Sovereignty

Despite their other theoretical differences, virtually all scholars of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) agree that the organization's members share an almost religious commitment to the norm of non-intervention. This article disrupts this consensus, arguing that ASEAN repeatedly intervened in Cambodia's internal political conflicts from 1979 to 1999, often with powerful and destructive effects. ASEAN's role in maintaining Khmer Rouge occupancy of Cambodia's UN seat, constructing a new coalition government in exile, manipulating Khmer refugee camps and informing the content of the Cambodian peace process will be explored, before turning to the 'creeping conditionality' for ASEAN membership imposed after the 1997 'coup' in Phnom Penh. The article argues for an analysis recognizing the political nature of intervention, and seeks to explain both the creation of non-intervention norms and specific violations of them as attempts by ASEAN elites to maintain their own illiberal, capitalist regimes against domestic and international political threats.
[the full version is available via my website, http://www.leejones.tk]

The nature of the relationship between the Assyrian state and the Syro-Hittite states is often represented in the writings of archaeologists and ancient historians under the rubric of imperialism, Assyrian sovereignty, and the Syro-Hittite resistance, an unchanging formula largely based on center-periphery models. This structuralist model of fixed relationships is thus characterized as a firmly-set trajectory of power relations and a teleological narrative of conquest, ending without exception with the eventual and complete submission and subjugation of Syro-Hittite states to Assyrian military power. While Syro-Hittite states are represented as vulnerable and politically weak entities, the Assyrian state is referred as an “expansionistic imperial power” or “superior invading force”. Had they escaped direct Assyrian sovereignty, these peripheral communities were at least deemed “Assyrianizing” in their material culture. This a priori qualification of Syro-Hittite-Assyrian relationships as an imbalanced power distribution is an outcome of the preponderance of studies of Assyrian sovereignty with an obsession with the (cosmic) image of the sovereign in his visual and verbal manifestations. Secondly it is often assumed that the study of Assyrian imperialism has always operated through coercion and military violence. Alternative forms of engagement between the Neo-Assyrian state and the Syro-Hittite kingdoms such as diplomacy, political negotiation, trade, exchange of ideas, politics of settlement, land management, taxation or traveling craftsmen and circulation of technology and knowledge are much more rarely discussed. In this paper, I suggest that historical perspectives on the unchallenged Assyrian imperialism are often driven by the alluring, yet biased perspectives offered by the sumptuous, if not excessive corpus of Assyrian annalistic accounts, state sponsored texts, and imperial monuments. Therefore such perspectives prioritize short-term political histories of conquest and domination over other longer term and more horizontally distributed aspects of the past such as cultural practices, ecological histories, political landscapes, socialization, or material worlds. The historicist accounts of the Near Eastern past can be challenged and perhaps balanced by evidence offered by archaeological, material, and environmental research, which present alternative and often contrasting perspectives on these particular histories. Prioritizing textual evidence often leaves out the material flows, delicate negotiations of power, dynamics of trade and exchange and the politics of resource extraction. Attending to other forms of evidence allows us to reflect on the complexity of the relationships between Assyria and the Syro-Hittite states. In this article, I pay particular attention to such interactions and encounters that are other than military in nature, and give priority to material evidence that challenge standard imperialist narratives of Assyrian textual accounts.

Nine characters are cast into a set of circumstances that cannot be explained but with which those individuals must engage. The fate of humanity rides on what they do.

Their task is to come to grips with the issue of self-governance. With no resources on which to draw except their own ideas, intelligence, moral integrity, and understanding, they must try to work out the essential principles of sovereignty.

The challenge is time-limited, but they do not how much time is left before the final buzzer is sounded. In addition, there is a war, of some kind, that is raging all around them, and the explosions are coming closer and closer to their location.

The discussions which ensue are far-reaching. They range from: the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, to: issues of ratification, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, constitutionality, the rule of law, judicial interpretation, sovereignty, the nature of power, education, cults, the scientific problem of origins, militarism, and more.

Finally, a number of the characters are suspected of terrorism and treason. As a result, they must face an investigation into their activities. The truth might not be enough to save those individuals, but an unexpected decision is rendered leading to ...

