Vision Of Sovereignty Research Articles

Hierarchies, Constitutional Dialogues, and Political Networks: A Comparative and Conceptual Study

This Chapter links two discourses: sovereignty and constitutional dialogue. Dialogue analysis is typically part of a normative attempt to alleviate concerns about the supremacy of the judiciary once judicial review of legislation is introduced. In this Chapter, it is argued that “dialogue” in fact connotes two distinct structural arrangements: formal and implied. True formal dialogue mechanisms create potential crises for those who wish to maintain the hierarchical vision of sovereignty as they transform the balance of powers. Other constitutional mechanisms such as limitations clauses have been defined as dialogic instruments, but are in fact mere permutations of the classical form of judicial decision-making. The Chapter discusses the version of implied/political dialogue that has emerged in the US and offers a vision of multi-player networks that operate both in the legal and political spheres. The Chapter demonstrates how both formal and implied dialogue assist in rejecting hierarchical visions of domestic sovereignty.

How to Grow out of Nothing

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 unleashed a new wave of decolonization, and throughout the 1990s, the newly independent states spent a lot of time and effort articulating their visions of sovereignty. Unlike neighboring Lithuania, which could turn its brief experience of interwar independence into a paradigmatic model of the postcolonial and postsocialist state, Belarus had to produce its narratives of political independence from scratch. This essay looks closely at the so-called National Rebirth, a vibrant intellectual attempt to elaborate an anticolonial view of the Belarusian past and its postcolonial present, which took place in the 1990s. Framed in negative terms and expressed through gestures of rejection, the Rebirth emerged as a form of apophatic nationalism that envisioned nationhood through an extensive cartography of nonbelonging and self-erasure. Following the key figures of the Rebirth, this essay shows how instances of absence were persistently elaborated, classified, and transformed into genealogies and historiographies; how nothingness was mined as a source of inspiration; and how nonalignment became a strategic choice.

Book Review: Jaime Lluch, Visions of Sovereignty: Nationalism and Accommodation in Multinational Democracies

Book Review: Jaime Lluch, <i>Visions of Sovereignty: Nationalism and Accommodation in Multinational Democracies</i>

Visions of Sovereignty: Nationalism and Accommodation in Multinational Democracies. By Jaime Lluch. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 344p. $75.00.

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Democracy, society and truth: an exploration of Catholic social teaching

AbstractThis article maintains that modern Catholic social teaching took shape by positioning itself between revolutionary ideologies that sought to destroy the church and reactionary forces that sought to instrumentalise it. Among the factors that contributed to this development were the emergence of a theologyical and socio-political conception of the laity, reflection on the question of how humans participate in Christ's rule, the development of a consociational vision of sovereignty in distinction from top-down or monistic views, the importance of labour to a proper understanding of human dignity, and the discovery of ‘society’, as distinct from the market and the state. Appreciation of these factors resulted in the magisterial defence of democratic politics as a necessary condition for telling the truth about what it means to be human.

Visions of Sovereignty. Nationalism and Accommodation in Multinational Democracies (National and Ethnic Conflict in the 21st Century), by Jaime Lluch.

<i>Visions of Sovereignty. Nationalism and Accommodation in Multinational Democracies (National and Ethnic Conflict in the 21st Century)</i>, by Jaime Lluch.

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology

The events that hastily came to be called "The Arab Spring" have done much to reopen the question of what it means for a Muslim society to be ruled legitimately and to force Islamist parties to account for their visions of sovereignty and authority in the public sphere. This paper provides a historical and conceptual background to certain modern attempts to harmonize ideals of divine and popular sovereignty. I pay special attention to the pre-2011 doctrines of Tunisian Islamist leader, Rashid al-Ghannushi, particularly his attempt to reconcile visions of divine and popular sovereignty through the doctrine of a universal covenant of vicegerency (istikhlaf). I contrast this doctrine of a "caliphate of man" with other modern attempts to institutionalize divine sovereignty (Saudi Arabia and Iran), while suggesting a set of ambiguities this doctrine raises both for the idea of rule by divine law (shari‘a) and for post-revolutionary expectations of democracy within a "civil state" (dawla madaniyya).

The erotics of sovereignty: queer Native writing in the era of self-determination

Mark Rifkin’s most recent study of queer Native writing situates itself within a discourse on gender and sexuality that has grown to prominence over recent years. His purpose in The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination (2012) is not to further the understanding of a culturally embedded practice but rather to redefine the very idea of self-determination in light of an understanding that the personal is both transpersonal and political. Central to Rifkin’s project is a question raised by Louis Owens two decades ago in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (1992): who counts as a real Indian? Rifkin seeks to answer this question by posing another: what counts as a real tribe? He is clearly not satisfied with the pat answer that makes federal recognition and blood quantum the index of American indigeneity. Instead, Rifkin seeks a broader definition linked to sovereignty unconstrained by settler colonial values, notably marriage, homemaking, and the nuclear family. Queer sexuality, outside of the constraints of heteronormativity, offers a model for a new vision of sovereignty, which could encompass an idea of peoplehood even in the absence of a communal land base. In his heavily theoretical text, Rifkin links representations of sexuality in the work of four queer Native writers—Qwo-Li Driskill, Deborah Miranda, Greg Sarris, and Chrystos—to possibilities for extending sovereignty and recognizing Native identity in situations where sovereignty has been foreclosed or denied by the US government. Beginning with the Cherokee, tribal enrollment has enforced a heteronormative vision of tribal identity through bourgeois domesticity on individual allotments and blood quantum traced through nuclear families. Rifkin uses Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology to explain how Driskill’s poetry registers Cherokee identity through its connection to a history of diaspora, dislocation, and silence, even though Driskill’s Cherokee ancestors were never registered on the Dawes Rolls, and he cannot become a registered member of the tribe. While the body serves as the site of continuing struggle, making present that which previously had no material form, words themselves become ancestors marked by the traumas of settlement. Ancestry must be understood as an active relationship rather than “the heteroreproductive transmission of racial substance” (66). Ultimately, according to Rifkin, Driskill’s work suggests the possibility that the

