Search results for ""sovereign""

How did the world come to be organized into sovereign states? Daniel Philpott argues that two historical revolutions in ideas are responsible. First, the Protestant Reformation ended medieval Christendom and brought a system of sovereign states in Europe, culminating at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Second, ideas of equality and colonial nationalism brought a sweeping end to colonial empires around 1960, spreading the sovereign states system to the rest of the globe. In both cases, revolutions in ideas about legitimate political authority profoundly altered the "constitution" that establishes basic authority in the international system. Ideas exercised influence first by shaping popular identities, then by exercising social power upon the elites who could bring about new international constitutions. Swaths of early modern Europeans, for instance, arrived at Protestant beliefs, then fought against the temporal powers of the Church on behalf of the sovereignty of secular princes, who could overthrow the formidable remains of a unified medieval Christendom. In the second revolution, colonial nationalists, domestic opponents of empire, and rival superpowers pressured European cabinets to relinquish their colonies in the name of equality and nationalism, resulting in a global system of sovereign states. Bringing new theoretical and historical depth to the study of international relations, Philpott demonstrates that while shifts in military, economic, and other forms of material power cannot be overlooked, only ideas can explain how the world came to be organized into a system of sovereign states.

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This volume examines the development of two sovereign nations over seventy-four momentous years.

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While Giorgio Agamben's work has not previously been categorised as existentialist, his work creatively repackages important existentialist themes in a politico-theological context. This collection of essays offers creative new ways of considering Agamben's critique of the sovereign exception, as well as other existentialist themes, including feminism and postcolonialism. The international range of contributors each challenge, complicate or reimagine Agamben's reading of the sovereign exception, which appears among the writings of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Fanon, Kafka, Dostoevsky and others in both theistic and atheistic forms.Divided into three sections Agamben and the Sovereign Exception, Agamben and the Death of God and Existentialist Themes in Agamben this collection re-introduces Agamben as an unacknowledged existentialist philosopher who takes the major themes and concepts of existentialism in a startling new direction.

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This 12-week study leads readers through the book of Daniel, highlighting God’s reign over all the earth as the sovereign Lord of history.

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The acceptance of human rights and minority rights, the increasing role of international financial institutions, and globalization have led many observers to question the continued viability of the sovereign state. Here a leading expert challenges this conclusion. Stephen Krasner contends that states have never been as sovereign as some have supposed. Throughout history, rulers have been motivated by a desire to stay in power, not by some abstract adherence to international principles. Organized hypocrisy--the presence of longstanding norms that are frequently violated--has been an enduring attribute of international relations Political leaders have usually but not always honored international legal sovereignty, the principle that international recognition should be accorded only to juridically independent sovereign states, while treating Westphalian sovereignty, the principle that states have the right to exclude external authority from their own territory, in a much more provisional way. In some instances violations of the principles of sovereignty have been coercive, as in the imposition of minority rights on newly created states after the First World War or the successor states of Yugoslavia after 1990; at other times cooperative, as in the European Human Rights regime or conditionality agreements with the International Monetary Fund. The author looks at various issues areas to make his argument: minority rights, human rights, sovereign lending, and state creation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Differences in national power and interests, he concludes, not international norms, continue to be the most powerful explanation for the behavior of states.

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This study leads readers through three books of prophecy, pointing to God's mercy and sovereign control that will lead to eternal blessing for those who turn to him in faith.

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In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes's landmark work on political philosophy, James Martel argues that although Hobbes pays lip service to the superior interpretive authority of the sovereign, he consistently subverts this authority throughout the book by returning it to the reader. Martel demonstrates that Hobbes's radical method of reading not only undermines his own authority in the text, but, by extension, the authority of the sovereign as well. To make his point, Martel looks closely at Hobbes's understanding of religious and rhetorical representation. In Leviathan, idolatry is not just a matter of worshipping images but also a consequence of bad reading. Hobbes speaks of the "error of separated essences," in which a sign takes precedence over the idea or object it represents, and warns that when the sign is given such agency, it becomes a disembodied fantasy leading to a "kingdom of darkness." To combat such idolatry, Hobbes offers a method of reading in which one resists the rhetorical manipulation of figures and tropes and recognizes the codes and structures of language for what they are-the only way to convey a fundamental inability to ever know "the thing itself." Making the leap to politics, Martel suggests that following Hobbes's argument, the sovereign can also be seen as idolatrous--a separated essence--a figure who supplants the people it purportedly represents, and that learning to be better readers enables us to challenge, if not defeat, the authority of the sovereign.

