis (49,000 civilians); and associated domestic subversion and terrorism, to the estimated death of another 50,000. More have been dying since 2013. There is a need to defend the nation, better. To do so requires a grand strategy. While, there are objective limits to the scope for sovereign action, hostile information operations have sapped the will to resist of those, who take decisions and make public opinion, in Pakistan, leading to greater helplessness than is warranted. Identifying four emergent global trends, the article outlines a grand strategy — of sovereign development — which would provide an overall integrated approach to strategic communication, diplomacy, development, and defence. It concludes by identifying some constraints to implementation and suggesting ways to overcome them.

Uncertainty, Alert and Distress: The Precarious Position of NGO Search and Rescue Operations in the Central Mediterranean

Abstract: The international framework for maritime search and rescue relies on state actors establishing regions of responsibility supported by private shipmasters acting in compliance with traditional duties to rescue persons in distress at sea. Despite revisions to the framework’s foundational treaty, questions persist about the extent of state responsibilities and the interaction between those responsibilities and international human rights law. Over the past three years, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have provided significant support to the efforts of sovereign actors responding to the migration crisis in the Central Mediterranean. Regional governments and civil society initially praised NGO operations, but in recent months these groups have come to criticize and challenge such operations. Italian authorities have threatened criminal prosecution of NGO deployers and proposed closing national ports to them. Libyan authorities have harassed NGO vessels and sought to exclude them from international waters. These actions are consistent with non-entree strategies employed by Mediterranean states in recent years, but are in certain cases of questionable legality. Although controlling irregular migration is properly the responsibility of state actors, recent policies are inconsistent with principles of rule of law and good governance. Keywords : irregular migration; maritime law; Search and Rescue regime; NGOs; Italy; Libya; human rights.

Immigrants Outside the Law: President Obama, Discretionary Executive Power, and Regime Change

In November, 2014, President Barack Obama announced the creation of DAPA, a program which instructed executive branch officials to exercise their administrative discretion to defer the deportation of eligible applicants. The President’s announcement was met with a firestorm of controversy. Critics charged that, by altering the legal regime from one in which undocumented immigrants were to be deported to one of “executive amnesty,” the President had exceeded his authority, turning him into an “emperor” or a “king.” The President’s supporters saw no such regime change, insisting that the President was acting fully within his executive authority. Understanding this debate requires one both to delve into the complicated legal context, and to look beyond legal doctrine. The firestorm of controversy reflected broader concerns about discretionary executive power and the law, linked to anxiety regarding the sovereign’s head of state as “he who decides on the state of exception.” It also derived from specific concerns about President Obama as the embodiment of the sovereign: his racialized body, depicted as illegitimate and foreign, furthered the perception of his policies as illegal. Lastly, the fact that undocumented immigrants are not perceived as members of the body politic helped to produce this vision of DAPA as lawless regime change. In this telling, the sovereign actor, the beneficiaries of his action, and the act itself are all cast as illegitimate through a mutually reinforcing logic; all are exceptions that stand “outside the law.”

Nigeria as a Geo-Political Entity and Sovereign Actor in International Relations: Interrogating Its Emergence

Utilizing the Secondary Sources of information gathering as well as Content Analysis, this paper x-rayed and questioned the metamorphosis of Nigeria as a single geo-political entity and sovereign participant in International Relations. It ascertains among others that the pre-colonial ethnic nationalities (such as the Igbo, Hausa/Fulani and Yoruba societies) lived in a variety of autonomous politico-economic systems, that the present day geo-political entity called ‘Nigeria’ is neither a “Natural Evolution” nor a “willful or voluntary association” arrived at by the pre-colonial ethnic groups but an “artificial British colonial imposition or creation” culminating in the 1914 amalgamation of Northern and Southern protectorate; that even the nomenclature-‘Nigeria’ is of colonial origin; that with non-militant nationalism, Nigeria obtained her independence on October 1, 1960, but has, since then, at the standpoint of neo-colonialism, been participating peripherally in the relations among nations. The paper also proffers necessary panacea. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2016.v5n1p59

