Various state and non-state actors are engaged in "border work"; disputes over the course and extent, nature, and legitimacy of the border (Reeves, 2014). "Border work" materializes in the regular ...confrontations and negotiations between transporters, contraband auxiliaries, and local populations, on the one hand, and customs and police officials, on the other It also occurs at the media level, as the state stages sovereignty over these border territories and control over cross-border flows. Through fieldwork, press analysis, interviews with officials, and archival work in the office of the Operational Customs Control of Oruro, the article demonstrates, first, that there is a shared understanding among the local population about the legitimacy of diverting part of the wealth materialized in the products that pass through their territory, and that, second, although, the government publicly stages the image of a vertical state; there is a space of negotiation between state and local actors that recognizes the latter's authority over border spaces and populations. Este concepto ayuda a desconectar teórica y metodológicamente la noción de "frontera" de aquella del "límite" (Benedetti, 2014); o sea, facilita pensar la frontera territorial no como una línea soberana entre Estado-naciones -esta proyección cartográfica de la geopolítica del Estado moderno-, sino como una constelación social cambiante, históricamente variable y promulgada por diversos actores.
The Divisions of Sovereignty Dickinson, Colby
Political theology : the journal of Christian Socialism,
03/2013, Letnik:
14, Številka:
1
Journal Article
This thesis investigates the shifting ideas, definitions and negotiations around the borders between Burma, China and Siam (Thailand) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Extending the work of ...scholars of ‘Zomia studies’ and recent advances in borderlands historiography, it uses extensive archival research in Burma, Thailand, the US and the UK to examine the changing relations between borderland dwellers, empires and nation-states in Southeast Asia. In doing so it seeks to contribute to wider debates over the nature of nation-state-making, sovereignty and citizenship at the edges of states. The following chapters make three main claims. The first is that contests for territory between diverse centres of power in the borderlands in the late nineteenth century show that border-making in ‘Zomia’ was a multi-directional rather than state-centred process. This thesis questions the apocryphal narrative of the ‘anti-state’ Wa and the ahistoric, state-escaping Lahu, by showing the varied territorial strategies of different groups of actors vying for control of the borderlands. The second claim is that the transnational mobility of people and things was central to border-making in the region. Smugglers who traded opium across borders in order to benefit from differences in colonial tax regimes paradoxically made international boundaries more rather than less relevant. Likewise peregrinations of preachers, converts and foreign missionaries in the early twentieth century caused external states to try to regulate the movement of people, thereby making the borders real. Thirdly, the thesis examines how people’s ideas of borders shifted in the polarising world of the early Cold War. Borders meant different things to different groups, becoming nationalist symbols or zones of uncertain sovereignty. At the margins, borderland peoples’ alternative spatial imaginings and political formations continued to challenge central states’ certainties of ‘geo-bodies’ and ‘imagined communities’.
This thesis is a philosophical history of police. It argues that philosophical studies of sovereignty and law have overlooked the critical place police power holds, tending to relegate police to the ...implementation of a sovereign will, or, contemporaneously, the enforcement and upholding of the law. In placing police at the centre of analysis, this work demonstrates the manner in which police power exists in a complex and overlapping relationship with sovereignty and law in a manner which is not reducible to implementation. In doing this I argue for the centrality of order in any consideration of police. In so doing it challenges a common narrative that accompanies studies of police which posits a break between an older pre-19th century conception and a modern one. While the former is characterised as broad, interventionist and concerned with ordering at the level of populations, the latter is conceived as a more limited term, designating the institution of the police, concerned with controlling crime and upholding the law. I argue that this narrative exists alongside and intersects with another line of argument on the question of order. Order, it is thought, was conceived by Aristotle and later Christian theologians as being natural and divine. This metaphysics of order is presumed to be ruptured with Thomas Hobbes who insists on the artificiality of order. This metaphysics is then challenged by liberal thought and political economy, when it is supposed that the re-introduction of a natural order determines and limits the state, fatally undermining the older police-state form. By foregrounding and examining the notion of order, I deconstruct the binaries – artificial/natural, positive/negative, transcendent/immanent, that underlie these common characterisations of police power. Using the work of Giorgio Agamben as a heuristic device, and in particular his category of the signature, I set about thinking order as relational, simultaneously revealing and mediating a split between transcendent and immanent. In the first chapter I examine and deconstruct the idea of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ order as they appear in Aristotle and Hobbes. I then examine, in chapter 2, the concept of police as it appears in Hegel and Fichte, crucially as mediating universal and particular which necessitates an unbounded police power. Ch. 3 analyses the work of Adam Smith and challenges the narrative which posits liberalism as relying on a notion of ‘natural’ order necessitating a restricted police power. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the reconfiguration of the relation between transcendent and immanent that occurs under the modern liberal state. It is here, I argue, that police power becomes unbounded and dislocated from sovereignty and law, whilst nevertheless bearing its force. Drawing on Benjamin and Agamben I argue that police power is, in fact, anarchic; not deriving from a transcendent origin or command.