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While the specificities of individual wars vary, they share a ubiquitous aftermath: the task of finding and identifying the disappeared. The Bosnian war of the early 1990s that destroyed the sovereign state of Yugoslavia is no exception.

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Secession and the Sovereignty Game offers a comprehensive strategic theory for how secessionist movements attempt to win independence. Combining original data analysis, fieldwork, interviews with secessionist leaders, and case studies on Catalonia, the Murrawarri Republic, West Papua, Bougainville, New Caledonia, and Northern Cyprus, Ryan D. Griffiths shows how the rules and informal practices of sovereign recognition create a strategic playing field between existing states and aspiring nations that he terms "the sovereignty game." To win sovereign statehood, all secessionist movements have to maneuver on the same strategic playing field while varying their tactics according to local conditions. To obtain recognition, secessionist movements use tactics of electoral capture, nonviolent civil resistance, and violence. To persuade the home state and the international community, they appeal to normative arguments regarding earned sovereignty, decolonization, the right to choose, inherent sovereignty, and human rights. The pursuit of independence can be enormously disruptive and is quite often violent. By advancing a theory that explains how sovereign recognition has succeeded in the past and is working in the present, and by anticipating the practices of future secessionist movements, Secession and the Sovereignty Game also prescribes solutions that could make the sovereignty game less conflictual.

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Against Ecological Sovereignty is a passionate defense of radical ecology that speaks directly to current debates concerning the nature, and dangers, of sovereign power. Engaging the work of Bataille, Arendt, Levinas, Nancy, and Agamben, among others, Mick Smith reconnects the political critique of sovereign power with ecological considerations, arguing that ethical and political responsibilities for the consequences of our actions do not end with those defined as human.Against Ecological Sovereignty is the first book to turn Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty and biopolitics toward an investigation of ecological concerns. In doing so it exposes limits to that thought, maintaining that the increasingly widespread biopolitical management of human populations has an unrecognized ecological analogue—reducing nature to a “resource” for human projects. Smith contends that a radical ecological politics must resist both the depoliticizing exercise of sovereign power and the pervasive spread of biopolitics in order to reveal new possibilities for creating healthy human and nonhuman communities.Presenting a stinging critique of human claims to sovereignty over the natural world, Smith proposes an alternative way to conceive of posthumanist ecological communities—one that recognizes the utter singularity of the beings in them.

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Examines the motley shape of the pope’s territorial domain, the institutions found there, and the relationships between Rome and its outlying cities. Microhistories of how things worked form a clear picture of relations between the sovereign and his subjects.

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Introduces Agamben as an existentialist figure who takes the philosophy in a startling new direction Reveals the atheistic underbelly of Agamben's political theology Opens new avenues of study by challenging Carl Schmitt's appropriation of existentialism Contributors include Vanessa Lemm, Beatrice Marovich, Tom Frost and Lucas Lazzaretti While Giorgio Agamben's work has not previously been categorised as existentialist, his work creatively repackages important existentialist themes in a politico-theological context. Divided into three sections 'Agamben and the Sovereign Exception', 'Agamben and the Death of God' and 'Existentialist Themes in Agamben' this collection challenges, complicates and reimagines Agamben's critique of the sovereign exception and other existentialist themes including feminism and postcolonialism.

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The contemporary organization of global violence is neither timeless nor natural, argues Janice Thomson. It is distinctively modern. In this book she examines how the present arrangement of the world into violence-monopolizing sovereign states evolved over the six preceding centuries.

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Examines three consecutive famines in Cambodia during the 1970s, exploring both continuities and discontinuities of all three. The book documents how state-induced famine constituted a form of sovereign violence and operated against the backdrop of sweeping historical transformations of Cambodian society.

