This book is a critical inquiry into sovereignty and argues that the meaning and functions performed by this concept have changed significantly during the past decades, with profound implications for the ontological status of the state and the modus operandi of the international system as a whole. Although we have grown accustomed to regarding sovereignty as a defining characteristic of the modern state and as a constitutive principle of the international system, Sovereignty as Symbolic Form argues that recent changes indicate that sovereignty has been turned into something granted, contingent upon its responsible exercise in accordance with the norms and values of an imagined international community. Hence we need a new understanding of sovereignty in order to clarify the logic of its current usage in theory and practice alike, and its connection to broader concerns of social ontology: what kind of world do we inhabit, and of what kind of entities is this world composed? This book will be of interest to students of International Relations, Critical Security and International Politics.

Sovereignty as Value is one of the first books to examine sovereignty using solely a normative approach. Through fourteen original essays, the book seeks to understand its viability in a globalized world, thus taking into account the inclusion of a language of rights, limitation and legitimacy. The authors’ focus is on whether sovereignty as a normative concept might be understood as a criterion of legitimate power and authority; as a foundational concept of public ethics applied to political and legal institutions. How should notions of legitimacy be linked with the notion of sovereignty? In what manner is sovereignty challenged by territoriality and territorial control? How does sovereignty relate to political legitimacy? Are all the forms of sovereign authority legitimate? Does the project of advancing human rights globally conflict with the logic of exclusion inherent in the classic notion of national sovereignty? These are some of the questions that will be assessed in this collective volume.

This book project studies the variation of sovereignty in international order by analysing how the general model of sovereignty is localised in the political practice of two major non-Western rising powers, namely China and India. It aims to investigate how the sovereignty of these states is constituted, which includes the question of how sovereignty works and becomes constituted in specific contexts and cases that fall outside the discourses and positions of the so-called Westphalian (conservative, absolutist) sovereignty that is dominantly advocated by these two states on a global level. The core of this project explores specific contested cases and situates them vis-à-vis the broader approaches of China and India to sovereignty. I specifically analyse four particular cases: China’s approach to sovereignty in relation to Hong Kong and Taiwan and India’s approach to sovereignty in relation to Bhutan and Kashmir. In doing so, I will illustrate that sovereignty is a flexible and plastic phenomenon which can be intertwined with principles, models or practices that are usually seen as divergent from or contradicting sovereignty; for example, those that derive from China’s and India’s imperial and colonial history.

This edited book explores diverse contestations and transformations of sovereignty around the world. Sovereignty plays a central role in modern political thought and practice, but it also remains fundamentally contested. Depending on the context and perspective, it seems either omnipresent or elusive, liberating or oppressive, fading or resilient. Indeed, if in recent decades sovereignty has been expected to wane, today it is back on the agenda; not as the solid bedrock of modern – international – politics, which it never was, but as variations on a concept and institution that are ever contested and, as a result, constantly transforming. Bringing together perspectives from various disciplines, including International Relations (IR), political theory, geography, law, and anthropology, this volume: • goes beyond debates over the resilience or decline of sovereignty to instead emphasize how precisely the inherent ambiguities, tensions, and contestations in scholarship and practice spark sovereignty’s manifold transformations; • offers three theoretical chapters that examine the illusions, contradictions, transformation, and lasting appeal of sovereignty and the nation-state; • explores sovereignty from various disciplinary perspectives in 11 empirical chapters that highlight its role in different contexts around the world, from the European Union (EU) to the South China Sea, to Western Sahara and Palestine; • problematizes the interplay between theory and practice of statehood and sovereignty, as in the perception of Northern Cyprus as a ‘fake state’, scholars’ promotion of Kurdish ‘statehood’ in Iraq, and studies affirming the ‘Islamic State’. This book will be of much interest to students of statehood, sovereignty, conflict studies and International Relations. Chapters 8 of this book are available for free in Open Access at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book explores how actors practise sovereignty as a force in a multiscalar context. Among the various power structures that perform sovereignty, such as the head of state, a legislative body, or the military, one aspect is clear: the practice of sovereignty relies upon people at multiple levels - better portrayed as scales - of authority. This book focuses on actors – the people who bring sovereignty to life, who imbue it with meaning, and who are ultimately responsible for its practice. With that perspective, the volume interprets various case studies, such as Russian approaches to sovereignty in its leadership and Central Bank, Scottish parties' discourses, and NATO command structures. Beyond those contexts, the work also examines Chinese digital platforms, criminal gangs in Latin America, Polish and Czech nationalist movements, want-to-be states in Kurdistan-Iraq and Abkhazia, and Polish video games – together, these examples demonstrate how actors practise sovereignty in unity with, but also in place of, the state. As proof of concept, the authors further examine how they, as researchers, also qualify as practitioners of sovereignty. In a concluding three-chapter section, they reflexively explore how research methods and disciplines of study actively shape sovereignty and how the latter defines the outer limits of scholarly research. This book will be of interest to students of statehood, sovereignty, discourse analysis, history, political science, sociology, and international relations.