The eponymous protagonist of Phèdre emerges as a true tragic heroine by exercising her own free will to commit wrong instead of being a mere victim of fate. Criticism focusing on injustice has tended to shine light on Thésée, denying Phèdre royal sovereignty just as French Salic law did to queens. By shifting the spotlight from Thésée to Phèdre, and from the idea of judgment as a means of redressing injustice to injustice resulting from the challenges of governance and self-governance in royal leaders, we will see that Phèdre’s gender has tended to obscure the important connection suggested between injustice and the exercise of monarchical power. The gender of the eponymous heroine of the play operates as a cover: by associating wrongdoing with a female monarch, a literal impossibility in France, Racine is able to delve into particularly controversial aspects of unjust governance as experienced in his day and age.

The article reads the invention of the Exodus-Narrative in its historical context of the religious and political system of the Ancient Near East. It reconstructs the revolutionary different approach to political power and theological foundation in the development of the Mose- and Exodus-Narrative and its innerbiblical Fortschreibung. For this development it is most decisive that the Exodus-Narrative is not based on a historical migration-movement "from point A to point B", but on a historical confrontation with the political powers at that time. The foundation of a strict monotheistic understanding of theology and the invention of “textual authority” that diverged from the status of scripture in the Ancient Near East and which can be reconstructed through the structure of the Exodus-Narrative and its canonical form as the Tora of Mose, has laid the foundation for the identity of Israel and the basis for the three Monotheistic Religions. The article's argument is strictly developed in correspondence with contemporary exegetical and historical research (esp. E. Otto and Chr. Dohmen) and is brought together with contemporary accounts to political thought from poststructuralist and deconstructive philosophers like Derrida, Levinas, Badiou and Agamben. The outcome of this study is articulated as a contribution to an affirmative reading of the so-called »crisis of representation«.

This doctoral dissertation investigates the development of the norm of sovereignty as responsibility by focusing on its institutionalization in the framework of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Prominent observers have regarded the emergence of a new norm of sovereignty as responsibility as one of the most significant normative shifts in international society since the aftermath of World War II. Against this backdrop, accounts have proliferated situating the ICC at the cutting edge of normative change. The present study critically engages with the whole set of theoretical foundations underlying this view, including the conventional constructivist understanding of norm development upon which the latter is premised. This, on the one hand, emphasizes the importance of norm institutionalization within “tangible” sets of rules or organizations. On the other, it understands institutionalization itself as a moment of clarity and stabilization, thus largely reducing it to an end-point of the norm emergence process. In other words, norm institutionalization is confined to a positivist view in which institutions fall back to the role of neutral fora. The result is a linear, static, and largely depoliticized account of norm content, which, while yielding to the traditional lack of communication between normative and empirical studies, ends up reiterating a dichotomic and simplistic view in which norms are scripts of emancipation, and power a practice of domination. The dissertation aims to unravel this dilemma altogether by offering a step forward in the development of a post-positivist constructivist approach. In other words, it takes a genuinely trans-disciplinary perspective and delves into the configuration of normativity as part of institutional practice, paying special attention to how the relative power of relevant actors reconstitutes norms during norm negotiation and implementation. Hence, the study  unfolds from an unusual location – at the intersection between normative international theory and the politics of international criminal law; and from there, it seeks to revive discussions about the power-laden nature of the normative fabric of international society, its own dis-symmetries, and its outright hierarchies. To this end, the dissertation asks two major sequential questions: how the overarching system negotiated by states at the Rome Conference affects the selection of situations and cases before the ICC and their outcomes; and how the selection of situations and cases and their outcomes, in turn, “feeds back” to the norm of sovereignty institutionalized through the Court’s practice. The resulting analysis shows the following. While the Rome Statute reflects the persistence of the state as the primary site of political authority and coercion, it also cuts against the normative aspirations of sovereignty as responsibility by leaving the Court specifically ill-equipped to break with a notorious pattern of hyper-protected sovereignty. Outstanding issues such as the ICC’s selectivity and African bias, as well as the Court’s future prospects, are then reconsidered under this light. Those findings are then discussed in the final part of the study. Focusing on questions of delegation to international institutions, this ends with a note of caution. It concludes that the prospects of sovereignty as responsibility, as well as the broader discussion about cosmopolitan governance, lie more with the re-politicization of the debate than a straightforward invocation of greater forms of supranationalism.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

"The so-called cyber-threat commands the attention of multinational corporations, governments and the strategic community, keen as they are to harness the power of digital communications yet anxious to protect their interests. Attacks such as those which disrupted on-line banking in Estonia and defaced government websites in Georgia, as well as the infamous Stuxnet worm that temporarily shut down Iran’s nuclear programme, are vivid examples of what may be possible within this new strategic domain. But are our networked societies really vulnerable, as some have suggested, to a knock-out blow, perpetrated by state-sponsored hackers or terrorists? And what can be done to defend the state from this and from the encroachment of external networks that transcend its borders and breach its laws?