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1:120 000 WGS 84 Plans included: Eastern Approaches to the Solent (1:60 000) Littlehampton (1:13 500) Shoreham Harbour (1:20 000) Brighton Marina (1:8500) Newhaven (1:16 500) Sovereign Harbour (1:20 000)

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Examines three consecutive famines in Cambodia during the 1970s, exploring both continuities and discontinuities of all three. The book documents how state-induced famine constituted a form of sovereign violence and operated against the backdrop of sweeping historical transformations of Cambodian society.

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1:120 000 WGS 84 Plans included: Sovereign Harbour (1:20 000) Rye Harbour (1:35 000) Folkestone Harbour (1:10 000) Dover (1:15 000) River Stour Entrance (1:35 000) Ramsgate (1:6500) Calais (1:20 000) Boulogne-sur-Mer (1:25 000)

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These 16 essays open with a contribution by Fergus Millar, in which he defends studying Classics. He also questions the dominiant interpretation of politics in the Roman Republic, arguing that the people, not the Senate, were the sovereign power, therefore shedding new light on Augustus' regime.

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Analyses the creation of different sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) from a comparative political economy perspective, arguing that different state-society structures at the sectoral level are the drivers for SWF variation. Juergen Braunstein focuses on the early formation period of SWFs, a critical but little understood area.

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An illustrated guide to the symbols of power in Western art. It examines the way that sovereign rulers have employed well-defined symbols, attributes and stereotypes to convey their power to their subjects and rivals, as well as to leave a legacy for future generations to admire.

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The First World War was a watershed in the evolution of warfare, politics, economics, and the social sphere. One persistent topic in the historiography of the war is how contemporaries perceived the war's outbreak and its course. Tobias A. Jopp contributes to the related research from a new angle by analysing a quantitative source of perception that has hitherto been largely neglected, namely, the prices at which sovereign bonds were traded in the financial markets. Sovereign bond prices can be understood as a real-time opinion poll conducted among bondholders as to how the borrowing countries fared considering the war's implications for public finances. Specifically, the author investigates the Amsterdam Stock Exchange between 1914 and 1919. The empirical analysis derives and discusses perceived turning points and asks how bondholders perceived the established alliances' credibility.

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Lothario’s Corpse unearths a performance history, on and off the stage, of Restoration libertine drama in Britain’s eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While standard theater histories emphasize libertine drama’s gradual disappearance from the nation’s acting repertory following the dispersal of Stuart rule in 1688, Daniel Gustafson traces its persistent appeal for writers and performers wrestling with the powers of the emergent liberal subject and the tensions of that subject with sovereign absolutism. With its radical, absolutist characters and its scenarios of aristocratic license, Restoration libertine drama became a critical force with which to engage in debates about the liberty-loving British subject’s relation to key forms of liberal power and about the troubling allure of lawless sovereign power that lingers at the heart of the liberal imagination. Weaving together readings of a set of literary texts, theater anecdotes, political writings, and performances, Gustafson illustrates how the corpse of the Restoration stage libertine is revived in the period’s debates about liberty, sovereign desire, and the subject’s relation to modern forms of social control. Ultimately, Lothario’s Corpse suggests the “long-running” nature of Restoration theatrical culture, its revived and revised performances vital to what makes post-1688 Britain modern. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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Lothario’s Corpse unearths a performance history, on and off the stage, of Restoration libertine drama in Britain’s eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While standard theater histories emphasize libertine drama’s gradual disappearance from the nation’s acting repertory following the dispersal of Stuart rule in 1688, Daniel Gustafson traces its persistent appeal for writers and performers wrestling with the powers of the emergent liberal subject and the tensions of that subject with sovereign absolutism. With its radical, absolutist characters and its scenarios of aristocratic license, Restoration libertine drama became a critical force with which to engage in debates about the liberty-loving British subject’s relation to key forms of liberal power and about the troubling allure of lawless sovereign power that lingers at the heart of the liberal imagination. Weaving together readings of a set of literary texts, theater anecdotes, political writings, and performances, Gustafson illustrates how the corpse of the Restoration stage libertine is revived in the period’s debates about liberty, sovereign desire, and the subject’s relation to modern forms of social control. Ultimately, Lothario’s Corpse suggests the “long-running” nature of Restoration theatrical culture, its revived and revised performances vital to what makes post-1688 Britain modern. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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New insights into how the Book of Samuel offers a timeless meditation on the dilemmas of statecraft The Book of Samuel is universally acknowledged as one of the supreme achievements of biblical literature. Yet the book's anonymous author was more than an inspired storyteller. The author was also an uncannily astute observer of political life and the moral compromises and contradictions that the struggle for power inevitably entails. The Beginning of Politics mines the story of Israel's first two kings to unearth a natural history of power, providing a forceful new reading of what is arguably the first and greatest work of Western political thought. Moshe Halbertal and Stephen Holmes show how the beautifully crafted narratives of Saul and David cut to the core of politics, exploring themes that resonate wherever political power is at stake. Through stories such as Saul's madness, David's murder of Uriah, the rape of Tamar, and the rebellion of Absalom, the book's author deepens our understanding not only of the necessity of sovereign rule but also of its costs--to the people it is intended to protect and to those who wield it. What emerges from the meticulous analysis of these narratives includes such themes as the corrosive grip of power on those who hold and compete for power; the ways in which political violence unleashed by the sovereign on his own subjects is rooted in the paranoia of the isolated ruler and the deniability fostered by hierarchical action through proxies; and the intensity with which the tragic conflict between political loyalty and family loyalty explodes when the ruler's bloodline is made into the guarantor of the all-important continuity of sovereign power. The Beginning of Politics is a timely meditation on the dark side of sovereign power and the enduring dilemmas of statecraft.