An examination of anticolonial thought and practice across key Indigenous thinkers. Accounts of decolonization routinely neglect Indigenous societies, yet Native communities have made unique contributions to anticolonial thought and activism. Remapping Sovereignty examines how twentieth-century Indigenous activists in North America debated questions of decolonization and self-determination, developing distinctive conceptual approaches that both resonate with and reformulate key strands in other civil rights and global decolonization movements. In contrast to decolonization projects that envisioned liberation through state sovereignty, Indigenous theorists emphasized the self-determination of peoples against sovereign state supremacy and articulated a visionary politics of decolonization as earthmaking. Temin traces the interplay between anticolonial thought and practice across key thinkers, interweaving history and textual analysis. He shows how these insights broaden the political and intellectual horizons open to us today.

This book seeks to address and fill a puzzling omission in contemporary critical IR scholarship. Following on from the aesthetic turn in IR, critical and ‘postmodern’ IR has produced an impressive array of studies into movies, literature, music and art and the way these media produce, mediate, and represent international politics. By contrast, the proponents of the aesthetic turn have overlooked fashion as a source of knowledge about global politics. Yet stories about the political role of fashion abound in the news media. Margaret Thatcher used dress to define her political image, and more recently the fascination with Michelle Obama, Carla Bruni and other women in similar positions, and the discussions about the appropriateness of their wardrobes, regularly makes the news. In Sudan, a female writer and activist successfully challenged the government over her right to wear trousers in public and in Europe, the debate on women’s headscarves has politicised a garment item and turned it into a symbol of fundamentalism and oppression. In response, the contributors to this book investigate the politics of fashion from a variety of perspectives, addressing theoretical as well as empirical issues, establishing the critical study of fashion and its protagonists as a central contribution to the aesthetic turn in international politics. The politics of fashion go beyond these examples of the uses and abuses of textiles and fabrics for political purposes, extending into its very ‘grammar’ and vocabulary. This book will be a unique contribution to the field and will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, critical IR theory and popular culture and world politics.

Violence and the Limits of Representation explores the representation of violence in literature, film, drama, music and art in order to demonstrate the ways in which the work done by researchers in the Arts and Humanities can offer fresh perspectives on current social and political issues.

Provides a new historical account of the rise and spread of the modern international system.

"The concept of extraterritoriality designates certain relationships between space, law, and representation. This collection of essays explores contemporary manifestations of extraterritoriality and the diverse ways in which the concept has been put to use in various disciplines. Some of the essays were written especially for this volume; others are brought here together for the first time. The inquiry into extraterritoriality found in these essays is not confined to the established boundaries of political, conceptual, and representational territories or fields of knowledge; rather, it is an invitation to navigate the margins of the legal-juridical and the political, but also the edges of forms of representation and poetics.Within its accepted legal and political contexts, the concept of extraterritoriality has traditionally been applied to people and to spaces. In the first case, extraterritorial arrangements could either exclude or exempt an individual or a group of people from the territorial jurisdiction in which they were physically located; in the second, such arrangements could exempt or exclude a space from the territorial jurisdiction by which it was surrounded. The special status accorded to people and spaces had political, economic, and juridical implications, ranging from immunity and various privileges to extreme disadvantages. In both cases, a person or a space physically included within a certain territory was removed from the usual system of laws and subjected to another. In other words, the extraterritorial person or space was held at what could be described as a legal distance. (In this respect, the concept of extraterritoriality presupposes the existence of several competing or overlapping legal systems.) It is this notion of being held at a legal distance around which the concept of extraterritoriality may be understood as revolving.