Sovereign Geopolitics? – Uncovering the “Sovereignty Paradox

Sovereign Geopolitics? – uncovering the “sovereignty paradox” Seán Patrick Eudaily and Steve Smith

Abstract:

This paper reconsiders the importance of the sovereign state in contemporary geopolitics. The role of the state in an era of globalization and devolution is a concern that has gained considerable attention in recent geographical scholarship. What has received less attention is how the state has historically functioned as a device that conflated the linked concerns of sovereignty and territoriality. The authors argue that there exist a number of “sovereignty paradoxes” that inhibit the interdisciplinary analysis of the interrelations between sovereignty, territoriality, and state power. Thus, reconsidering sovereignty and territoriality informs both how the state emerged as an important unit of geographical analysis historically, and why the state has become such a problematic concept in contemporary geopolitics. This work has implications for understanding popular struggles over civil liberties, foreign policy, and justice for indigenous peoples.

Keywords: sovereignty, territory, state, political geography, geopolitics

Contact Information:

Dr. Seán Patrick Eudaily Associate Professor of Politics Department of History, Philosophy, and Social Sciences University of Montana Western 710 South Atlantic Street Dillon, MT 59725 Tele: (406) 683-7103 Email: [email protected] Dr. Steve Smith Assistant Professor of Geography Department of Social Science Missouri Southern State University 3950 E. Newman Road Joplin, MO 64801 Tele: (417) 625-3008 Email: [email protected]

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What we need, however, is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty, […]. We need to cut off the King’s head: in political theory that has still to be done.

- Michel Foucault1

I hope that by disentangling the history of sovereignty from the history of states and by focusing on sovereignty as a problem, we can avoid those distortions and restrictions that the “rise of the state” narrative imposes on the European past. […] If we consider sovereignty as a problem, therefore, we will be able to acknowledge the abiding importance of the state without losing sight of the complex, uneven, and unfinished aspects of state making. - James J. Sheehan2 Ever since the seventeenth century, [Hobbes’ definition of sovereignty] has remained at the heart of the political self-understanding and practice of the modern West. […] It seems to me […] that we have inherited a theory which we continue to apply, but which we do not really understand.

-Quentin Skinner3

I. Introduction:

States – while important units of political analysis – are very difficult to

understand. They resist scholars’ attempts to gather data on them through anything other

than proxy means, such as describing the status of their economies, the opinions and

moods of their populations, or the organization of their institutions of government.

Nevertheless, they provide a peculiar geographic certitude. It should, then, stand as no

surprise that a common assumption of many undergraduate students when taking college

geography courses is that the memorization of countries and capitals will sustain their

attention throughout the course. This idea rests on erroneously affirming the consequent;

that is, “if we are to study geography (in particular political geography or geopolitics),

then we must first start with the ‘state.’”

Should scholars of geopolitics resist the lure of this assumption and instead think

carefully about the state as simply a culturally (western) and historically (modern)

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specific device that may aggregate power, but does little to actually explain transitions

amongst modes of power and the distribution thereof, then the range of geopolitical

questions expands. Of course, political geographers have explored many arenas beyond

that of the state. For example, both Colin Flint and John Agnew in recent discussions of

geopolitics note a movement away from assuming the priority of the state. For example,

Flint notes that “geopolitical agents have multiple goals – they are not homogenous,

simple, or singular entities.”4 Flint thus acknowledges the multiple sites of geopolitical

agency both within and outside the state. In a similar fashion, John Agnew elaborates on

the role that scientific rationality, particularly organic notions of state growth and

boundary establishment, had on the geopolitics of the twentieth century. This

“naturalized knowledge,” which Agnew notes was not without criticism in recent times,

nonetheless shaped the thinking of political geographers and specifically justifies not

limiting the scope of geopolitical inquiry to the state.5

In an era where the priority of the state is called into question, the watchword of

geopolitics has changed to globalization. With globalization comes a new concern over

networks, regimes, and power centered both above and below the nation-state and the

creation of increasingly fruitful new research agendas. Nevertheless, much of the

twentieth century geopolitical conversation has been premised on the primacy of the state

and the constant concern regarding its ability to effectively stand as a conceptual and

empirical organizer of international law, political science, and geopolitics, while at same

time increasingly expanding its scope of political authority across borders.

Such concerns are not wholly outside of well-established traditions in geopolitical

scholarship. An early and strong example of this is Isaiah Bowman’s The New World:

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problems in political geography.6 Bowman’s text discusses the various regions and parts

of the world that were at the time (and in many cases remain) “problems.” Bowman’s

narrative is rather foresighted insomuch as he was deeply concerned with the role that

religious and ethnic minorities would play in the formation of states and boundaries.7

Bowman urged that “if a people will fight because of religious persecution, then

adjustment with respect to religious privilege is much more important than economic

advantage [italic: original].” 8 The mechanisms by which Bowman sought to address

issues of religion in national identity during the interwar period was through elaborate

discussions of boundaries and incipient attempts at international organizations, such as

the League of Nations through Article 22, should assume more responsibility for their

own domestic affairs; however, “their tutelage should be entrusted to advanced nations.”9

As such, even early geopolitical discourses denied the state its role as the sole or even

predominate aggregator of demands, and, as is discussed below, sovereign power.