This Adelphi tackles the range of issues raised by our dependence on digital networks. It considers how instantaneous, global communications are challenging national and social orders and what shape those challenges may take as the net is cast ever wider. Comparing the transformations of the Information Age with those of previous generations, when new technologies and emerging transnational threats spread panic in political and strategic circles, the authors examine the real implications for states and statehood."

Italexit. The transformation of the European constraint and the conditioned sovereignty-The Maastricht Treaty has Europeanized the German economic constitution, making the sovereignty of the Member States conditional on the dogma of competitive austerity. The legitimacy of the European trade state is, however, weakened by the remerging of protectionism of which Trumpism and Brexit are exemplary manifestations. This essay, after analysing the Italexit hypothesis in both the European and constitutional legal system, stresses the need to find a new form of reconciliation between the values of supranational integration and of social-democratic constitutionalism.

The concept of sovereignty has come to frame a number of data governance proposals by the Indian government. To understand the scope, import and consequences of these reassertions of sovereignty, it is, however, important to unpack the nature of the claims that have been put forward. In particular, to what extent do these promote the exercise of autonomy and choice by the Indian people? In order to benefit the people of India, assertions of sovereignty in the face of data colonialism will need to take into account that data is not merely a resource “out there”, but increasingly functions as an extension of our bodies. As this analysis will show, current conceptualisations of data sovereignty fail to do so; for now, they therefore merely entail a transfer of power to domestic elites while doing little to return sovereignty to the people of India.

Sovereignty is seeing renewed relevance in the age of data in India as it has become the framework of choice in a number of data governance proposals by the Indian government. To understand the scope, import and consequences of these reassertions of sovereignty, however, it is important to unpack the nature of these claims as they have been put forward. In particular, to what extent does this type of sovereignty allow for the exercise of autonomy and choice of the Indian people? This paper will demonstrate that such assessments crucially depend on how we construct the nature of data. In most dominant discourses, data is described as a resource of some sort. However, in practice the line between our physical bodies and our virtual bodies is increasingly becoming irrelevant: data, then, emerges not so much as a resource that is simply out there, but as an extension of our bodies. In order to benefit the people of India, assertions of sovereignty in the face of data colonialism will need to take these shifting realities regarding the nature of data into account. Through an assessment of policy proposals relating to sovereignty in the realm of data and new technologies, we seek to examine to what extent policy in India does indeed recognise these new realities, and what the value of these new assertions of sovereignty for the people of India consequently is.

Wayne Vucinic Book Prize 2007, "for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences." 

Endorsement by Slavoj Zizek:

"Alexei Yurchak's Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More immediately seduced me by its very title with a profound philosophical implication that eternity is a historical category--things can be eternal for some time. The same spirit of paradox runs through the entire book--it renders in wonderful details the gradual disintegration of the Soviet system from within its ideological and cultural space, making visible all the hypocrisy and misery of this process. I consider Yurchak's book by far the best work about the late epoch of the Soviet Union--it is not just history, but a pleasure to read, a true work of art." (Slavoj Zizek, author of In Defense of Lost Causes)

Abstract:

Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive. This book explores the paradoxes of Soviet life during the period of "late socialism" (1960s-1980s) through the eyes of the last Soviet generation.

