Description
Book SynopsisThis provocative and important text offers a new way of thinking about sovereignty, both past and present. Distinguished geographer John Agnew boldly challenges the widely popular story that state sovereignty is in worldwide eclipse in the face of the overwhelming processes of globalization. He argues that this perception relies on ideas about sovereignty and globalization that are both overstated and misleading. Agnew contends that sovereignty-state control and authority over space is not necessarily neatly contained in state-by-state territories, nor has it ever been so. Yet the dominant image of globalization is the replacement of a territorialized world by one of networks and flows that know no borders other than those that define the Earth itself. In challenging this image, Agnew first traces the ways in which it has become commonplace. He then develops a new way of thinking about the geography of effective sovereignty and the various geographical forms in which sovereignty actually operates in the world, offering an exciting intellectual framework that breaks with the either/or thinking of state sovereignty versus globalization.
Trade ReviewTake back control! Read and digest John Agnew’s Globalization and Sovereignty. In this second edition, the pioneer of political geography provides an indispensable guide to the contested contours of both of these slippery terms. If only we can place it in the hands of those who really need it. -- Klaus Dodds, Royal Holloway University of London; author of Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction
John Agnew is among the most important and lucid voices in studies of globalization and the reconfiguration of political space in our twenty-first century. Revealing the limits of our geographical imagination, he frees the discussion of sovereignty from the cage of the nation-state. Globalization and Sovereignty thus provides invaluable insights into the fundamental questions of governance in our contemporary world. -- Stephen Sawyer, American University of Paris
John Agnew is among those scholars who have cut a sharp original path across histories and geographies, giving us novel interpretations. This second edition of his influential book is must reading. -- Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of Expulsions
Table of ContentsPreface Chapter 1: Globalization and State Sovereignty Chapter 2: Sovereignty Myths and Territorial States Chapter 3: Sovereignty Regimes Chapter 4: Sovereignty Regimes at Work Chapter 5: Conclusion Index