Far from quaint and anachronistic, Bowman’s work foreshadowed many of the

same concerns that animate the field of geopolitics today, namely (in today’s parlance)

supranationalism and devolution.10 His discussions often involved thinking about

disputes amongst national groups in terms of “problems,” which presumably required

solutions. In hindsight it is clear that the institutions of both international organizations

and of states have been somewhat weak and ineffective at dealing with conflict born out

of these aspects of a complex, “messy” geopolitics.11 However, regardless of the League

of Nations’ failures, the impulse toward a liberal internationalism during this period

necessitated a constitutional state that is to be accountable to domestic as well as

international populations.

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The infancy of this sort of internationalism, however, would end with the

outbreak of the Second World War and come to maturity during the Cold War. The

continuing questions concerning the effectiveness of the state as means by which such

internationalism might be championed thus also continually illustrates the fragility of this

liberal project. The fields of political geography and of international relations mature in

the cold war period both in scope and in abstraction. Jean Gottmann’s “Geography and

International Relations” set out to describe the role that geography plays in international

politics with the Cold War as a backdrop. Cautioning against too simple a rendering of

both international relations itself and the import of geography in understanding relations

among states, Gottmann nonetheless attempted to articulate order vis-à-vis the state into

an understanding of geopolitics during the Cold War period.12 Richard Hartshorne’s

ideas of centrifugal and centripetal forces similarly imposed order and explanation on

what is otherwise “messy” geopolitics; however, Hartshorne, like Gottmann, also

cautions us against too hasty a move to treat states, and the order that they seemingly

provide, as a priori. Contrasting his understanding of the state from that of political

scientists, Hartshorne states:

[F]rom our (political geographers) point of view, political scientists seem to have concerned themselves solely with the idea and purpose of the generic state – the purposes, that is, that are common to all states. This ignores the very thing that is of direct concern to the geographer – namely, the idea that is distinct for the particular state in contrast with that of other states, that which makes for significant differences from country to country. Perhaps that means that it is logically a problem for the geographer.13 Both Gottmann and Hartshorne were no doubt attuned to the reorganization of the state

system that the Cold War geopolitics had set afoot. Moreover, similar to Bowman, Flint

and Agnew, and amongst many others, there was a clear necessity to think beyond the

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state as a singular, unifying entity in world politics. For some geopolitical scholars this

consideration was a threat to states and the stable order that their institutions and very

existences brought about, for others, however, the “problematic” of the state held

possibilities for alternative forms of social organization and political resistance.

This paper explores the problem of the state in geopolitical analysis, but not by

directly addressing its weaknesses as a unit of analysis. Rather, we would like to consider

providing an alternative to these discussions by discussing sovereignty and territoriality

in relation to geopolitics. Sovereignty, as an alternative to the state as a conceptual form

provides opportunities for consideration of both transnational organization, as well as

people’s movements. The link, then, between sovereignty and territory is that sovereignty

is expressed spatially. Its spatial expression in the form of territory provides an insertion

point for geopolitical analysis. Reframing the conversations about power in international

politics in terms of the territorialization of sovereignty, both above and below the state,

provides an alternative to a the spatial void in which much theorizing about power

(particularly state power) rests, while also expanding the scope of geopolitical inquiry.

II. States, Territory, and the “Sovereignty Paradox”

A geopolitics without states may provide no need for one of the firmly held

concerns of some political geographers – namely the placement, arrangements, and

disposition of borders that neatly circumscribe a particular territory. Nevertheless, a

geopolitics without sovereignty leaves us only with artificial states and crocked lines left

to be filled in, described, apportioned, reapportioned, united, divided, and re-divided.

Geographical research has recently taken a turn toward a reconsideration of sovereignty,

as has scholarship in cognate social science fields, such as political science, international

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law and intellectual history. Agnew’s “territorial trap” publication, for example, may be

one of the stronger examples of addressing “spatial forms” outside of the narrowly

defined (and the only nominally sovereign) state. Writing in the wake of the thawing

Cold War, Agnew acknowledges that, “sovereignty in anything like its modern form is a

relatively recent [development].”14 As such, the point was less to argue against the state,

but more to force a reconsideration of how power may be expressed outside the state

through different peoples and institutions.