Be Careful What You Wish For: Changing Doctrines, Changing Technologies, and the Lower Cost of war

The collective security structure created by the UN Charter is becoming shakier than ever, and two recent trends pose particular challenges to Charter rules on the use of force. The first trend involves a normative shift in understandings of state sovereignty, and the second trend involves improvements in technology--specifically, the rapid evolution of unmanned aerial vehicles, precision weapons, and surveillance technologies. Each trend on its own raises difficult issues. Together, they further call into question international law's ability to meaningfully constrain the use of force by states. CHANGES IN NORMATIVE UNDERSTANDINGS OF SOVEREIGNTY The last two decades have seen a dramatic shift away from traditional ideas about state sovereignty. Increasingly, both legal scholars and national and international-level advocates and political decisionmakers have articulated an understanding of state sovereignty as limited and subject to what amounts to de facto waiver. In this vision of sovereignty, a state is required to execute certain responsibilities. If it to do so, external actors have a right and/or an obligation to step in themselves to ensure proper execution of these responsibilities. Versions of these arguments have emerged recently in two very different discourse communities. One is the human rights community, in which this vision of sovereignty is often couched in terms of atrocity prevention and the to protect. Parallel versions of this argument have also emerged from within the national security community. Here, the argument is generally couched in terms of state duties to prevent the export of terrorism. The Responsibility to Protect Let us start with the to protect. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the debates in the 1990s over humanitarian intervention had morphed into discussion of the responsibility to protect, or R2P, a doctrine initially developed by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). In a 2001 report, ICISS offered a starkly different understanding of sovereignty than that taken for granted prior to World War II: State sovereignty implies ... Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international to protect. (1) ICISS was careful to note that the use of military force to protect populations should be a last resort, and that any R2P-based military interventions should be authorized by the Security Council. But ICISS was unwilling to view Security Council authorization as an absolute requirement: If the Security Council rejects a proposal [to intervene to protect a population] or to deal with it in a reasonable time, alternative options ... [include] action within area of jurisdiction by regional or sub-regional organizations under Chapter VIII of the Charter, subject to their seeking subsequent authorization. (2) After all, warned ICISS, if the Council fails to discharge its to protect in conscience-shocking situations crying out for action ... concerned states may not rule out other means to meet the gravity and urgency of that situation. (3) Within a decade, the R2P concept had gained substantial traction throughout the international community. It was referenced in the 2005 UN World Summit Outcome Document, and in 2011, the Security Council referenced R2P in Resolution 1973, which authorized the use of force to protect civilians in Libya, as well as Resolution 1975, authorizing the use of force in Cote d'Ivoire. (4) While most post-ICISS elaborations of R2P have--for obvious reasons--tended to downplay the possibility of military interventions undertaken without Security Council authorization, the normative logic of R2P suggests that Security Council authorization should not be dispositive. …

Family Model and Mystical Body: Witnessing Gender through Political Metaphor in the Early Modern Nation-State

FRANCE BEFORE SUNRISE: TWO POLITICAL THEORIES MEET The sixteenth century in France was a “constitutional moment”—a time when political theorists and jurists articulated a full and rich iteration of the value of constitutionalism and legal-parliamentary authority in relation to the monarch. It was also a moment to “witness” in many senses. It was a time to witness history—Henri II died in a jousting match, only to be followed by three degenerate sons who died in short succession; Catherine de Medici incited the hatred of rival factions; and thousands of Huguenots were massacred in Paris on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. It was also a time of witnessing in a religious sense, as the Wars of Religion tore France apart and the powerful Catholic Ligue targeted the French Calvinists; and it was an instance when witnessing gained new associations related to a striking growth in France’s judicial infrastructure caused by the sale of new offices. By the end of the century, this tremendous political and social instability resulted in the development of a different perspective on political organization and absolutist theory came into circulation, bringing with it a significantly different sense of witnessing. During the first half of the seventeenth century these two political theories vied for the right to define the terms of engagement. For women, this battle between political perspectives was especially important. Each theory, constitutionalism and absolutism, represented a distinct vision of sovereignty—the former emphasized the need for strong judicial governance and the latter the need for a strong monarch—and affected whether women witnessed in a religious sense or in a legal one, as rightsholders and members of the political community. Framing the theoretical conversation about sovereignty were two distinct political positions regarding the nature of kingship and what—if