Understanding Of Sovereignty Research Articles

Sociological study of cyber threats as an integrated part of the general data protection regulation

Sociology studies society and the patterns of its development, social processes, institutions, relations, structures, communities and certain cultural values which determine its development. Sociology also studies human behavior - how it affects society, and how people behave in social groups. There are many understandings of sovereignty in academic circles but mainly as absolute and hierarchical. As time passes, the concept of sovereignty, which prioritizes territory, has begun to lose relevance due to massive technological developments. In the context of technology and national security, territorial rules are irrelevant for three reasons: technology makes consistent and predictable territorial definitions difficult, data often moves in ways unrelated to the interests of users and legislators, and technology makes it easier for public and private actors to circumvent territorial rules, often without detection [12]. Another consequence of technological development is new actors with strong international influence due to globalization, free markets, and technological developments. Of all these actors, the most interesting are multinational companies. They do not operate on a territorial basis, which creates problems of jurisdictional asymmetry, overlap and control rather than of sovereignty in its formal sense [40]. Is sovereignty still relevant for the state? Since the advent of the Internet, the relevance of the nation-state concept has been questioned, and state actors have gradually lost their dominance. The Internet supports many international actors, and technology companies are the most significant. Their domination creates economic, legal, political, and social challenges; thereby, the state tries to regulate technology companies. The authors argue that the state sovereignty is still relevant despite many arguments saying otherwise. The paper explains the relevancy of the state sovereignty by presenting two cases: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the New Media Bargaining Code (NMBC). The nation-state demonstrates its sovereignty by the law affecting national companies; thus, showing that the state can restrain the power of technology companies, i.e., state sovereignty is still relevant in the contemporary era.

The 1921 Constitution and Beyond: Any Inspiration After 100 Years?

The 1921 Constitution has mostly been considered as a unique piece of legal document in Turkish Legal History with regard to the time it was written, the conditions under it was created, the necessity it touched and the era it changed. The 1921 Constitution had been assessed by scholars, bureaucrats, politicians and lawyers in different times from distinct perspectives. It has got special attention lately as regards to the discussions on constitution-making processes. Even after 100 years, many of its features inspire today’s constitutional discussions as the 1921 Constitution touches even today’s sociological, political and legal needs. In this context, this paper aims to assess the 1921 Constitution first by pointing out the unique features; then, gives try to answer a question posed whether the 1921 Constitution is a constitution itself, or not. This trial is done under the double constitution period discussions and by pulling out the deficiencies of the 1921 Constitution. Subsequently, the box of inspirational touches of the 1921 Constitution to 100 years beyond is opened. In that sense, it has been found that the understanding of sovereignty that brings it down to its origin “earth/humankind”, the idea of local democracy and the vision on fundamental rights and freedoms that open the door to modern understanding of rights on this part of the world, could be drawn/inherited for today’s constitutional making processes.

The Remains of Power: Meaning and Function of Regalia in Madagascar

ABSTRACT It has become commonplace to define sovereignty as an almost divine and transcendent power, a concept which has its roots in the ancient Roman world. Following Foucault’s lead, for example, Giorgio Agamben has argued that the political capture of life represents the original paradigm of the entire history of Western civilization. This ontological and Western-centric reading of sovereignty has had an enormous influence on the social and human sciences. Taking its cue from Ernst Kantorowicz’s insights into the ‘duality’ of power, this article problematizes Agamben’s reading by exploring an alternative paradigm, which conceives sovereignty as a ‘chronotopic apparatus’ and ordering ritual. Through an analysis of the meaning and function of royal remains (regalia), effigies and ritual practices in western Madagascar, the essay shows a different understanding of sovereignty and of its symbolism, which can be used to articulate an alternative genealogy of political power.

Chinese Political Theory in Dialogue with Rousseau

Within the vast body of scholarship on the Enlightenment, only a small portion addresses the role of China in the debates of that period. Among those, scarcely any concerns the relationship between China and Rousseau’s thought. Yet the connections are many, and deep. This essay surveys a body of Chinese political theory available to Rousseau, then compares Rousseau’s understanding of sovereignty, the “people,” popular will, public opinion, and the authority of office, with comparable terms present in the Chinese theory available to him. The aim of this exercise is not so much to establish influence, though that can be difficult to deny. Primarily, the essay attempts to show that Rousseau’s system generates contradictions in part because he attempts to combine parliamentary procedure with the conception of sovereignty and the popular will found in his Chinese sources.