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Although Native Americans have been subjugated by every American government since The Founding, they have persevered and, in some cases, thrived. What explains the existence of separate, semi-sovereign nations within the larger American nation? In large part it has been victories won at the Supreme Court that have preserved the opportunity for Native Americans to ‘make their own laws and be ruled by them.’ The Supreme Court could have gone further, creating truly sovereign nations with whom the United States could have negotiated on an equal basis. The Supreme Court could also have done away with tribes and tribalism with the stroke of a pen. Instead, the Court set a compromise course, declaring tribes not fully sovereign but also something far more than a mere social club.This book describes several of the most famous Supreme Court cases impacting the course of Native American history. The author provides an analysis of canonical American Indian Law cases with historical and legal context and brings a fresh perspective to the issues.Law students, policy makers and judges looking for an introduction to American Indian Law will gain an understanding of this complicated history. This exploration will also appeal to academics interested in a new perspective on old and current cases.

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Rethinking the causes and consequences of Britain’s default on its First World War debts to the United States of America The Long Shadow of Default focuses on an important but neglected example of sovereign default between two of the wealthiest and most powerful democracies in modern history. The United Kingdom accrued considerable financial debts to the United States during and immediately after the First World War. In 1934, the British government unilaterally suspended payment on these debts. This book examines why the United Kingdom was one of the last major powers to default on its war debts to the United States and how these outstanding obligations affected political and economic relations between both governments. The British government’s unpaid debts cast a surprisingly long shadow over policymaking on both sides of the Atlantic. Memories of British default would limit transatlantic cooperation before and after the Second World War, inform Congressional debates about the economic difficulties of the 1970s, and generate legal challenges for both governments up until the 1990s. More than a century later, the United Kingdom’s war debts to the United States remain unpaid and outstanding. David James Gill provides one of the most detailed historical analyses of any sovereign default. He brings attention to an often-neglected episode in international history to inform, refine, and sometimes challenge the wider study of sovereign default.

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Why the international community should have intervened in Rwanda. The Rwandan Genocide was a genocidal mass slaughter of ethnic Tutsis by ethnic Hutus that took place in 1994. 20 years on, Kassner contends that the violation of the basic human rights of the Rwandan Tutsis morally obliged the international community to intervene militarily to stop the genocide. This compelling argument, grounded in basic rights, runs counter to the accepted view on the moral nature of humanitarian intervention. It is a new approach to the intersection of human and sovereign rights that is of tremendous moral, political and legal importance to theorists working in international relations today. It challenges the immutability of the right of non-intervention held by sovereign states, assessing when it becomes right for the international community to intervene militarily in order to avoid another Rwanda.