ASEAN’s Stakes: The South China Sea’s Challenge to Autonomy and Agency

ASEAN’s Stakes:The South China Sea’s Challenge to Autonomy and Agency Alice D. Ba (bio) The South China Sea has come to involve important stakes for all involved. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is no different—though its situation is also notably distinct. The South China Sea occupies what Michael Leifer once characterized as the geographic “heart of Southeast Asia.”1 Geography alone means that whatever happens in the South China Sea affects ASEAN states the most directly. Moreover, as smaller powers, these states confront much greater vulnerabilities when it comes to great-power demands, even as they may be particular beneficiaries of great-power association. China’s activities in the South China Sea have no doubt underscored these dilemmas as the ASEAN states all try to navigate between the strategic vulnerabilities and the economic opportunities associated with a rising, more confident China. Nor are ASEAN states’ great-power dilemmas limited to China: the latter’s activities in the South China Sea have also precipitated heightened attention from the United States. ASEAN’s challenge is thus compounded by the fact that the South China Sea has become an important focal point of rivalry and tension between the ASEAN region’s two most important great-power relationships. Maintaining a space between China and the United States—one in which Southeast Asian states can enjoy some range of maneuver and choice—may prove to be the greatest challenge confronting the ASEAN region. This essay considers what is at stake in the South China Sea disputes for ASEAN’s coalition of smaller powers, with special attention paid to institutional interests and constraints. It considers not only the more immediate challenges created by territorial disputes but also the more general great-power dilemmas that heightened tensions have recently thrown into sharp relief. [End Page 47] ASEAN’s Immediate Challenges Most immediately, China’s physical and jurisdictional assertions create the challenge for ASEAN of agreeing on a collective response. This challenge, however, is made more complicated by the fact that it is an intergovernmental organization. Tus, while other governments may have to manage a constellation of domestic interests and agencies, ASEAN as an institution is the expression of ten distinct sovereign actors. States differ not just in the importance they attach to the disputes but also in their relations with China and the kinds of regional responses they prioritize. ASEAN’s unprecedented and very public failure to produce a joint communiqué at its 2012 annual foreign ministers’ meeting chaired by Cambodia in Phnom Penh dramatically illustrated this challenge. Additionally complicating ASEAN’s response is the fact that critical differences exist even among the grouping’s four claimant states. The Philippines and Vietnam have been the most vocal and active in responding to China’s activities, while Brunei and Malaysia—even with recently growing Malaysian concerns—have generally favored softer approaches. Such differences challenge ASEAN’s efforts to adopt a collective position as well as implement possible ad hoc workarounds that might facilitate a way forward. In its response to the South China Sea disputes, ASEAN as a collective has prioritized the pursuit of a regional code of conduct (CoC) because it keeps attention on the principles of international law, as well as existing codes of conduct like ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. Following the embarrassment of ASEAN’s 2012 meeting, Indonesia quickly moved to facilitate ASEAN’s Six-Point Principles on the South China Sea. This statement identifies the “early conclusion” of a CoC and the “full implementation” of both ASEAN’s 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea and the 2011 guidelines as important priorities alongside self-restraint and the nonuse of force by all parties, “full respect” for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and the peaceful resolution of disputes. These six principles continue to provide ASEAN states with an important basis for consensus and action. Indonesia’s moves to quickly correct the failures of the 2012 ASEAN ministers’ meeting under Cambodia’s chairmanship are indicative of the understood risks that the South China Sea disputes pose to the organization. Notably, however, the CoC is “not meant...

Governance of technological change: How to define it without reducing it?The Governance of Socio-Technical Systems: Explaining Changeedited by Susana Borrás and Jakob Edler

The governance of technology and innovation has become an increasingly important issue in recent decades. Issues such as environmental management, the availability of energy sources, arms control and food safety have appeared in the area of transnational politics, and are now governed by different conflict resolution instruments within the framework of international law, such as treaties, protocols and conventions. Nation states play a central role in negotiating, writing and operationalizing these legal devices. However, issues of scientific and technical governance often pass national borders to cross multiple spheres of sovereign action and different jurisdictions, communities of practice, and private sector strategies. Analysts from a variety of social science disciplines are interested in how arrangements of scientific and technical governance take effect in view of the internationalization of issues, the complexity of devices, the changing borders of governmentality, and the globalization of actors. A number of authors have explored how these arrangements are redrawing the boundaries of nation states, and more generally, how they reconfigure the meaning and the implementation of democracy thanks to the intervention of new players, whose perimeter is defined around their involvement in the governance of complex technical issues ( Irwin 2008 ).