Tracing understanding of sovereignty and settler-colonial violence in the Quebec’s Viens Commission (2016–2019)

ABSTRACT The Val d'Or crisis began in 2015 with local Indigenous women naming the violence they faced at the hands of police officers in a news report, which culminated in 37 documented cases yet no criminal charges. In response to the outcry, the provincial ‘Viens Commission: Listening, Reconciliation and Progress' was launched in 2016. The mandate of the commission was to determine if Indigenous people faced discrimination in Quebec's public services. This paper reviews the terms and limits of this commission when it is understood as a discursive production of modern liberal settler-colonial nations. My analysis proposes that the commission, unwittingly or not, is bound by the conditions of existence of ongoing settler-colonization, that is the imperative of land access. The issue of discrimination against Indigenous people can then be discussed and ‘resolved' as disconnected from issues of land sovereignty. As per Goeman’s conception of scales of spatial injustices, it mostly leaves the alienation between the interconnected scales targeted by settler-colonial violence (such as body and land) unchanged. By paying attention to the way violence is presented and managed, I discuss how the commission may be oriented by larger conditions interested in re-settling the present and in veiling land sovereignty questions.

Muslim Kingship and the Problem of Un-Conversion

ABSTRACT The transcendence of divinity in Islam along with submission to God as the ultimate sovereign created a host of challenges for Muslim kings in their formal, legalistic interactions with non-monotheists, especially those communities who perceived the divine as immanent in nature and did not make a distinction between the veneration of kings and the worship of gods. While the preferred biblical mode for smoothing such engagements between the believer and non-believer was “conversion” of the latter, this approach was often neither possible nor desirable from the perspective of Muslim rulers in Asia. Thus, in many cases, Muslim kings practiced a transgressive form of boundary crossing and translation across religious divisions erected by biblical monotheism, what I call “un-conversion,” by deliberately bypassing or overriding the scriptural requirements of Islam. This essay examines the theoretical implications of such un-conversions for our understanding of sovereignty and political theology in Islam.

A Liberal Peace?: The Growth of Liberal Norms and the Decline of Interstate Violence

How have understandings of fundamental norms of international society changed over time? How does this relate to the decline of interstate violence since 1945? Previous explanations have focused on regime type, domestic institutions, economic interdependence, relative power, and nuclear weapons, I argue that a crucial and underexplored part of the puzzle is the change in understanding of sovereignty over the same period. In this article, I propose a novel means of examining change in these norms between 1970 and 2014 by analyzing the content of UN Security Council resolutions. This analysis is then utilized in quantitative analysis of the level of violence dispute participants resorted to in all Militarized Interstate Disputes in the period. I find that as liberal understandings of fundamental norms have increased, that the average level of violence used has decreased. This points to a crucial missing component in the existing literature: that institutions can only constrain when political actors share the right norms.

Foucault’s Analytics of Sovereignty

ABSTRACT The classical theory of sovereignty describes sovereignty as absolute and undivided yet no early modern state could claim such features. Historical record instead suggests that sovereignty was always divided and contested. In this article I argue that Foucault offers a competing account of sovereignty that underlines such features and is thus more historically apt. While commentators typically assume that Foucault’s understanding of sovereignty is borrowed from the classical theory, I demonstrate instead that he offers a sui generis interpretation, which results from the application of his general strategic conception of power to sovereignty itself. In construing sovereignty through a “matrix” of civil war, Foucault thus deprives it of the absoluteness traditionally attributed to it. Instead, he views sovereignty as constituted by conflictual and mobile power relations, a precarious political technology that deploys violence to restore its authority. I also motivate Foucault’s contention that popular sovereignty remains fundamentally continuous with the absolutist sovereignty it succeeds, insofar as it masks and thereby perpetuates unequal power relations in conditions of social conflict. According to Foucault, sovereignty is not a fact of power but a contestory claim, a discourse whose mutability helps to explain its persistence today.

STATE SOVEREIGNTY IN INTERNATIONAL AND INTEGRATION FRAMEWORKS

Introduction. The article provides the overview of the transformation of state sovereignty due to global trends. Main stages of the historical development of this concept are indicated. The author identifies and evaluates from various positions the key «reference points» of the correlation between state sovereignty and the modern globalized world based on international law, and presents the vision of the impact of integration on it. Materials and methods. The study is based on general scientific and special methods. In view of the nature of the researched issues, the comparative legal research, as well as analogy and modelling were of particular importance. Much attention was paid to the legal framework of the EU, the EAEU, Russia and a number of foreign states, as well as to the doctrine of international law and the theory of international integration. Research results. The article presents the integrated approach to the source of state sovereignty and the primacy of its natural, national or international nature according to the modern trends. Correlation between state sovereignty and international legal personality is also reviewed. The author designs the prototype of «integration sovereignty» on the basis of theoretical approaches and practical examples. Discussion and conclusion. The author substantiates a broad interpretation of the «classical» understanding of sovereignty within the framework of international integration trends. It is noted that the presented concept requires deep understanding, theoretical study and further scientific discussion, however, ignoring its existence, according to the author, is impossible, and taking it into account in practical work is necessary.

