The basic premise of the thesis is challenging Schmitt's statement "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception" (Schmitt 2005 pg.1). Schmitt's presumption is that the sovereign can be found via the ...process of finding who makes the decision. This presumption is made on the basis of Schmitt's belief of the inherent nature of the decision to the application of legal and political orders. This thesis hopes to unpack this claim in its entirety and examine the claim that the sovereign is the one who makes the exception. This is not to deny that sovereigns do make decisions but rather the thesis' aim is to question and unpick the claim that the decision is the defining feature of sovereignty. Indeed, the thesis argues the decision is not the defining feature of sovereignty but can paradoxically lead to the undoing of state sovereignty when it is applied. The undoing of sovereignty in this case is not the downfall of the regime as some may suppose. Rather, the undoing as sovereignty can be seen as challenging Schmitt's own terms i.e., unity and homogeneity crystallised by the decision. The undoing of sovereignty in this regard can be witnessed in the illustrations themselves. Whilst the regimes of Bahrain, Egypt, and Syria have not fallen we have witnessed significant challenges to their claims of sovereignty from below. These challenges expose the failure of sovereignty within these regimes illuminating the limitations of Schmittian decisionism.
State death Fazal, Tanisha M
2007., 20111030, 2011, 2007, 2007-01-01, 20070101
eBook
If you were to examine an 1816 map of the world, you would discover that half the countries represented there no longer exist. Yet since 1945, the disappearance of individual states from the world ...stage has become rare. State Death is the first book to systematically examine the reasons why some states die while others survive, and the remarkable decline of state death since the end of World War II.
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.
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.
Previous studies of the Swedish East India Company (SOIC) have consistently demonstrated the resentment of the 'great maritime powers', especially Great Britain, towards new competition emerging from ...Scandinavia. In response, the SOIC was forced to find a strategy to guarantee its survival and thereby avoid the fate of the recently abolished Ostend Company. While scholars have focused on the SOIC's economic strategy, its legal strategy remains largely unexamined. This thesis explores the role of the Scot Colin Campbell (1686-1757) as a director of the SOIC, and how his knowledge of British law was a key component of Swedish success in the East India trade. Condemned as an ʽinterloperʼ by British legislation, his presence, viewed as hostile by other British subjects, naturally generated a response from Great Britain and the Honourable East India Company (EIC). The conflict culminated in the so-called Porto Novo affair of 1733, in which a 600-strong Franco-British force attacked the Swedish warehouse in the neutral town of Porto Novo on the Coromandel Coast. The ensuing eight-year-long lawsuit demonstrates the struggle between British exceptionalism and Swedish sovereignty, leading to the question: who owns the sea? Based on research into perceptions and reputations, this thesis contributes to the understanding of maritime conflicts in the absence of international maritime law and the impact of commercial treaties on the nationʼs sovereignty.
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).
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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