This article overviews the phenomenon of private military and security companies (PMSCs) through the prism of various theoretical concepts. The paper explores the heterogeneous nature of PMSCs, the reasons for their present-day increased activity, and interaction with state and non-state participants in global processes. The phenomenon manifests itself amid the change in the attitude towards traditional forms of violence, which allows states to partly outsource their security and law-enforcement functions. At the same time, some countries maintain their monopoly on violence and are even expanding the arsenal of mechanisms for consolidating their geopolitical influence through PMSCs. The study shows that PMSCs' activities in "weak" countries may impair the inviolability of their statehood. The article also discusses the possibility of democratic control of PMSCs' activities. Keywords: non-state actors, private military and security companies (PMSCs), sovereignty, asymmetric conflicts, new types of war, privatization and outsourcing in the security field, democratic control, state monopoly on legitimate violence

The global COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a justice crisis. It also brings to light multiple ongoing, underlying social crises. The COVID-19 crisis is actively revealing crises of energy sovereignty in at least four ways. First, there are many whose access to basic health services is compromised because of the lack of energy services necessary to provide these services. Second, some people are more vulnerable to COVID-19 because of exposure to environmental pollution associated with energy production. Third, energy services are vital to human wellbeing, yet access to energy services is largely organized as a consumer good. The loss of stable income precipitated by COVID-19 may therefore mean that many lose reliable access to essential energy services. Fourth, the COVID-19 crisis has created a window of opportunity for corporate interests to engage in aggressive pursuit of energy agendas that perpetuate carbon intensive and corporate controlled energy s...

In 1540, Emperor Charles V elevated the seigniory of Zottegem, together with the county of Gavere to a principality. The title then belonged to Francisca of Luxembourg-Fiennes, the mother of the famous count Lamoral d'Egmont.
When a lady of foreign birth dies in the new principality, the amman of Zottegem sequesters the property. This leads to a protest of the aldermen of the land of Aalst, who claim to be empowered to collect the goods of the deceased. After 3 warnings, they come to the principality and arrest the amman, seriously angering her ladyship. A 12 years long legal conflict follows, in which we can distinguish 3 dimensions. On the pure inter-human level, the amman, and after his premature death his widow, backed by her ladyship request reparation from the Aalst council. On the seigniorial level, her ladyship defends her ancestral privileges against the claims of the Aalst council. Most interesting though, is the third dimension, in which her ladyship claims full sovereignty over her domain, denying any rights, not only to those of Aalst, claiming to be her superior institution, but even to the emperor himself, who cannot have any claims on the same domain as her, "as there cannot be two lordships at the same time in the same place".
A hard time for the Emperor's judges, a genuine sovereignty conflict in the center of the principality!

The State fit to represent the interests of society, seeking to harmonize interests and give a global response to the different conflicts.
The performance of the State connects, in this area, above all, the Fundamental objective of Social peace.

Relying on the example of the Governance and Economic Management
Assistance Programme for Liberia (GEMAP) this article analyses whether
and under which conditions a shared sovereignty arrangement can serve as a veritable tool of international involvement to create a sustainable
(socio)economic development in a state emerging from conflict. The article
outlines milestones and obstacles of the Liberian peace process and economic
transformation after the signing of the Accra Peace Agreement in
2003. Focusing on (socio)economic and fiscal problems as a threat to the
peace process the article analyses the GEMAP Agreement of 2005 which
was negotiated between the National Transitional Government of Liberia
(NTGL) and international donor organisations. The paper argues that GEMAP is an example of a far-reaching shared sovereignty arrangement that could serve as a (role)model for future co-operations between external donors and post-conflict countries. Furthermore, the article concludes that the continued endorsement of the Accra Peace Agreement and GEMAP by the United Nations Security Council can be considered as a supporting legitimisation of the shared sovereignty arrangement. The conclusion and outlook reflect GEMAP’’s potential role as a playbook for future shared sovereignty arrangements and the continuing need to carefully balance national sovereignty and international involvement in post-conflict situations.

In recent years there has been a marked effort in American democracy to make engaging the formal democratic process more difficult. Laws have been passed that restrict constituents’ ability to vote by mail, that reduce the number of polling places and shorten their hours, that require strict forms of identification to cast a ballot, that limit early voting, and ban imbibing snacks and beverages in line at polling locations. Similarly, the judiciary at both the state and federal level has issued decisions signaling its reticence to embrace a deeper and more egalitarian vision of what American democracy could be. In this paper I will argue that these practices might usefully be understood as an expression of destituent power to both complement and contest that concepts understanding and growing body of literature.