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.

DIGITALIZATION — A FACTOR OF TRANSFORMATION OF STATE SOVEREIGNTY AS AN INTERNATIONAL LEGAL CATEGORY IN UN DOCUMENTS AND A VALUE IN THE CONSTITUTIONS OF THE CIS MEMBER STATES

This article deals with the influence of globalization, information and communication technologies on the scientific understanding of sovereignty as an international legal category and constitutional value. The category "sovereignty" in its axiological dimension acts as a basic element of the national system of constitutional values. In the international legal context, the principle of respect for the sovereignty of the state is a system-forming one. It is noted that due to the dualistic value nature, sovereignty is subject to protection by both national constitutional legislation and international law. The author analyzes UN documents and the constitutions of the CIS member States and suggests ways to optimize the legal protection of state sovereignty in the digital environment.

RECONSIDERING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VITORIA AND GROTIUS’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE INTERNATIONAL LAW AND NATURAL LAW TRADITIONS

AbstractIn light of recent reevaluations of the work of Hugo Grotius, this essay analyzes the respective roles of Francisco de Vitoria and Grotius in the construction of the “Grotian tradition” of international law and human rights. In contrast to conventional accounts which understand the two within a progression, this essay argues that Vitoria and Grotius can alternatively be understood as representing two distinct strains of international law and ethics, forms of which persist to this day. The first is that strain which privileges local governance based on the natural law and which insists that international law must have a moral or equitable valence (represented today by liberal internationalism). The second, competing strain which, with its focus on “neutral” rules of commerce and international order, presumes that it need not have such a valence (essentially, neoliberalism). In the process, this essay examines the role of the natural law in Vitoria’s thought, which for him was most often a reason against interference or intervention, not for. The essay also highlights the role of the Eighty Years’ War between the Dutch United Provinces and Spain in the development of Grotius’s understanding of sovereignty, in contrast to the Thirty Years’ War which is given more prominence in conventional accounts.

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 Alice L. Baumgartner (bio) Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s. Edited by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Pp. 288. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) The 1860s was a decade of constitutional crisis in North America. In 1861, eleven southern states seceded from the Union in defense of slavery. [End Page 429] As Union and Confederate soldiers fought the opening battles of the war, the French army invaded Mexico and installed an Austrian archduke as its emperor. In 1867, the same year that republican forces in Mexico executed the French-imposed emperor, Canadian provinces and territories entered into confederation, resulting in greater independence from Britain. By examining these constitutional crises in relation to one another, Remaking North American Sovereignty not only deepens our understanding of sovereignty and state formation in the 1860s, but also models several different methodological approaches to researching and writing transnational history. Remaking North American Sovereignty is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Making Nations,” examines how sovereignty was reshaped and redefined in the 1860s. Steven Hahn looks at the familiar history of the Civil War from the “inside out” and “the southside north” in order to interrogate our assumptions about the development of capitalism, the abolition of slavery, and the geography of the sectional crisis. Andrew Smith points out the hemispheric factors that helped to convince most Canadians to remain part of the British Empire: British military might promised to guard against threatened invasions from the United States at the same time that the U.S. Civil War and political instability in Latin America demonstrated the dangers of republicanism. Pablo Mijango y González takes up the question of why Mexico and the United States each experienced a “constitutional revolution,” while Canada underwent a more peaceful process of “constitutional gradualism.” Robert Bonner explores the visual vocabulary of sovereignty across North America in order to show how sovereignty was not only conceived but visualized in new ways in the 1860s. Part 2, “Indigenous Polities,” assesses how Native peoples shaped and responded to the constitutional crises in North America. Jane Dinwoodie asks how Native groups who had resisted removal responded to the Civil War, showing that some tribes, such as the Eastern Cherokee, fought for the Confederacy in order to secure their claim to their lands, while others, such as the Bayou Lacombe Choctaws, tried to protect their communities by retreating to remote, inaccessible terrain. Ryan Hall analyzes Blackfoot treaty-making to show both similarities and connections between state expansion in the United States and Canada. Marcela Terrazas y Basante studies how Indian raids shaped the construction of sovereignty at the national, state, and local levels in Mexico. Part 3, “The Complications of the Market,” looks at conceptions of sovereignty at a more granular level. Christopher Clark shows how the [End Page 430] expansion of freeholding, promoted by the distribution of homesteads and the allotment of tribal lands, extended and transformed national power in the United States. Benjamin H. Johnson compares Louis Riel and Juan Cortina to reexamine the consequences of greater national power in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Mary P. Ryan takes up debates over landownership in the San Francisco Bay area to understand how different scales of authority—municipal, state, and federal—contest and, in the process, construct conceptions of sovereignty. These essays speak to one another in ways that enrich our understanding of state formation and transformation in the 1860s. One of the greatest ironies of Greater Reconstruction was, as Frank Towers writes in the introduction, “the simultaneous drive by President Abraham Lincoln to free slaves in the South and conquer indigenous states in the West” (8). The issue of sovereignty helps to resolve the apparent contradiction. As Steven Hahn explains, the constitutional crises of the nineteenth-century United States revolved around “the various challenges and obstacles to a national sovereignty, about competing sovereignties and their eventual defeats, whether they were slaveholding, Native American, Mormon, or some other” (25). Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in order to defeat the Confederate States of America. After...

