“Sovereignty, territory, and the legitimacy of the international order”

2021 ◽  
pp. 147488512110651
Author(s):  
Colleen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
International Order ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Territorial Boundaries

In The Shifting Border, Ayelet Shachar (2020) argues that the exercise of sovereign power through border regimes no longer tracks territorial boundaries. In my commentary, I first argue that Shachar’s analysis implicitly calls into question the legitimacy of the international order. I then raise the worry that the logic which severs the link between the exercise of sovereignty and territory is the same logic that can be used to justify injustice and atrocity such as ethnic cleansing. Shachar’s normative proposals do not sufficiently recognize or guard against this risk.

International Relations

Beyond Reason ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 145-174
Author(s):  
Sanjay Seth
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Order ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Distinct Object

This chapter offers a postcolonial critique of the discipline of international relations, which constitutes itself as a discipline by defining a unique and distinct object: the “anarchy” that prevails in the international realm, where unlike the “domestic” realm, there is no sovereign power. In defining its object thus, it also assumes that the international order is composed of sovereign states. But until a few decades ago empires covered the larger surface of the globe and included the majority of its people. The discipline manages the extraordinary feat of either forgetting this altogether or accounting for it by dismissing it as a “survival” of an earlier era, destined to be surpassed in the inexorable teleological march toward state sovereignty that is thought to have begun with the Peace of Westphalia. The “amnesia” regarding empire that characterizes the discipline is disabling, because the imperial past shadows and shapes the contemporary international order.

Barbarous Nationalism and the Liberal International Order: Reflections on the ‘Is,’ the ‘Ought,’ and the ‘Can’

1996 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 439-462
Author(s):  
Carol A.L. Prager
Keyword(s):  
International System ◽  
International Order ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
First Time ◽  
Second World

It's a mistake to endow the Holocaust or any other massive case of crimes against humanity with cosmic significance. We want to do it because we think the moral enormity of the events should be balanced by an equally grand theory. But it's not. The attempt to do so is poignant.Alain FinkielkrautSavage ethnonationalism, dating back to the end of the eighteenth century, and violent ethnic conflict, as ancient as history, are sometimes viewed as if for the first time in the post-Cold War era. Still, it is the case that the end of the discipline imposed by the bipolar international system has permitted temporarily repressed ethnic and nationalist passions to reassert themselves. In response, a vast literature has sprung up discussing what states should do about genocide and ethnic cleansing, the gravest human rights abuses. In what follows I will consider barbarous nationalism in the context of the liberal international order put into place at the end of the Second World War, the roles of politics, law and morality forming a sub text to that discussion.

scholarly journals THE SUBJECT OF SOVEREIGNTY: LAW, POLITICS AND MORAL REASONING IN HUGO GROTIUS

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 619-645 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNABEL BRETT
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Moral Theology ◽  
International Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Moral Science ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Legal Arguments

AbstractHugo Grotius’s account of sovereign power in De iure belli ac pacis occupies a contested place in recent genealogies of modern sovereignty. This article takes a fresh approach by arguing that Grotius’s legal arguments do not do their work alone. They function within a broader horizon of what he calls “morals,” a field of reasoning that has debts to scholastic moral theology and Aristotelian moral science. Grotius's conception of sovereignty represents a modulation between law and “morals,” which allows him both to separate his scientific jurisprudence from the science of politics and nevertheless to reply to the political scientists on their own ground. The context of “morals,” however, is not narrowly political but inter-political, generating a potential tension between popular aspirations to sovereignty and the international order. Grotius’s “moral” handling of the issue offers an invitation to reflect on our current preoccupation with much the same concerns.