This article uses the example of the Mogadishu International Airport zone and takes a spatio-temporal lens to explore how (sovereign) power unfolds in international interventions that aim at building a sovereign state. I show that the Mogadishu International Airport zone emerges as an elastic frontier zone that contradicts the sovereign imaginary intervenors aim to project and undermines many of the taken-for-granted boundaries that states tend to produce. The Mogadishu International Airport and similar zones emphasize the centrality of logistics and circulation in interventions, but also point towards their temporal and liminal character. Modularity became the material answer to the demand to secure circulation while adapting to the rapid rhythm and short timeframes of statebuilding. Modular designs enable the constant adaptation of the intervention terrain, allow intervenors to deny their power and imprint and facilitate the commercialization of supply chains and intervention materials. Sovereign power that operates through such zones becomes modular itself. It is exercised as an adaptable, in parts exchangeable, and highly mobile form of power that operates through crises and emergencies. The spaces and materials created by modular forms of sovereign power remain elusive, but nonetheless stratify experiences of power and security.

While  nation-states  often  claim  that  refugees  threaten  their  political  and  territorial integrity, this chapter shows how the opposite can be true: sometimes states need refugees. In late 2014 and early 2015, when parts of Iraq and Syria were overtaken by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), people seeking refuge in semiautonomous Iraqi Kurdistan became central to the public story told about Kurdish sovereignty. Their ethnic or regional group affiliation determined their integration or rejection by the Kurdish authorities. For example, on the one hand, Anbari people were suspected of being ISIS supporters because of their regional origin. They found themselves the target of suspicion, even as they were provided with refugee status and aid. On the other hand, minorities such as Yazidi and Kurds were brought into camps that looked more like planned cities.Ultimately, refugee presence in Kurdistan reinforced a garrisoned security state. In the name of protecting refugees, Kurdistan received international humanitarian support, but also a major thrust of military expertise and supplies by which to enforce its borders. By 2017, the Pentagon signed an agreement to give the Kurdish army, known as the Peshmerga, US$415 million (Al Jazeera 2016), along with part of the US$13 billion it was spending in the fight against ISIS. Defining and placing refugees became a core alibi to the construction of a security state that held the potential of becoming a U.S.-backed independent Kurdistan.  This  was  ultimately  not  the  case,  and  the  United  States  quickly  withdrew its support for Kurdistan after ISIS was officially defeated. Nevertheless, the centrality of refugees in the story of a weak nation-state reveals insights about the political role of refugees more broadly, even for states whose status is less tenuous or less obviously linked to refugee protection.

An examination of the international community's response to the crisis in Darfur between 2004 and 2007 reveals two contradictory developments regarding the responsibilities of sovereign statehood. On one hand, the vast majority of states within the Security Council readily endorse the notion that sovereignty entails a responsibility to protect populations. On the other hand, a few states, including two of the permanent-five, continue to insist that the international community cannot legitimately intervene in the affairs of a functioning state, even when the sovereign has manifestly failed to carry out its responsibilities, unless sovereign consent is granted. While important developments have been made in holding sovereigns to account over the last two decades, this continued assertion of the necessity of consent strikes at the heart of the notion that sovereignty entails responsibility. If consent is required before the international community can act, the notion that the sovereign state is responsible and accountable not only to its own people but also to the international community loses much of its meaning. The enjoyment of sovereign rights can only be understood to be truly conditional upon the observance of sovereign responsibilities if the international community can legitimately breach these rights in the absence of sovereign consent.

LA JUSTIFICACIÓN DEL TRABAJO DIPLOMÁTICO DESARROLLADO EN MÉXICO POR CHARLES WYKE DURANTE DOS AÑOS SE BASÓ EN LAS INSTRUCCIONES DIPLOAMÁTICAS REALIZADAS POR EL FOREING OFFICE. ESTE DOCUMENTO OFICIAL ES IMPORTANTE PORQUE INCLUYE ASPECTOS QUE DETERMINARON LAS RELACIONES BILATERALES, ADEMÁS DE ESTAR BASADAS EN PATRONES BRITÁNICOS Y EN PRINCIPIOS DEL DERECHO INTERNACIONAL. LA MORATORIA POR ESOS DOS AÑOS EN EL SERVICIO DE LA DEUDA, ORDENADA POR JUÁREZ EN JULIO DE 1861, CONVENCIÓ A LOS GOBIERNOS DE LA GRAN BRETAÑA, FRANCIA Y ESPAÑA PARA INTERVENIR EN MÉXICO. ESTE ARTÍCULO ANALIZA LA SUSPENSIÓN DEL PAGO QUE ANTES NINGÚN GOBIERNO MEXICANO HABÍA REPUDIADO CUMPLIR. SE ARGUMENTA QUE LA INTERVENCIÓN FUE DISEÑADA PARA ESTABLECER UN RÉGIMEN CAPAZZ DE HONRAR SUS OBLIGACIONES EN TORNO A LA DEUDA Y PREPARAR AL PAÍS PARA RECIBIR IMPORTANTES INVERSIONES.

