scholarly journals Humanitarian Interventions as Practises of Statecraft: Re-Crafting State Sovereignty in Refugee Crises

Refuge ◽  
1996 ◽  
pp. 23-24
Author(s):  
Nevzat Soguk
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Governance Practices

This study argues that humanitarian interventions are not undertaken merely to alleviate the sufferings of people under duress such as refugees. Beyond humanitarianism, they are activities of statist governance-practices of statecraft oriented to re-articulate and re-craft state sovereignty and the hierarchy it signifies, that is, the hierarchy of citizen/nation/state, not only as natural but also as necessary to the peaceful, stable, and secure organization of local and global politics. In as much as humanitarian interventions target refugees as objects of intervention, they appropriate refugees to the task of statecraft; refugees become not only the manifestation of the difficulties for the sovereign state, but also the site of statist practices, which, attendant upon refugees, endeavour continuously to re-articulate the state-centric imagination of life possibilities in local and global interactions. In the process, humanitarianism is typically subordinated to the contingencies of statism in the late 20th Century.

Ambiguities and Ambivalences in Making the Nation: Women and Politics in 20th-Century Mexico

2005 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikki Craske
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Development Project ◽  
The State ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Constant Feature ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
New Vision ◽  
State Projects

By comparing two time periods, the early and late 20th century, this article examines the ambiguities and ambivalences in the state promotion of women in the nation-building projects of Mexico. I argue that in both cases, the state was keen to promote itself as modern and progressive and used women's status in society to these ends. Despite the explicit focus on women, there were many ambiguities and ambivalences resulting from the competing state projects in the political, socio-economic and cultural arenas offering women both privileged spaces and constraints in the development of gendered citizenship. The contradictions arise from simultaneously promoting women's rights, extolling traditional gender roles and fearing women's political activism – both conservative and more radical. Although these ambivalences and ambiguities remain a constant feature, there is a key difference in the two time periods: in one the regime is inward looking, economically protectionist and corporatist, while in the other a new vision of Mexico has attempted to dismantle the corporatist structures and state development project with private economic initiatives and political individualism. In both periods, women gained important rights but romanticized imagery of the self-sacrificing mother was mobilized to underpin change: women were expected both to change and remain the same.

Sovereign State or Sovereign Group?

1925 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-499 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Y. Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Accurate Description ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Late Professor ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Foundation Stone

The late Professor William A. Dunning is reported to have said of the recent political theories which attempt to replace the conception of state sovereignty by some pluralistic grouping of social forces, that they were “radically unintelligible.” It is hard for political theorists who have been accustomed to regard the conception of sovereignty as a foundation stone and a sort of “rock of ages” for their faith to be told (as one is every day, more or less) that the anti-intellectualistic type of a sociological basis is the only valid one for juristic structure. For that, according to the old rationalistic conceptions of analytical jurisprudence, is indeed to base sovereignty upon shifting sands and to deprive law of any special significance of its own by equating it with social reactions of the most indeterminate character. But the anti-intellectualistic trend of modern political theory indignantly denies this charge. The assumption, it counters, that any legal center of reference can be final in its authority or in its right to command is an outworn Hegelianism, discredited by practice and theory alike. Law is too much a thing of fictions to be taken seriously in its claims, when it pretends to be giving an accurate description of facts in the abstract terms of a pretended right on the part of the state to be the sole author of enforceable commands and the only rightful claimant of men's ultimate loyalty.

New Rights for Old? Cosmopolitan Citizenship and the Critique of State Sovereignty

2003 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 332-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Chandler
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Global Citizens ◽  
Global Issues ◽  
Cosmopolitan Democracy ◽  
Cosmopolitan Citizenship ◽  
First Time

Cosmopolitan international relations theorists envisage a process of expanding cosmopolitan democracy and global governance, in which for the first time there is the possibility of global issues being addressed on the basis of new forms of democracy, derived from the universal rights of global citizens. They suggest that, rather than focus attention on the territorially limited rights of the citizen at the level of the nation-state, more emphasis should be placed on extending democracy and human rights to the international sphere. This paper raises problems with extending the concept of rights beyond the bounds of the sovereign state, without a mechanism of making these new rights accountable to their subject. The emerging gap, between holders of cosmopolitan rights and those with duties, tends to create dependency rather than to empower. So while the new rights remain tenuous, there is a danger that the cosmopolitan framework can legitimise the abrogation of the existing rights of democracy and self-government preserved in the UN Charter framework.