The securitization of citizenship in a ‘Segregated City’: a reflection on Rio’s Pacifying Police Units

The Pacification Police Units – UPPs – implemented in Rio de Janeiro since 2008 have as one of their stated goals the promotion of the integration between the pacified favelas and the ‘formal’ city, aiming to overcome the view of Rio as a ‘divided city’. Intending to problematize the reasoning behind this stated goal in order to question the UPPs’ very foundations, this article examines the political and sociospatial background in which they were introduced. The implementation and operation of the UPPs is outlined in the context of the militarization of Rio’s spaces, and especially of its urban poor regions, within an analysis of what assumptions about favelas and slum residents the UPPs imply. The UPPs are analyzed in dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s work as a sovereign act of ‘drawing lines of distinction’ between lives worth living and politically worthless ‘Others’. It becomes clear that they are guilty of articulating and reinforcing what Teresa Caldeira has named the ‘talk of crime’, a Manicheistic discourse through which Brazilians articulate and cope with their daily encounter with violence. The disjunctive nature of Brazil’s ‘inclusively inegalitarian’ democracy, as explored by James Holston, is emphasized. Brazil emerges as a post-dictatorial country, in which neoliberal reforms and democratic opening have simultaneously implied an increasingly authoritarian penal state that targets the urban marginalized as its ‘internal enemies’.

Color-Coded Sovereignty and the Men in Black

The appearance of effective security making—demonstrated through surveillance, visibility, and ongoing performance—is significant to contemporary sovereign authority in urban spaces characterized by quotidian violence and crime. This article examines La Cancha, Cochabamba, Bolivia’s enormous outdoor market, which is policed not by the state but by private security firms that operate as nonstate sovereign actors in the space of the market. The article provides an ethnographic account of one of these firms (the Men in Black), and documents the work of both municipal and national police—all of them distinguished by differently colored uniforms—in the management of crime, administration of justice, and establishment of public order in the market. Sovereignty here is derived through public performance, both violent and nonviolent, through which the Men in Black demonstrate and maintain their sovereign power.

Speech-act theory to enhance Karl Barth's homiletical postulation of a sermon's ‘revelatory compliance’

AbstractKarl Barth's theology is a theology which was born from the pulpit. For Barth the formulation and enactment of the unity of church, theology and proclamation had become an integral part of his life and theological legacy. While Barth taught as professor at the University of Bonn he published his first volume of hisChurch Dogmatics(CD) with an emphasis on divine revelation. At the time of the publication ofCDI, Barth held two seminars on homiletics. The seminar notes were later assembled and turned into a book with the same title. If both works,CDI andHomiletics, are compared side by side a major theological inconsistency becomes apparent. InCDI Barth emphasises that revelation as the ‘Word of God’ remains with God, leaving the divine as the solely acting sovereign. Whereas inHomiletics, Barth talks about a sermon's ‘Offenbarungsmässigkeit’ – a sermon's revelatory compliance. These two postulations are not only in tension but they contradict each other. The underlying problem is that Barth cannot define revelation as a solely divine act which takes place separately and independently of human interaction; by simultaneously asking for a sermon and preachers’ revelatory compliance, as if otherwise God would not be able to reveal himself. This poses the question as to how this inconsistency can be resolved. The underlying problem for Barth was at that time, apparently, upholding both divine revelation and human proclamation without compromising the character of God and the nature of a sermon. A way out of the dilemma can be found if revelation and sermon delivery are reframed and complemented by the philosophical approach of John R. Searle's and John L. Austin's ‘speech-act theory’. ‘Speech act theory’ better appropriates Barth's desire to elevate a homily because of the ‘reality change’ which takes places in the very act of proclamation. In this theory proclamation is understood as a human act bound to God's truth which is creating a ‘new reality’ that opens and expects to have this reality filled and actualised by God's sovereign act of revelation. When proclamation/preaching is interpreted as ‘speech-act theory’, this follows Barth's desire to elevate the human act of the sermon delivery by simultaneously keeping the distinction between the human and divine, which is really worthy to be called a speech event.

Marketing Sovereign Promises: The English Model

The difficulty sovereign actors face in making their promises credible is widely appreciated (e.g., North and Weingast 1989; Myerson 2008). In this article, I argue that the English repeatedly usedinstitutions of monopoly brokerageto mediate trades between the sovereign (offering various promises) and subjects (offering revenues). Once set up—at different times in different markets—institutions of monopoly brokerage sparked substantial and abrupt growth in state revenues. Moreover, these revenue increases cannot be explained by changes in promise-holders’ ability to punish nonperformance, changes in the preferences of pivotal state decision makers, or changes in high constitutional structure alone.