Abstract: This article addresses the ‘touch-event’ as a mediated affective encounter that pivots around a tension between intimacy and distance, seduction and sovereignty, investment and withdrawal. Through a rereading of the Pauline event of conversion to Christianity, it argues that an analysis of the evolving significance of touch-events for Catholic liturgy and a religious congregation shows the theopolitical as always already constituted within an economy of enfleshed virtues. Focusing on contemporary examples of touch-events from the life of Francis, the first pope from the Americas, as well as from fieldwork among a group of female Latin American Catholic migrants in Rome, I argue for a closer examination of touch-events in order to grasp some of their theopolitical, radical, emancipatory, and, in some contexts, subjugating effects.
Keywords: Atlantic Return, economies of virtues, incarnation, Pauline event, Pope Francis, sovereignty, theopolitics, touch-event

Within the context of the broader food sovereignty literature, and with a specific focus on notions of America Indian sovereignty, this article explores how members of thirty-nine different Native American community farming and gardening projects in the United States describe and define food sovereignty, as both concept and method. This article further distinguishes how principles of food sovereignty are being operationalized in the broader goals of promoting community health, sustainability, and local economic systems, and of reclaiming and maintaining tribal culture.

The sovereignty concept is facing a challenge. In the postmodern world order European member states share a common security strategy and human security has become the guiding principle for European security thinking. The aim of this thesis is to develop conceptualizations of the sovereignty concept that incorporates elements of both state sovereignty and human security. In addition my aim is to analyze how state sovereignty is conceptualized and expressed in the European Security Strategy (ESS). Based on traditional sovereignty theories and critical human security studies I have developed three postmodern definitions of sovereignty: statehood sovereignty, responsibility sovereignty and privilege sovereignty. These sovereignty conceptualizations were used as my ideal types when conducting a text analysis of the ESS. My analysis demonstrates that all three sovereignty conceptualizations are expressed in the ESS. My analysis demonstrates a conditional relationship between responsibilit...

This undergraduate senior honors thesis investigates how imperial sovereignty is reproduced in politically contested regions. Centering on the politically volatile region of ancient Armenia, I use disparate assemblages of imperial Parthian, Roman, and Armenian coins in order to understand how each competing polity established claims to legitimate sovereignty by mobilizing coins as a shared medium of their political and economic systems. I turn to new materialist archaeology to move beyond standard symbolic or metallurgical coinage analysis and towards a more holistic and contextual view of coins and their malleable roles in antiquity in both shaping and being shaped by tenuous imperial claims to sovereignty.

A thorough analysis of capital punishment from a political-geographical perspective is lacking in the discipline of geography. This is despite the fact that capital punishment overlaps with numerous geographic approaches, concepts, and areas of study. This study serves as a call to geographers to begin considering capital punishment's wide interaction and interrelation with developed areas of knowledge in the discipline. Specifically, political geographers stand to contribute in novel ways to wider discussions about capital punishment by analyzing executions relative to contemporary work in geography on violent, legal, and carceral spaces. I first introduce the need for geography's engagement with this pressing issue. Then, I clarify several terms needed to understand this violent practice. A third section highlights several pathways of development in the critical geographies of capital punishment. It is organized around four broad themes-critically mapping capital punishment, bodies in motion, politics of access, and executing the "other"-connecting capital punishment to developing concepts, literatures, and sub-disciplines in geography. The final two sections outline an epistemological approach to the geographies of capital punishment and how legal and carceral geographies might contribute.

