The Sovereign State in the International System

1990 ◽  
pp. 15-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. H. Hinsley
Keyword(s):  
International System ◽  
Sovereign State

States before relations: On misrecognition and the bifurcated regime of sovereignty

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 829-847 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minda Holm ◽  
Ole Jacob Sending
Keyword(s):  
International System ◽  
The State ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Fragile States ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Institutional Rule ◽  
Institutional Infrastructure ◽  
Protective Shield ◽  
Symbolic Structure ◽  
Liberal Thought

AbstractThe symbolic structure of the international system, organised around sovereignty, is sustained by an institutional infrastructure that shapes how states seek sovereign agency. We investigate how the modern legal category of the state is an institutional expression of the idea of the state as a liberal person, dependent on a one-off recognition in establishing the sovereign state. We then discuss how this institutional rule coexists with the ongoing frustrated search for recognition in terms of sociopolitical registers. While the first set of rules establishes a protective shield against others, regardless of behaviour, the second set of rules specify rules for behaviour of statehood, which produces a distinct form of misrecognition. States are, at one level, already recognised as sovereign and are granted rights akin to individuals in liberal thought, and yet they are continually misrecognised in their quest to actualise the sovereign agency they associate with statehood. We draw on examples from two contemporary phenomena – fragile states, and assertions of non-interference and sovereignty from the populist right and non-Western great powers, to discuss the misrecognition processes embedded in the bifurcated symbolic structure of sovereignty, and its implications for debates about hierarchy and sovereignty in world affairs.

scholarly journals Acordos de Sokovia e os Limites do Poder: Capitão América e Reflexões Sobre o Papel da Superpotência no Sistema Internacional

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 434-456
Author(s):  
Liliane Klein Garcia
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
International Relations Theory ◽  
American People ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Captain America ◽  
The Cold War

Ao observar o sistema unipolar que emergiu do final da Guerra Fria, é marcante o sentimento de insegurança geopolítica gerada pela existência de apenas uma superpotência global e as dúvidas da atuação do Estado soberano nessa conjuntura. Nesse paradigma, Capitão América: Guerra Civil é lançado com uma simbologia contestadora do papel do hegemon no sistema internacional. Com isso, inicialmente é exposto o enredo do filme, seguido das teorias liberal e realista das Relações Internacionais e da semiótica greimasiana. Com isso em vista, é feita a análise dos símbolos do longa-metragem e, por fim, se conclui que os autores do texto tinham como objetivo disseminar uma mensagem de união política entre os americanos.     Abstract: Observing the unipolar system emerging from the closure of the Cold War, is remarkable the sentiment of geopolitical insecurity generated by the existence of only one global superpower and the doubts about the role of the sovereign State in such system. In this paradigm, Captain America: Civil War is released with a contesting symbology about the role of the hegemon in the international system. Therefore, first it is exposed the movie plot, followed by the liberal and realist theories of international relations and the French semiotics. With this in mind, the symbols in the feature are analised and, in conclusion, it is stated that the authors wish to convey a message in bipartisan union amongst the American people. Keywords: International Relations Theory, Semiotics, Captain America.     Recebido em: setembro/2019. Aprovado em: maio/2020.

The Concept and Practice of Peacebuilding at the UN and Beyond

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura J. Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
International System ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Conceptual Domain ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Discourse Functions ◽  
Gender And Space

This chapter outlines what the author thinks the United Nations thinks it thinks about peacebuilding, investigating the different ways in which peacebuilding is represented as both concept and practice in the corpus of data. The author argues that UN peacebuilding discourse functions to (re)produce a narrow construction of peacebuilding as statebuilding, which is bound by constrictive logics of both gender and space that ascribe to the (notionally sovereign) state a degree of power, authority, and legitimacy, but ultimately leave undisturbed the hierarchies operative in the international system that afford legitimacy to the “international,” as a spatial and conceptual domain.

Colonies, semi-sovereigns, and great powers: IGO membership debates and the transition of the international system

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-298
Author(s):  
Ellen J. Ravndal
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
International System ◽  
Transition States ◽  
International Norms ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sovereign Equality

AbstractHow did the transition from a world of empire to a global international system organised around the sovereign state play out? This article traces the transition over the past two centuries through an examination of membership debates in two prominent intergovernmental organisations (IGOs). IGOs are sites of contestation that play a role in the constitution of the international system. Discussions within IGOs reflect and shape broader international norms, and are one mechanism through which the international system determines questions of membership and attendant rights and obligations. The article reveals that IGO membership policies during this period reflected different compromises between the three competing principles of great power privilege, the ‘standard of civilisation’, and universal sovereign equality. The article contributes to Global IR as it confirms that non-Western agency was crucial in bringing about this transition. States in Africa, Asia, and Latin America championed the adoption of the sovereignty criterion. In this, paradoxically, one of the core constitutional norms of the ‘European’ international system – the principle of sovereign equality – was realised at the hands of non-European actors.

scholarly journals Generalising the international

2005 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 451-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNY EDKINS ◽  
MAJA ZEHFUSS
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Alternative Analysis ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The Future

Ironically, since 11 September 2001, world politics seems to have taken a turn towards certainty. This article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the sovereign state in an insecure and anarchic international system is sustained and how it might be challenged. It does so through a Derridean analysis of Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society. The article examines how International Relations (IR) thinking works; it teases out the implications of our reading of Bull's work and proposes that what we call generalising the international could lead to an alternative analysis of world politics, one that retains an openness to the future and to politics.