SOVEREIGNTY AND STATE OF EXCEPTION IN WILLIAM GOLDING’S LORD OF THE FLIES

The aim of this study is to evaluate the concepts of sovereignty and bare life in Lord of the Flies written by the English novelist, William Golding. An evaluation of the novel with the understanding of sovereignty as it is put forward by the Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben will demonstrate that the text can be read as the formation of civilization, contrary to the point of view that interprets the novel as the disappearance of civilization. To this end, the examples of state of exceptions, which Agamben thinks are intimately related to the formation of sovereignty and law, in the novel demonstrated. According to this approach, the social order is enabled only through the state of exception. In the novel, this state becomes apparent with the suspension of law/rule and also the degradation of the human from political existence to bare life. After the novel is analyzed through these concepts, the island and the outside the island will be shown to be similar in terms of the state of exception with a specific emphasis on the relation between the novel and imperialist/ colonial biopolitics, and thus the novel cannot be read as the disappearance of civilization. In conclusion, it will be underlined that the violence-forged relations of stranded boys on the island become as such as a result of the nature of sovereignty and biopolitics.

Are Liberal Internationalists Still Liberal?

Contrary to a widespread perception, the world order created by the UN Charter was not premised on the rejection of sovereignty. It was fundamentally, and in some ways more purposefully than before, souverainiste – not in the sense that it admitted of no higher authority than the sovereign state, for such extreme souverainisme would have been not only inconsistent with the Charter, but also impossible to reconcile with any kind of international law. Rather, the idea underlying the Charter was one of state sovereignty constrained by international law and also deepened by a sense of purpose, namely the flourishing of human communities through the advancement of self-government and human rights. Sovereignty thus conceived was meant to provide support and legitimacy to the new world order. This understanding of sovereignty was not contradicted by the curtailment of certain aspects of state sovereignty under the Charter. Most crucially, sovereign states lost the legal power, if they ever had it, to wage aggressive war. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, many predicted that international law would take a democratic turn, and complete the transformation that had begun with the UN Charter. There was probably no better moment for international law to fully embrace the democratic ideal, and the principle of self-determination would have been the obvious vehicle for this change. Yet, democracy does not seem to have made much progress as a principle of international law since 1989. Why did the 1989 promises of a democratic turn in international law fail to bear fruit? The answer may lie in the transformation of liberal internationalism over the last decades. Liberal internationalism had been reshaped by two powerful forces: one ideological (supranationalism), and the other socio-economic (globalisation). Each of these forces stymied the democratic transformation of international law, and changed the concept of the liberal international order in the minds of liberal internationalists.

Muslim Political Theology Before and After Empire: Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl’s Station of Leadership (Manṣab-i Imāmat)

ABSTRACTThis essay examines an important yet hitherto unexplored early-nineteenth century Indo-Persian work of Muslim political theology Station of Leadership (Manṣab-i Imāmat; also known as Darājāt-i Imāmat), written by the towering and contentious Sunnī thinker and political theorist from Delhi Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d. 1831). In this hugely critical though lesser known of Ismāʿīl’s texts, he sought to detail a theory and framework of ideal forms of Muslim political orders and leaders. Manṣab-i Imāmat presents a fascinating example of a text of Muslim political theology composed during a moment marked by a crisis of sovereignty as South Asia gradually yet decisively transitioned from Mughal to British rule. In this essay, through a close reading of Manṣab-i Imāmat, I aim to bring into view a vision of Muslim political thought and understanding of sovereignty that exceed and subvert the modern privileging of a territorial conception of the nation-state as the centerpiece of politics. I show that while tethered to an imperial Muslim political theology that assumed Islam’s superiority over and subsumption of other religious identities and traditions, sovereign power for Ismāʿīl indexed not territorial sovereignty but the maintenance of Muslim markers of distinction in the public performance of everyday religious life.

