The question of Indigenous sovereignty in politics and literature is better posed as several questions of Indigenous sovereignties in political literatures. In this thesis, I propose that Anishinaabe ...writer Gerald Vizenor and Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko's storytelling conveys dimensions of sovereignties that indicate when, how, and where Indigenous sovereignties (plural) are enacted in relation to, and independent of, settler sovereignty (singular), which is defined by a relationship of possession. Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead (1991) and novella Ocean Story (2011), alongside Vizenor's novel Treaty Shirts (2016), memoir Interior Landscapes (1990), and the Constitution of the White Earth Nation, deploy Indigenous sovereignties in relationships that elude settler colonial hierarchies of sovereign subordinacy. Reading these diverse genres of texts in sovereign contexts, I engage a critical framework of generative incommensurability that catalyses the sovereignties they gesture toward as unequivocal and as unreconcilable with settler colonial sovereignty. Focussing on sovereign aspects of constitution in chapter one, temporality in chapter two, and place and memory in a tripartite chapter three, I offer an extended critical study toward how Indigenous stories realise sovereignties that exceed settler colonial political epistemology but are also not separable from a settler context. Ultimately, I suggest that an ethic of dynamic reciprocity in work with and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews enables a reorientation of political hierarchy at a theoretical level that yields material possibilities. Emphasising Indigenous sovereignties as actions expressed, not states possessed-that is, as always active and underway-I discuss the material and conceptual spaces where Indigenous and non-Indigenous sovereignties interact to reveal likenesses and incommensurabilities, encounters that desanctify the singular hegemonic worldview sustained by the settler colonial imaginary. The relationships between and amongst Indigenous sovereignties and settler sovereignty are reimagined by Vizenor and Silko's storywork to be messy, non-binary exchanges. The stories that carry these sovereign charges emerge as political sites of engagement where scholars take on roles of political agents and assume all of the responsibilities that follow.
Developments in the area of 'precision agriculture' are creating new data points (about flows, soils, pests, climate) that agricultural technology providers 'grab', aggregate, compute and/or sell. ...Food producers now churn out food and, increasingly, data. 'Land grabs' on the horizon in the global south are bound up with the dynamics of data grabbing, although hitherto researchers have not revealed enough about the people and projects at issue. Against this backdrop, this paper examines some key issues taking shape, while highlighting new frontiers for research and introducing the concept 'data sovereignty', which food sovereignty practitioners (and others) need to begin considering.
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Reports on an ethnographic study that examines how the concept of the Crown is understood and contested in NZ. Examines the different ways in which the Crown as a political, legal and symbolic entity ...shapes policy and practice. Considers what exactly the Crown is, how it is imagined and personified, when and why the discourse of the Crown is used, and what the implications are of its continual usage. Argues that the Crown is an imagined yet extraordinarily powerful entity that represents more than simply a proxy for the NZ state and that needs to be deconstructed in order to shed light on the symbolic and discursive work it performs in maintaining NZ's political and constitutional order. Outlines key findings of the pilot study and suggests future directions for research. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
In the states of the European Union (EU), the question currently being asked is to what extent dependence on technologies from the USA and China will have a lasting impact on state sovereignty. The ...term digital sovereignty stands for the EU’s desire to compensate for the deficits of the past decades, which were caused by an insufficient development of the location for software and hardware development. Autocratic states use the path of digital autarky, the USA a path of liberalization and high degrees of openness. In the EU, on the other hand, regulation, data protection, and liberal values developed over centuries play a major role in the less pronounced IT development. The path of European states to more digital sovereignty has been addressed politically as an “action plan,” but there is still no common understanding or definition of what digital sovereignty exactly means. There is a lack of a target and a measurable index as well as evaluated measures derived from it. Based on a historical derivation, this article proposes a definition for European digital sovereignty and the formation of an index. The index needs to be further scientifically elaborated for applicability.
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The article is devoted to the place ofthe sovereign's veto in the constitutional systems of Switzerland and Liechtenstein in relation to the position of each within the system. Due to the very unique ...constitutional structure of Switzerland (a special role of the parliament, a wide catalog and high frequency of using direct democracy tools) and Liechtenstein (sovereign defined in two entities - the prince and the nation; the exceptionally strong position ofthe head of state, who has the right to veto both laws adopted by the parliament and motions in referendums), attempts were made to analyze the political position of sovereigns in both countries, relying solely on the right to block legal acts adopted by the parliament (refusal to sign the law by the prince in Liechtenstein and people's veto in both countries).
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The article discusses the issue of the church autocephaly through the lens of the Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty. It starts from the premise that the concept of autocephaly is synonymous with ...sovereignty in the area of the inter-Orthodox relations. He uses Carl Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty-as-exception as an analytical tool seeing proclamation of autocephaly by a local church as introducing a state of emergency (exception), from which, in turn, sovereignty is born. As an example, the article considers the history of the Russian autocephaly. The article also introduces the distinction between sovereignty and its limited version, which arises in situations when a mother-church grants autocephaly to her part. An alternative model is the Church of Constantinople’s sovereignty derived from the “primacy of honour” in the Orthodox diptychs. In this respect, the article considers the prospective Pan-Orthodox Council as claiming the supreme authority in Eastern Orthodoxy.
