Product Description: Public international law has embarked on a new chapter. Over the past century, the classical model of international law, which emphasized state autonomy and interstate relations, has gradually ceded ground to a new model. Under the new model, a state's sovereign authority arises from the state's responsibility to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights for its people...read more

Product Description: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s new open access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. What is the role of the material world in shaping the tensions and paradoxes of imperial sovereignty? Scholars have long shed light on the complex processes of conquest, extraction, and colonialism under imperial rule...read more

Product Description: How does a nation become a great power? A global order was emerging in the nineteenth century, one in which all nations were included. This book explores the multiple legal grounds of Meiji Japan's assertion of sovereign statehood within that order: natural law, treaty law, international administrative law, and the laws of war...read more

Product Description: How does EU membership affect national sovereignty? This question has acquired a central place in the public debate on the European Union. National sovereignty relates to the independence of nation states in international affairs and to their autonomy to organize domestic matters...read more

Product Description: An earthquake. A conflict. A tsunami. A coup. Increasingly, non-international armed conflicts send thousands of civilians fleeing across borders to safety, whilst (natural) disasters hit areas of the world where resources to address the calamity are scarce...read more

Product Description: This book questions what sovereignty looks like when it is de-ontologised; when the nothingness at the heart of claims to sovereignty is unmasked and laid bare. Drawing on critical thinkers in political theology, such as Schmitt, Agamben, Nancy, Blanchot, Paulhan, The Politics of Nothing asks what happens to the political when considered in the frame of the productive potential of the nothing? The answers are framed in terms of the deep intellectual histories at our disposal for considering these fundamental questions, carving out trajectories inspired by, for example, Peter Lombard, Shakespeare and Spinoza...read more

Product Description: Sovereignty marks the boundary between politics and law. Highlighting the legal context of politics and the political context of law, it thus contributes to the internal dynamics of both political and legal systems. This book comprehends the persistence of sovereignty as a political and juridical concept in the post-sovereign social condition...read more

The attitude we take to power is almost invariably one of distrust, never more so than when it claims to be sovereign. And yet, we have always been drawn to sovereignty. Out of fear or fascination, we accepted that it was a condition of our liberty; that to assert ourselves as free, we would have to work not against but through sovereign power. This book retraces the history of the implication of sovereignty and liberty, an implication that has shaped the way we live together, as individuals and as political beings. Shedding new light on the work of key political and constitutional thinkers, including Marsilius of Padua, Hobbes, Hegel, Kelsen, and Schmitt, it identifies the conceptual operations that created sovereignty and shows how subjection to an absolute and undivided power came to be a source of meaning. At the heart of the analysis is the idea that sovereignty made reference to and relied upon a form of faith which aligned man’s political existence on law. Offering new and often controversial insights into the grounds of our attachment to sovereign power and into the crisis that is currently affecting its institutions, this book will appeal to students and scholars of law, politics, history of philosophy, and the social sciences.

Product Description: It is unusual to connect Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy with liberal thought. This study argues that liberal philosophy is indeed indebted to Hobbes: as a modern thinker he was the first to deduce political rights and obligations from self-interest...read more

Product Description: The concepts of statehood and self-determination provide the normative structure on which the international legal order is ultimately premised. As a system of law founded upon the issue of territorial control, ascertaining and determining which entities are entitled to the privileges of statehood continues to be one of the most difficult and complex issues...read more

Product Description: The Political Machine investigates the essential role that material culture plays in the practices and maintenance of political sovereignty. Through an archaeological exploration of the Bronze Age Caucasus, Adam Smith demonstrates that beyond assemblies of people, polities are just as importantly assemblages of things--from ballots and bullets to crowns, regalia, and licenses...read more

Many of the nations of the Caribbean that have become independent states have maintained as a central, organizing, nationalist principle the importance in the beliefs of the ideals of sovereignty, democracy, and development. Yet in recent years, political instability, the relative size of these nations, and the increasing economic vulnerabilities of the region have generated much popular and policy discussions over the attainability of these goals.  The geo-political significance of the region, its growing importance as a major transshipment gateway for illegal drugs coming from Latin America to the United States, issues of national security, vulnerability to corruption, and increases in the level of violence and social disorder have all raised serious questions not only about the notions of sovereignty, democracy, and development but also about the long-term viability of these nations. This volume is intended to make a strategic intervention into the discourse on these important topics, but the importance of its contribution resides in its challenge to conventional wisdom on these matters, and the multidisciplinary approach it employs.  Recognized experts in the field identify these concerns in the context of globalization, economic crises, and their impact on the Caribbean.

Product Description: Domestic sovereignty (the right of a government not to be resisted by its people) and international sovereignty (the moral immunity from outside intervention) have both been eroded in recent years, but the former to a much greater extent than the latter...read more

Tony Montana, an immigrant to the United States from Cuba, is forced to resort to violence in his struggle to achieve success

Product Description: Although democracy is in principle associated with popular rule, in practice it is best described as rule by elected elites. This form of government is not only wanting from a theoretical point of view, but it also no longer seems to meet the expectations of large segments of the citizenry...read more

Product Description: Territorial rights are often perceived to create barriers and discriminate against the poor. This study challenges that notion by re-examining the cosmopolitan understanding of territory. It addresses issues from the right to vote, the right to exclude others to the legitimacy of territorial boundaries and the exploitation of natural resources...read more

Product Description: Sovereignty is a key factor to consider when studying the Mexico-United States relationship. During most of the twentieth century, as a result of the new character of the Mexican post-revolutionary regime, there was a decoupling between the state’s maximalist discourse on sovereignty, and its practice...read more

Product Description: If we think there is a fast solution to changing the governance of Iraq, warned U.S. Marine General Anthony Zinni in the months before the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, "then we don't understand history." Never has the old line about those who fail to understand the past being condemned to repeat it seemed more urgently relevant than in Iraq today, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the Iraqi people, the Middle East region, and the world...read more