The bounds of identity: the Goldsmid mission and the delineation of the Perso–Afghan border in the nineteenth century

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. D. Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
International Order ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Boundary Disputes ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Territorial Boundaries ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
Territorial States

AbstractThis article examines boundary disputes between Qajar Persia and the emerging state of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. It argues that disputes between these two Islamic polities were central to the creation of modern states through the territorialization of political identity, in the form of border delineation. The demarcation of territorial boundaries represented the ‘indigenization’ of Western norms of statehood. Indigenous political actors increasingly understood and envisaged their political communities in terms of territorial states, reinterpreting and redeploying European political concepts in indigenous spaces. The Perso-Afghan case exemplifies the assimilation of ideas of political territoriality, central to the construction of a modern state-based international order, in Muslim regions outside direct colonial control.

scholarly journals Sovereign Power, Government and Global Liberalism’s Crisis

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-459
Author(s):  
Mariela Cuadro
Keyword(s):  
International Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Governmental Power ◽  
Practices Of Freedom

Abstract Abstract: For some time now a leading cause of debate among IR scholars has been the so-called Liberal International Order (LIO) and its assumed crisis. This article pierces this debate from a critical perspective asserting that different conceptions and analytics of power allow diverse questions on and diagnoses of liberalism in the global realm. With this objective, it confronts Ikenberry’s conception of LIO with the Foucauldian notion of liberalism. This is done by identifying the conception of power that underlies each notion of liberalism, assuming the former as performative. This way, it first defines two different conceptions of power: sovereign and governmental. Second, it links Ikenberry’s conception of LIO with the sovereign conception of power and points out the political and analytical effects of this relation, mainly, the hierarchical character of LIO and the consequent desire for a West-led world. Third, it develops Foucault’s conception of liberalism linked to governmental power and establishes some of its political and analytical effects: the importance of a heterarchical notion of power focused on the dimension of subject and subjectivity for the analysis of the present, and the political need to reflect on our practices of freedom.

Book Reviews

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Martin Van Bruinessen ◽  
Michael M. Gunter ◽  
Joost Jongerden ◽  
Michiel Leezenberg ◽  
Stanley Thangaraj
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Academic Publishing ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
City College ◽  
Tennessee Technological University ◽  
Technological University

Michael M. Gunter (ed.), Routledge Handbook on the Kurds, London and New York: Routledge, 2019, 483 pp., (ISBN: 9781138646643). Reviewed by Martin van Bruinessen, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Kardo Bokani, Social Communication and Kurdish Political Mobilisation in Turkey, Balti, Republic of Moldova: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2017, 252 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-330-33239-3) Reviewed by Michael M. Gunter, Tennessee Technological University, United States Emel Elif Tugdar & Serhun Al, eds., Comparative Kurdish Politics in the Middle East: Actors, Ideas, and Interests, Cham: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2018, pp. 235, (ISBN: 978-3319537146) Reviewed by Joost Jongerden, Wageningen University, The Netherlands Christoph Markiewicz, The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam: Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 364 pp, (9781108684842). Reviewed by Michiel Leezenberg, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Thomas Schmidinger, The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava, Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019, 192 pp. (ISBN: 978-1629636511). Reviewed by Stanley Thangaraj, City College of New York, United States

Simone Weil

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrice Marovich
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Intellectual Curiosity ◽  
Creation Theology ◽  
Simone Weil

Few of Giorgio Agamben’s works are as mysterious as his unpublished dissertation, reportedly on the political thought of the French philosopher Simone Weil. If Weil was an early subject of Agamben’s intellectual curiosity, it would appear – judging from his published works – that her influence upon him has been neither central nor lasting.1 Leland de la Durantaye argues that Weil’s work has left a mark on Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality, largely in his discussion of the concept of decreation; but de la Durantaye does not make much of Weil’s influence here, determining that her theory of decreation is ‘essentially dialectical’ and still too bound up with creation theology. 2 Alessia Ricciardi, however, argues that de la Durantaye’s dismissal of Weil’s influence is hasty.3 Ricciardi analyses deeper resonances between Weil’s and Agamben’s philosophies, ultimately claiming that Agamben ‘seems to extend many of the implications and claims of Weil’s idea of force’,4 arguably spreading Weil’s influence into Agamben’s reflections on sovereign power and bare life.

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