Rescuing the State?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Agius
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
The State ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Military Applications ◽  
Middle Powers ◽  
Gender Lens

This chapter explores how two middle powers, Sweden and Australia, deploy the politics of protection in different ways. Sweden’s efforts to remake the state is viewed through a gender lens as part of efforts to disentangle its former neutral profile through more robust military applications, whilst embodying a peaceful self-narrative linked to military non-alignment, active internationalism and a ‘feminist foreign policy’. The second case explores efforts to reclaim a bounded concept of the sovereign state in Australia's masculinist and militarized approach to securing its borders with respect to asylum seekers. Australia seeks to reclaim a more traditional imagining of the state, or a return to ‘restoring’ state sovereignty perceived to be under threat by globalising forces. Both case studies explore the inherently gendered and securitized reworking and revisioning of the state, and the tensions and contradictions that emerge in questions of security, sovereignty and identity.

The Existing Cause of Biafra and its Right to Self-determination

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Yinka Olomojobi
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
The State ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
The South ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Independent States ◽  
The Right

Abstract There has been recent agitation for self-determination in the south-east of Nigeria for the state known as Biafra (a pro-secessionist group). The principle of self-determination is a well-debated discourse since it connects with the right to secede and create a sovereign state. Like a marriage at gunpoint, a reluctant partner will always want a way out of the marriage, and will take a hike at the first opportunity. Given this political inheritance, Nigeria has fallen prey to several attempts to undermine state sovereignty originating in ethnic and regional differences. The controversy has concerned both the principle’s status in international law and its charter. This principle has played a prominent part in the emergence of former colonies as independent states. The aim of this article is to explore the ongoing agitation for a Biafran Republic and to assess whether it is in conformity with the right to self-determination.

Beyond Autonomy? The Politics of Corporations

1974 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-60
Author(s):  
Dennis Kavanagh
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The State ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Democratic Control ◽  
National Boundaries

IN RECENT YEARS THERE HAS BEEN A FORMIDABLE GROWTH OF literature on the political and other implications of business corporations. Much of the writing on the corporations has been of an alarmist nature. We are usually referred to the growth of an impressive economic (and, by implication, political) power of the corporations, the lack of effective democratic control on their activities, and the consequent need to establish a more effective set of constraints. It is suggested that internally the corporations are tending to by-pass the legislatures and other representative institutions, while externally the multinationals are integrating sectors of economies across states, and employing a management which may owe primary loyalty to the corporation and not the state in which managers are based. The emergence of the multinationals therefore not only seriously challenges many of our cherished political institutions and procedures, it also confronts our patterns of thinking about the sovereign state which have been inherited from the 16th century. In that they escape from the constraints of national boundaries and representative institutions it is alleged that the corporations are rendering obsolescent our traditional concepts of both state and sovereignty. Much of this argument is neatly encapsulated in the evocative titles of such scholarly works as Beyond the Nation State and Sovereignty at Bay.

scholarly journals The Impacts of Civil-Military Cooperation Programmes on Human Security and Peacekeeping in Timor-Leste

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 16-22
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Human Security ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Military Cooperation ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The People ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
The Republic

Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) between two countries is based on the law and regulation of each country in order to achieve respective national political goal and agendas. In this case study, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste (or well known as “Timor-Leste”) nation state which was established on 28th November 1975 and the formation of the nation was the results of persistent and struggle of the people. They had struggled for as long as 450 years before obtained united, independent nation and sovereignty. After nine days of independence, on the 7 th December 1975, Indonesia asserted that Timor-Leste was the 27th province of the Republic of Indonesia. This incident took place after the withdrawal of the Portuguese colonies. However, Timor-Leste restored their independence on 20th May 2002 which was after 25 years of Indonesian occupancy. In this context, United Nations (UN) internationally recognized Timor-Leste as sovereign State and thereafter the 192th member state of the UN. The study islimited to the impacts of CIMIC programmes towards the Timor-Leste people. Besides that, limitation of data collection has emerged due to ADF’s reluctance to provide details and information which is related to the programmes conducted in certain period of time which has taken place from 1999 to 2006. This research is significant on the issues of human security, peacekeeping and CIMIC programmes in Timor-Leste. The lessons learnt from the ADF operations in Timor-Leste which could contribute to the policy planners of humanitarian interventions in other missions ahead in the future.