De cynische vraag ‘Wat hebben wij aan de Antillen?’ wordt vaak gesteld, met weinig begrip en respect voor een eeuwenlange koloniale  geschiedenis. Het is met de zes Caribische eilanden niet anders dan met de Waddeneilanden: zij horen er nu eenmaal bij, en de relevante vraag is wat ‘wij’ maken van dit trans-Atlantische verband dat, inderdaad, vaak knelt, maar dat wij hoe dan ook delen.  Dat ‘wij’ betreft niet alleen de Nederlanders aan de Noordzee, maar ook de Nederlanders aan de overzijde van de Atlantische oceaan, in de Cariben. Daarover gaat dit artikel. Allereerst bespreek ik de historische achtergrond, vervolgens de dekolonisatie met het Statuut van 1954 en de spanningen die dit complexe arrangement van non-soevereiniteit onvermijdelijk blijft oproepen, om te eindigen met een pleidooi voor een bredere Koninkrijksagenda.

// - - - With link to full text / Abstract in Polish is included below
This  article  explores  legal  consequences  arising  from  Italy’s  European human rights legal commitments in confrontation with the migration crisis. The so-called  Arab  Spring  resulted  in  a  great  influx  of  illegal  migrants  who,  from  obvious  reasons,  chose  mainly  the  territory  of  Italy  as  the  first  safe  space  for  their  living  or  as  a transit country. At the beginning the process did not seem to become such a disaster and  human  rights  drama.  The  main  purpose  of  the  Authors’  analysis  is  to  present  the  attitude  of  two  main  human  rights  organs  of  the  Council  of  Europe,  namely  the  European  Court  of  Human  Rights  as  well  as  the  Committee  on  the  Prevention  of  Torture,  Inhuman  or  Degrading  Treatment  or  Punishment.  Against  the  background  of  the  analysed  documents  the  Authors  try  not  only  to  present  the  above-mentioned  legal  consequences,  but  also  discuss  the  further  role  of  Italy  in  the  ongoing  migration  crisis.  It  is more than sure, that in the present day state of affairs Italy cannot be longer left alone  as  this  is  in  strong  contravention  with  the  overwhelming  idea  of  solidarity  which  has  been  a  foundation  of  the  European  integration,  including  the  collaboration  within the European Union.

// - - - Abstarct (in Polish)
Autorzy koncentrują swoją uwagę na konsekwencjach prawnych, wynikających z europejskich zobowiązań praw człowieka Włoch w konfrontacji z kryzysem migracyjnym. Słynna Arabska Wiosna spowodowała ogromny napływ migrantów, którzy – ze zrozumiałych przyczyn – wybierali terytorium Włoch jako pierwsze bezpieczne miejsce do życia lub kraj tranzytu w poszukiwaniu nowego miejsca przeznaczenia. Proces ten początkowo nie zapowiadał tak wielkiej katastrofy ani dramatu praw człowieka dla obu konfrontujących się stron. Głównym celem niniejszego artykułu jest przedstawienie stanowiska dwóch najważniejszych organów ochrony praw człowieka Rady Europy, tj. Europejskiego Trybunału Praw Człowieka oraz Komitetu Zapobiegania Torturom, Nieludzkiemu bądź Poniżającemu Traktowaniu lub Karaniu. Na podstawie analizowanych dokumentów Autorzy prezentują europejskie konsekwencje prawne dotykające Włoch, jak również podejmują dyskusję nad dalszą rolą tego kraju w postępującym kryzysie migracyjnym. W obecnym stanie rzeczy jest więcej niż pewne, że Włochy nie mogą dłużej być osamotnione, gdyż pozostaje to w silnej sprzeczności z wiodącą ideą solidarności, która legła u podstaw europejskiej integracji, w tym w ramach Unii Europejskiej.

This study aims to answer where normality ends and where exception begins in politics. This distinction is crucial to understand not only the management of populations and subjects but also the very nature of political power. To do that, I readdress concepts such as governmentality and exceptionalism using examples from the late European context: the management of “normal” data subjects and the administration of “exceptional” groups such as refugees. In light of this, the paper argues that the borderline which traditionally has separated exceptionality and governmentality is not blurred. It simply does not exist anymore. Due to the impossibility to separate those dimensions, the result is that exceptionalism can be expanded through governmentality whereas normalization seems to give an orientation to this dual phenomenon in every political decision.