Struggles for Individual Rights and the Expansion of the International System

2011 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Reus-Smit
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
International System ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New States ◽  
The Right

AbstractWe live today in the world's first universal, multicultural, and multiregional system of sovereign states. Five centuries ago, emergent sovereign states were confined to Europe and contained within the bounds of Latin Christendom. Through five great waves of expansion this nascent European system globalized. The Westphalian settlement, the independence of Latin America, the Versailles settlement, post-1945 decolonization, and the collapse of the Soviet Union each brought a host of new states into the system. How can we explain these great waves of expansion, each of which saw imperial systems of rule displaced by the now universal form of the sovereign state? After detailing the limits of existing explanations, this article presents a new account of the principal waves of systemic expansion that stresses the importance of subject peoples' struggles for the recognition of individual rights. Empires are hierarchies, the legitimacy of which has been sustained historically by traditional regimes of unequal entitlements—institutional frameworks that allocate individuals of different social status different social powers and entitlements. In the Westphalian, Latin American, and post-1945 waves of expansion, which together produced most of today's sovereign states and gave the system its principal regions, subject peoples embraced local interpretations of new, distinctly modern ideas about individual rights and challenged the traditional distribution of entitlements that undergirded imperial hierarchy. Each wave differed, not the least because different rights were at work: liberty of religious conscience, the right to equal political representation, and after 1945, a compendium of civil and political rights. But in each case a “tipping point” was reached when the imperial system in question proved incapable of accommodating the new rights claims and subject peoples turned from “voice” to “exit,” and each time the sovereign state was seen as the institutional alternative to empire.

The Bahamas in International Politics: Issues Arising for an Archipelago State

1974 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vaughan A. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Open Economy ◽  
International System ◽  
National Interest ◽  
The Other ◽  
Minimal Amount ◽  
The Bahamas ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Independent States

The Commonwealth of the Bahama Islands entered the international system as a sovereign state on July 10, 1973. It did so by sponsorship, which is to say that as far as relations between the Bahamas and the imperial country (United Kingdom) are concerned, independence has been granted, rather than taken or seized, with a minimal amount of difficulty. The identification of various issue-areas related to the entry of the Commonwealth into the international system is one way of indicating the various components that have gone into making up the “national interest” of that country, at least in the perspective of the state's policy makers. More concretely, the peculiar problems arising from its character as an archipelago state with a relatively open economy, make the questions to be resolved before and immediately after independence perhaps more complex than those faced by the other independent states of the Commonwealth Caribbean that have acceded to full sovereignty in the last decade.

The Constitutionalization of the International Legal Order

2008 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 545-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUSAN C. BREAU
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International System ◽  
World Order ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
International Norm ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Nation States ◽  
International Legal Order ◽  
The Subject

A continuing debate within international law research is whether there is an emerging international constitutional order. This journal devoted an issue to this discussion and there have been a number of books and articles written on the subject. Indeed, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas has recently joined the debate by writing an essay entitled (in the English translation) ‘Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?’ The essay reminds the reader of constitutionalism's original philosophical roots in Kantian cosmopolitanism. Habermas argues that the world dominated by nation-states ‘is indeed in transition towards the postnational constellation of a global society’. He contrasts this vision with the realist opinion that the taming of political power through law is only possible within a sovereign state and with a more recent view postulating a vision of a liberal world order under the banner of Pax Americana. In support of the Habermas position, it can be argued that as a result of the UN 60th Anniversary Summit's adoption of the international norm of ‘the responsibility to protect’, there is a trend towards constitutional values in our international system. As Anne Peters states, ‘[t]he most fundamental norms might represent global constitutional law.’

scholarly journals Sovereignty, a Swinging Concept Between International Law and Political Reality

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 181-185
Author(s):  
Anca Dinicu
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International System ◽  
The State ◽  
Fundamental Unit ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
International Context ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Political Units ◽  
Domestic Affairs

Abstract The State, as the fundamental unit of the international system, appeals to ultimate power and authority in order to control its own domestic affairs and claims equality as a legal basis regarding its relation with other legal political units. But the existence of the sovereign state in the current international context, where the multiple interdependencies generate divergence and cooperation in the same, is subject to permanent challenges. And the issue is not easy approachable in theory, nor in practice. Like other concepts, as security or democracy, the concept of sovereignty needs to be updated according to the new rules revealed by the process of globalization, rules that are defined not by the equal states, but by the powerful ones.

scholarly journals Do International Rules and Norms Apply to Nonstate Actors?

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Lemke
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International System ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Nonstate Actors ◽  
World War ◽  
Discussion Section ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Rebel Groups ◽  
De Facto States

Abstract The nonstate actors of interest in this article are territorial contenders: political entities that control populated territory, function like sovereign states but are not recognized as sovereign states by other members of the international system. Sometimes they are de facto states, sometimes they are rebel groups, sometimes they are neither of these, instead existing in control of territory with neither conflict against the sovereign state within whose borders they exist nor claims to a state of their own. New data about territorial contenders permit me to evaluate arguments about changing rules and norms in the international system. I find support for claims about the consequences of changing rules about which actors are recognized as sovereign states but not for claims about a norm against conquest after World War II. In the discussion section, I consider implications of these findings for future research.

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