История американской внешнеполитической мысли: трактовки суверенитета США в конце XX – начале XXI века

In the 1990s the end of the Cold War and the US’s efforts to build a “new world order” actualized in scientific discourse the problem of understanding the principle of state sovereignty. Moreover, due to the WTO accession, the discussion among United States’ scholars intensified about the preservation of sovereignty of their own state. As a result, both the US authorities and most experts advocate the inviolability of the sovereignty of their country, noting, however, that it might be temporarily limited by different international obligations, first of all by economic agreements, but this does not affect it radically and the possibility of withdrawing from various kinds of contracts remains. At the same time, the last superpower’s foreign policy actions at the end of the 20th century (interference in the internal affairs of Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, Yugoslavia, etc.) clearly illustrate the disregard for the sovereignty of other states. In an attempt to explain this policy, they argued that sovereignty, while remaining a significant principle in general, can be lost, which opens up the legitimate path to the internationalization of a conflict. All in all, despite the fact that such an understanding of sovereignty as a conditional principle, is not new in itself, the United States took some steps to extend this understanding to the whole world, granting itself the right to single-handedly determine cases where and why sovereign rights are lost.

Karen Education and Boundary-Making at the Thai-Burmese Borderland

ABSTRACT This article argues that schooling and education are boundary-making devices in the volatile borderland straddling Burma and Thailand. We show that the development of Karen education was one of the ways in which the Karen National Union (KNU) erected ideological, symbolic and cultural boundaries to keep this borderland separate from the Burmese and Thai states. We draw attention to the conflict in what is considered valued knowledge, the recognition of learning, and who is considered the legitimate authority to manage education at the local and school levels. In fact, examining Karen education at the Thai-Burmese borderland is more than just a description of schooling: it is an examination of the struggle over governance and identity, and ultimately of understandings of sovereignty and nationhood. Moreover, the changing political landscapes in Thailand and Burma have now drawn this borderland and its education into the orbit of the national sphere, provoking a redefinition of notions of governance and nationhood.

‘Parliamentary’, ‘popular’ and ‘pooled’: conflicts of sovereignty in the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union

ABSTRACTMany believe the UK to have been an awkward member of the EU, firmly attached to a traditional idea of parliamentary sovereignty. In fact, the UK’s membership of the EU has coincided with a profound transformation in the British state and corresponding understandings of sovereignty. This article examines this transformation by focusing on its legal and constitutional aspects. The article contends that EU membership has provided a context for ‘constitutional modernization’ in the UK, undertaken in the absence of public scrutiny or debate. By the EU referendum of June 2016, the UK found itself with a transformed constitutional structure in practice but with an unchanged reliance in theory on a traditional notion of parliamentary sovereignty. Events over the last 3 years have revealed the depth of this disjuncture and its implications for British sovereignty.

Still searching for (food) sovereignty: Why are radical discourses only partially mobilised in the independent Anglo-Caribbean?

The notion of ‘food sovereignty’ is often surprisingly absent in food and agricultural discourses in the Anglo-Caribbean, where over the past half century policy-making has aligned with conventional ‘food security’ approaches. This paper argues that, in addition to its contemporary entrenchment within a neoliberal environment, this is also due to the nature of ‘sovereignty’ itself in a region which has been shaped by a distinctive colonial, social and economic history. In order to demonstrate this, firstly, it makes the case for why, in the context of rising food imports and enduring structural legacies, food sovereignty matters in the Anglo-Caribbean. Secondly, it charts changes in the regional policy of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to show how, despite repeated calls to increase self-sufficiency, conventional neoliberal approaches to agricultural development and food security have predominated since the 1970s. Finally, it identifies and analyses limited instances where food sovereignty discourses have been mobilized, by farmers’ groups and political actors, and interrogates the meaning of both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ sovereignty itself in this post-colonial context. It finds mobilisations of food sovereignty to be characterised by a repeated conflation of domestic food production with the concept’s ideological principles as a political project, and a particular understanding of sovereignty that places an emphasis on ‘the state’ and ‘the region’ over ‘the people’. This shows that the very nature of ‘sovereignty’ itself plays a critical role in both the translation of, and possibilities for mobilising ‘food sovereignty’ as a radical project as envisaged in the wider literature.