This Thesis strives to establish a direct correlation between the jeopardised national sovereignty and economic prosperity due to FDI. In order to elaborate the argument, the first chapter sets forth ...the key determinants of FDI. This will assist in explaining the destinations and the fields of investment, which are of interest to the FDI exporters. The second chapter presents the evolution of economic trends in the past 100 years in order to examine the impact of different approaches towards FDI. The impact of FDI and globalisation on developing countries is also presented. It is then argued that, although free market economics boost growth, the interference of the state is a necessity in times of crisis. The third chapter incorporates the historic roots of FDI in Iran. It will be argued that the sovereignty of Iran has been gravely endangered as a result of foreign influence, which explains the current mind-set of Iranians in relation to foreign clout. Such influence is evidenced to have taken place through political and economic treaties. The fourth chapter examines the validity of the abovementioned hypothesis in the context of the current political establishment of Iran. The recent history of Iran since 1979 is thus presented with emphasis on the legal and economic evolution of the country decade by decade. It is argued that the key hurdle towards the FDI flow in Iran, has been economic sanctions. It is concluded that, there is a direct correlation between FDI and jeopardised sovereignty, and, in the case of Iran, its endeavour to adhere to international law with view to increase the FDI inflow has been futile.
Semantic innovations like seed commons, peasant seeds and seed sovereignty are a powerful expression of what may be termed as seed activism. In this opening paper of the JPS Special Forum on Seed ...Activism, we explore the surge of mobilizations the world over in response to processes of seed enclosures and loss of agrobiodiversity. A historical overview of the evolution of seed activism over the past three decades traces a paradigm shift from farmers' rights to seed sovereignty. Some of the main threats to peasant seed systems - from seed and intellectual property laws to biopiracy, corporate concentration and new genome editing technologies - are analyzed along with strategies by peasants and other activists to counter these developments. We take stock of what has been achieved so far and of the challenges ahead, and suggest some avenues for future research.
Hyper-Sovereignty and Community Gower, Jeffrey D.
Angelaki : journal of theoretical humanities,
03/03/2024, Letnik:
29, Številka:
1-2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The article retraces three important steps along the path of Derrida's Heidegger interpretation in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Readings of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, ...Introduction to Metaphysics, and "The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics" complement and further develop Derrida's deconstruction of Heidegger, which revolves around the term "Walten" and its role in the world-formation that makes community possible. The analysis of what Derrida calls the hyper-sovereignty of Walten reveals an ethico-political ambiguity in Heidegger's texts. On the one hand, this hyper-sovereignty registers as a super-sovereign violence that founds theological-political world-constructs through the exclusion of those deemed other. On the other hand, like différance it serves as the condition of impossibility of a common world. Following Derrida's provocation, I develop this second sense to argue that the dissolution of the common world entails an ethical imperative to carry the other with whom one has nothing in common.
PDF