scholarly journals Queering Justice: States as Machines of Oppression

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (Summer) ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Nour Abu-Assab ◽  
Nof Eddin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Arab State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Recent Attention ◽  
Shed Light

In light of the recent attention to the incarceration, surveillance, and policing of non-normative people in the Middle East and North Africa, this article does not seek to offer alternatives to systems of justice. Instead, our argument revolves around the need to turn the concept of justice on its head, by demonstrating that justice within the context of the nation-state is in its essence a de facto and de jure mechanism of policing and surveillance. To do so, this article draws on Michael Foucault’s notion of state-phobia from a de-colonial perspective, intersectional feminist theory, and Hisham Sharabi’s conceptualisation of the Arab-state as neo-patriarchal. This article highlights the need to move away from the post-colonial benevolent imaginary of the state, as a result of people’s desire for self-determination, to a more realistic de-colonial conceptualisation of nation-states that emerged post-colonisation, as sites of oppression. This article will also shed light on the role of civil society in reinforcing the unjust justice sought within nation-state frameworks by drawing on the examples of the recent crackdown on non-normative people in Egypt, and the example of non-normative Palestinians living under occupation. The Egyptian and Palestinian cases are, respectively, one of an allegedly sovereign state that overtly restricts gender and sexual freedom, and another of an occupying state that nominally guarantees gender and sexual rights. These examples are used to demonstrate the theoretical underpinnings of this article, through which we seek to problematise and break binaries of justice versus injustice, and the state versus civil society, in an attempt to queer the concept of justice.

Seeking what?

Focaal ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 (64) ◽  
pp. 51-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Global Politics ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
New Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Global Commons ◽  
Vested Interests ◽  
Alter Ego

Hardt and Negri's transvaluation of violence into the sign of emergent revolutionary subjectivity begins in a philosophical dream, not any actual historical anthropology. Negri's politics of subversion attempt to articulate the ongoing constitution of a new multitude but actually constitute the alter ego to Pax Americana's vision of nation-state sovereignty and finance-dominated capitalism. Thorstein Veblen's critique of the finance-dominated, postmodern new order, first rendered in 1919, draws similar conclusions about fictions in sovereignty by nation-state and contradictions between vested interests and the global commons. But Veblen correctly warns against romanticizing violent tactics. An anthropology of situations will better help scholars clarify contemporary predicaments and potentials than will search for an insurgent global multitude. The issue is urgent in the situation of globalized counterinsurgency. Anthropology can and should mount a better critique of actual global politics than it can find within the values of any philosophy, even one committed to the Spinozan celebration and amplification of immanence.

scholarly journals THE TRIUMPH OF THE STATE: SINGAPORE'S DOCKWORKERS AND THE LIMITS OF GLOBAL HISTORY, c. 1920–1965

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 1097-1123
Author(s):  
GARETH CURLESS
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Global Approach ◽  
Global History ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
The World

AbstractLabour history has been revitalized by the global turn. It has encouraged historians to look beyond national frameworks to explore issues relating to mobility and inter-territorial connection. This article, while accepting the benefits of a global approach, argues that historians should not lose sight of the factors that constrain mobility or lead to the collapse of cross-border exchanges. Singapore's dockworkers were at the forefront of the island's anti-colonial campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s. Inspired by anti-colonial movements elsewhere in the world, dockworkers drew on international discourses relating to self-determination to place their local struggles in a global context. This activism, however, coincided with the emergence of countervailing forces, including the universalization of the nation-state and the rise of state-led developmentalism. In this context, dockworkers’ internationalism came to be regarded as a threat to state sovereignty and development. As a result, once Singapore achieved independence the ruling People's Action Party encouraged dockworkers to abandon their globalized outlook in the name of modernization and nation building. Global history, then, should be as much about the rise of the national as the transnational, and the loss of connection as the forging of inter-territorial networks.

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