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Although the Creeks constitute a sovereign nation today, the concept of the nation meant little to their ancestors in the Native South. Rather, as Steven Peach contends in Rivers of Power, the Creeks of present-day Georgia and Alabama conceptualized rivers as the basis of power, leadership, and governance in early America.

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Modern political theory begins with the rise of the philosophical concept and practice of sovereignty in the sixteenth century. Over the course of the next several centuries, sovereignty was generalized as the form of the modern state - eventually, there was no state that was not sovereign, and there was no understanding of the state that did not depend upon the notion of sovereignty. Yet, as Gerard Mairet argues in "The Fable of the World", at this moment of the culmination of political sovereignty, the limitations and dangers of this theory and practice have become all too apparent. Furthermore, Mairet believes that we have begun to see the glimmers of a new form of political community beyond the sovereign state and its rootedness in inter-state violence: for Mairet, Europe has become the harbinger of a new federative form of statehood. In this rigorous investigation of the notion of sovereignty from Bodin and Hobbes, through Rousseau and the Federalists, to Foucault and the framers of the European constitution, Mairet examines the articulation of the concept through the bloody history of European colonialism. He also shows how the reconstitution of the European political community after World War II marked the beginning of a new trajectory - one that offers the hope of a post-sovereign mode of political being-in-the-world.

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Although the Creeks constitute a sovereign nation today, the concept of the nation meant little to their ancestors in the Native South. Rather, as Steven Peach contends in Rivers of Power, the Creeks of present-day Georgia and Alabama conceptualized rivers as the basis of power, leadership, and governance in early America.

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The dramatic encounter between Muhammad Ali Pasha, Ottoman governor of Egypt, and his vanquished Saudi foe, Imam Abd Allah, in Cairo in November 1818. The book highlights the importance of this historic moment in the uneasy relationship between Muhammad Ali and his nominal sovereign, Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II.

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Can human rights protect the stateless? Or are they permanently excluded from politics? We are living in world in which human rights are violated on an unprecedented scale, often by the very sovereign states who claim to protect them. According to Giorgio Agamben, this is no coincidence: he argues that human rights are actually a sign of our growing powerlessness and political alienation in the face of a sovereign state of exception that has become global. Taking Agamben's critique as their starting point, Lechte and Newman reveal the paradoxes central to the politics of human rights by exploring questions of statelessness, exclusion, the violence of security and the visual representation of refugees and illegal migrants in the media. They propose a radical rethinking of human rights: as disengaged from humanitarianism, biopolitics, sovereignty and the society of the spectacle; as becoming genuinely political.

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Contemporary Issues in Financial Services special edition includes studies by the University of Malta, MSc Banking and Finance graduates and the respective lecturers, on financial services within particular countries or regions and studies of particular themes such as credit risk management, fund management and evaluation, forex hedging using derivatives and sovereign fixed income portfolios.

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Identifies the decisive moments in the development of the concept of responsibility, retrieves its origins, and explores the reflections on it. This book states that responsibility is less about a sovereign subject establishing a sphere of power and control than about exposure to an event that does not come from us and yet calls to us.

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The Nebulis Sovereignty is up in flames. For the first time since its founding, thewitches’ paradise is being raided by Imperial forces. It’s Imperial solider againstSovereign witch-Saint Disciples versus Purebreds. As war indiscriminately obliteratesall, Iska’s unit engages in combat with the Hydra, and a new witch begins to make hermove as paradise falls.

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In this accessible yet provocative text Barry Hindess provides a new interpretation of concepts of power within Western social thought, from Hobbes' notion of "sovereign power" to Foucault's account of "government". This book will be welcomed as an important contemporary contribution to one of the key debates in social and political theory.

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An army of death approaches a peaceful lizardman village--an army of undead deployed by Nazarick. Its commander is the Sovereign of the Frozen River Cocytus. The lizardman coalition shall face the Great Tomb of Nazarick. The weak are meat the strong shall eat in the merciless world that awaits in Volume 4.