This thesis examines the French Company of the Indies ('Compagnie des Indes', 1664-1769) as a vehicle for state-making in India and France. The French Company was always much closer to its ...metropolitan state than its English or Dutch rivals. Existing scholarship has cast this state influence as a debilitating weakness for the Company’s finances and trade, yet this thesis shows how the entanglement of state, commercial and religious interests proved a dynamic factor in the Company’s political interventions in the Indian subcontinent. By writing sovereignty into our understanding of the Company, this thesis thus provides a new explanation for French territorial expansion in India, a history that has been largely ignored in recent years. It employs the tools of social and cultural history in novel contexts to examine the creation of Company sovereignty in a wide range of sources, including private and official correspondence, legal records, missionary accounts, journals, ships’ logs, newspapers, travel writing, maps, and material culture. In doing so, it demonstrates how the Company was permeated by a diverse array of interests that shaped its state-making processes in specific ways, from royal ministers in Versailles to Luso-Indian widows in Bengal. It argues that this porosity helped shape the emergence of a corporate political economy driven by the accumulation of land revenues, which led to the articulation of a new kind of imperial power and sovereignty. Using the neglected history of a French trading company, this thesis tells a story that is at once global and local. In doing so, it provides a fresh perspective for understanding both the Old Regime and early colonial India.
This thesis studies the practice of packaging at the imperial court of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), in particular the agency of packaging in the Qianlong Emperor’s (1711-99) art collection. It ...discusses the functions of packaging in the imperial collection and provides a new perspective to examine it. It fills an important gap in our understanding of Chinese art history. The thesis analyses the collection and relevant archives to explore the role of Qianlong’s packaging. It argues that packaging was the way Qianlong handled his collection in order to convey essential information about those items. Applying the existing theory of secrecy to study the imperial collection, it demonstrates that, the emperor used packaging to create a sense of secretiveness to the objects. The thesis also shows that Qianlong made use of the objects’ secretiveness to redefine the objects’ histories (definition), as well as to develop a relationship with his officials. The findings of the thesis call for a reconsideration of the widely accepted view that simply equates owning the imperial collection to having the sovereignty to rule. A close look at the collection shows that Qianlong utilised different forms of packaging to engage himself with the objects. By doing so, his engagement was materialised and integrated to become part of the objects’ histories. He must have been conscious of the power of packaging as he actively participated with the imperial workshops in the design and production of packaging the imperial collection. Qianlong’s ideas of packaging are best realised in the curio box, an assemblage of many different objects in various packaging devices. It is the packaging, rather than the actual objects, that makes the assemblage a curio item. Much effort was thus made in devising the structure of the curio boxes. Packaging in the imperial collection comes in a large diversity of forms. Such a diversity indicates the importance of packaging and the necessity to understand it, especially how Qianlong designed it to affect our perception of the collection, and of his sovereignty. Unlike the traditional studies which have long neglected the packaging of the imperial collection or considered it as subsidiary to its contents, this thesis uses a new approach to examine the imperial packaging and objects enclosed.
This thesis examines how ecclesiological debates informed the languages of political legitimacy advanced by royalist and Covenanter leaders during the Scottish Revolution (1637-1651). During King ...Charles I’s reign, Scottish Presbyterians faced a Protestant king who attempted to secure supremacy over the kirk by imposing ‘popish’ Episcopalian reforms. Covenanter leaders challenged the king’s authority over determining the ceremonies and polity of the Reformed church to uphold Scotland’s status as a covenanted nation. To formulate their theories about the king’s civil and ecclesiastical sovereignty, royalist and Covenanter leaders engaged with Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic scholastic debates taking place in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe about the relationship between church and state. This thesis is the first attempt to comprehensively compare royalist and Covenanter political and ecclesiological ideas while placing them in a cross-confessional context that transcended a Reformed or ‘British’ tradition. It demonstrates how royalists and Covenanters merged analyses of legal categories drawn from a Catholic scholastic tradition with standard Protestant interpretations of the duty of the Christian magistrate. It argues that royalist and Covenanter leaders articulated ‘secular’ political ideas (i.e. absolute sovereignty, popular consent, and self-defence) to solve a crisis about the nature of the church, but not as a way to marginalise religious concerns. Instead, they reassessed the king’s relationship to Parliament and civil law for ecclesiological ends. This challenges narratives in the history of political thought which contend that ‘secular’ political ideas emerged as the church became increasingly distanced from the state. Instead, concerns about the ceremonies and polity of the church drove the expression of ‘secular’ political ideas in Covenanted Scotland. The church was therefore not an oppressive institution that had to be marginalised to bring about political change. Instead, debates about the theoretical nature of the church itself underlay the political and cultural transformations of the Scottish Revolution.
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