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Can we talk about 'the people' as an agent with its own morally important integrity? How should we understand ownership of public property by 'the people'? Nili develops philosophical answers to both of these questions, arguing that we should see the core project of a liberal legal system - realizing equal rights - as an identity-grounding project of the sovereign people, and thus as essential to the people's integrity. He also suggests that there are proprietary claims that are intertwined in the sovereign people's moral power to create property rights through the legal system. The practical value of these ideas is illustrated through a variety of real-world policy problems, ranging from the domestic and international dimensions of corruption and abuse of power, through transitional justice issues, to the ethnic and religious divides that threaten liberal democracy. This book will appeal to political theorists as well as readers in public policy, area studies, law, and across the social sciences.

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The concept of sovereignty is a crucial foundation of the current world order. Regardless of their political ideologies no states can operate without claiming and justifying their sovereign power. The People''s Republic of China (PRC)one of the most powerful states in contemporary global politicshas been resorting to the logic of sovereignty to respond to many external and internal challenges, from territorial rights disputes to the Covid-19 pandemic. In this book, Pang Laikwan analyzes the historical roots of Chinese sovereignty. Surveying the four different political structures of modern Chinaimperial, republican, socialist, and post-socialistand the dramatic ruptures between them, Pang argues that the ruling regime''s sovereign anxiety cuts across the long twentieth century in China, providing a strong throughline for the statesociety relations during moments of intense political instability.Focusing on political theory and cultural history, the book demonstrates how conce

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Comparing Political Regimes provides a current and comprehensive empirical assessment of the world’s 195 sovereign states. Alan Siaroff analyzes and classifies countries in terms of economic development, political evolution, and state strength, ultimately outlining and contrasting the aspects of four regime types: liberal democracies, electoral democracies, semi-open autocracies, and closed autocracies. The fourth edition explains institutional differences in regime types,, including how regimes evolve in key countries and how this change is incremental. An invaluable resource for students to refer to, this book provides a thorough foundational introduction to the comparative politics of countries and contains several unique figures and tables on the world’s sovereign states. This new edition modifies the conceptual focus regarding some features of democracy and democratic party systems, expands on variations in autocracies, and adds a new chapter on the historical evolution of democracy, including key thresholds of representative democracy and levels of participation and competition at various historical junctures for all countries.

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With the dissolution of Cold War tensions, as new states take shape around the world and as nationalist and ethnic conflicts come to characterize the international order, questions of national identity have become pivotal for peacekeepers, policymakers, and scholars. In National Collective Identity, Rodney Hall illustrates how centuries-old dynastic traditions have been replaced in the modern era by nationalist and ethnic identity movements.This book delineates three epochal changes in the international system: from the medieval, feudal-theocratic order to the dynastic-sovereign system in the sixteenth century, the territorial sovereign system in the seventeenth century, and finally, after the American and French Revolutions, the national sovereign system. In rich historical detail, this book reexamines a broad spectrum of international conflicts--including the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic wars, the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, and the Cold War and its aftermath--in terms of the shifting sands of state identities through time.Arguing for the need to make a clear distinction between nation and state--one that has largely been overlooked in recent international relations studies on nationalism--Hall shows how an understanding of this dichotomy can help forecast the development of new states over time. National Collective Identity ascribes transformative power to social actors rather than viewing them as merely conditioned by the self-perpetuating logic of the state. In so doing, Hall presents a new theoretical model that accounts for human agency as an integral component of national systems.

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A fantasy world like no other. A unique magic system. Into the Rift takes us back to the thrilling story begun in Flames of Mira, and continues the tale of Jakar.After defeating the mercenary army that threatened his home, Jakar sets out with Efadora - the only person left with the power to bind him - across the Rift. He hunts the cultists who enslaved him, intent on ending their trade in elemental children, but he remembers little beyond that his search begins in the legendary city of Sulian Daw. Back in Mira, the Foundry’s rhidium - the rare mineral that grants them extraordinary power - has gone missing and is feared stolen by the rebellious faction that seeks to bring down the Sovereign. Ester, fledgling Smith of the Foundry, is tasked with tracking it down. If she fails, the Sovereign will rain death upon all those who oppose him, costing thousands of innocent lives.

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The achievements of the democratic constitutional order have long been associated with the sovereign nation-state. Civic nationalist assumptions hold that social solidarity and social plurality are compatible, offering a path to guarantees of individual rights, social justice, and tolerance for minority voices. Yet today, challenges to the liberal-democratic sovereign nation-state are proliferating on all levels, from multinational corporations and international institutions to populist nationalisms and revanchist ethnic and religious movements. Many critics see the nation-state itself as a tool of racial and economic exclusion and repression. What other options are available for managing pluralism, fostering self-government, furthering social justice, and defending equality?In this interdisciplinary volume, a group of prominent international scholars considers alternative political formations to the nation-state and their ability to preserve and expand the achievements of democratic constitutionalism in the twenty-first century. The book considers four different principles of organization—federation, subsidiarity, status group legal pluralism, and transnational corporate autonomy—contrasts them with the unitary and centralized nation-state, and inquires into their capacity to deal with deep societal differences. In essays that examine empire, indigenous struggles, corporate institutions, forms of federalism, and the complexities of political secularism, anthropologists, historians, legal scholars, political scientists, and sociologists remind us that the sovereign nation-state is not inevitable and that multinational and federal states need not privilege a particular group. Forms of Pluralism and Democratic Constitutionalism helps us answer the crucial question of whether any of the alternatives might be better suited to core democratic principles.

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The Political Thought of African Independence: An Anthology of Sources brilliantly frames the debates that captivated the world as former European colonies in Africa began their transition to sovereign rule in the 1950s and ’60s. Its wealth of key documents are enhanced by Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker's General Introduction, part introductions, headnotes, and annotations, providing needed contextual information and supports for readers.

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A pocketbook reproduction of the Declaration of Arbroath with historical analysis by Tom Turpie to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration. The document is a declaration of Scottish independence as a sovereign state in 1320, rather than a feudal land controlled by England's Norman kings, and to lift the excommunication of Robert the Bruce.

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Managing Public Debt combines a theoretical and empirical analysis of the advantages of issuing index-linked bonds and potential problems that may arise and how sovereign issuers should deal with them. International in its approach, this book will be especially welcomed in those countries where index-linked programmes are in operation or being discussed. It considers the experiences of the UK, Sweden and Italy, providing new insights which will be of special interest to economists and officials in the US Treasury who will shortly begin issuing index-linked bonds. Other issues discussed include the impact of index-linked bonds on the cost of public debt of sovereign issuers and the advantages of such bonds compared to conventional bonds; the market perspective on index-linked bonds in view of the European Monetary Union and alternative uses and strategic aspects of index-linked bonds.This important book will be invaluable to policymakers, government institutions, academics and postgraduate students as well as market practitioners.

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Comparing Political Regimes provides a current and comprehensive empirical assessment of the world’s 195 sovereign states. Alan Siaroff analyses and classifies countries in terms of economic development, political evolution, and state strength, ultimately outlining and contrasting the aspects of four regime types: liberal democracies, electoral democracies, semi-open autocracies, and closed autocracies. The fourth edition explains institutional differences within democracies and autocracies respectively, including how regimes evolve in key countries and how this change is incremental. An invaluable reference for students to refer to, this book provides a thorough foundational introduction to the comparative politics of countries and contains several unique figures and tables on the world’s sovereign states. This new edition modifies the conceptual focus regarding some features of democracy and democratic party systems, expands on variations in autocracies, and adds a new chapter on the historical evolution of democracy, including key thresholds of representative democracy and levels of participation and competition at various historical junctures for all countries.

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While it might have been viable for states to isolate themselves from international politics in the nineteenth century, the intensity of economic and social globalisation in the twenty-first century has made this impossible. The contemporary world is an international world - a world of collective security systems and collective trade agreements. What does this mean for the sovereign state and 'its' international legal order? Two alternative approaches to the problem of 'governance' in the era of globalisation have developed in the twentieth century: universal internationalism and regional supranationalism. The first approaches collective action problems from the perspective of the 'sovereign equality' of all States. A second approach to transnational 'governance' has tried to re-build majoritarian governmental structures at the regional scale. This collection of essays wishes to analyse - and contrast - the two types of normative and decisional answers that have emerged as responses to the 'international' problems within our globalised world.

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