Whether sovereignty and the state are decoupled because the state is now

problematic in a globalizing era that has made it less effectual, or if the state was never

(or perhaps briefly) effectual is less important than what sovereignty outside the state

might mean for geopolitical inquiry and for new forms of power. Agnew subsequently

argues that we must begin to reframe the conversations concerning the political

geography of states in terms of sovereignty regimes.15 Agnew further divides these

sovereignty regimes into four ideal types, defined by the twin axes of the strength of

“central state authority” and the consolidation of “state territoriality.”16 Not alone in this

line of thinking, Agnew is joined by Ersun N. Kurtulus, who further addresses the

concern of state organization and sovereignty; as he notes:

The proposition that sovereignty ought to be located in the state as an entity may also be justified by what might be called the democracy argument. This aspect of sovereignty has recently been made an important issue as a result of those processes of transgovernmental or transnational integration which have supposedly come to reshape the international sphere in general.17 Kurtulus also proffers an ideal typology, in his case focusing on differentiating between

the intra-state, state, and interstate political scales on the one hand and the

descriptive/normative distinction on the other.18 Both Agnew and Kurtulus locate the

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argument for a more robust understanding of sovereignty in juxtaposition to the

efficacious “constitutional supremacy” of the nation-state on the one hand, and the

curious territorial imperative that apparently accompanies states. Thus, we are left with a

“sovereignty paradox” where we must have a sovereign state with territory as a necessary

condition for its ability to articulate power; however, this territorial imperative must first

be satisfied by some sovereign legitimate authority.

This territorial component of the “sovereignty paradox” is closely connected to

the historical and theoretical themes alluded to in the three epigraphs to this paper:

Skinner’s point with regard to contemporary political thought’s errant Hobbesianism, the

juxtaposition of Foucault’s call to “cut the King’s head off in political theory,” and

Sheehan’s call to “disentangle the history of sovereignty from the history of the state.”

For simplicity’s sake, we may summarize these challenges to the self-evidence and

practicality of state sovereignty as follows:

• The concepts of political theory lag behind political developments “on the

ground” (kings, after all, have had their heads cut off) and should be updated to

reflect current practices.

• An obsessive focus on the historical narrative of “the rise of the state” obscures

the specific and varied place of the question of sovereignty with (and beyond) the

processes of state-formation, consolidation, territorialization, disintegration, and

reterritorialization.

• Contemporary state practice does employ the conceptual framework of

sovereignty developed in the 17th century, yet we lack a corresponding

understanding of how sovereignty shapes our language of politics in myriad ways.

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• Much of the conceptual confusion about sovereignty comes from the application

of divergent standards of what type of questions inquiry about sovereignty should

answer, and at what scale those answers are relevant.

• That most (if not all) attempts to grapple with the location of sovereignty at

different scales, the description of how effectual the sovereignty wielded by states

is (or is not) in various regions and historical periods, and/or analysis of the

legitimacy of sovereignty as a norm fail to question the underlying assumption

that both sovereignty and the state must be expressed territorially.

Considering these various components of the general problem we term the “sovereignty

paradox” together leads to two important conclusions. First, there is a strong sense of

disciplinary over-determination in each of these separate lacunae. Political theory,

European history, intellectual history, international relations, and political geography not

only all bring their own sets of discipline-specific concerns, concepts, and tools; they also

exhibit different manners and degrees of conflating sovereignty and the state. Secondly,

potential avenues of escaping the confusion in each case often lead to the cul-de-sac of

trading one discipline’s old problem for a “new” problem already vexing another. We

argue that in order to exit this revolving door that the epistemic and methodological

concerns of disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) scholarship must by augmented by the

political (meaning partisan, positional, and engaged) concerns of the public intellectual.

While each of these threads of inquiry are of great interest to specialists in

geography, history, international relations, and political theory (and those working at the

intersections of these fields), the “sovereignty paradox” is not merely a thought puzzle of

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academic esoterica. Rather, its consequences can be seen throughout geopolitics as

currently practiced.

We believe that the contemporary world political situation is rife with instances

where a critical reappraisal of sovereignty might lead to experiments in possibility. One

example is the long-simmering debate within the United States over the “inherent”

powers of the president as Commander-in-Chief and chief foreign policy officer. Most

recently this has bubbled to the surface of popular perception due to the disclosure in late

2005 of the Bush administration’s use of the National Security Agency to collect

electronic surveillance outside of the legal framework established by the Foreign

Intelligence Surveillance Act (1978).19 A second instance where defining the concept and

practice of sovereignty is at the heart of contemporary politics is the foreign policy and

international law positions adopted by the United States following the attacks of

September 11, 2001 (usually referred to as the “Bush Doctrine”). The centerpiece of this

new doctrine is an enhanced notion of “preemption” as the exercise of the sovereign right

of self-defense. Summarizing this doctrine (first elaborated in the National Security

Strategy of 2002), the National Security Strategy of 2006 reads:

To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively in exercising our inherent right of self-defense. The United States will not resort to force in all cases to preempt emerging threats. Our preference is that nonmilitary actions succeed. And no country should ever use preemption as a pretext for aggression.20

In a second example, our received notions of sovereignty are intimately connected to the

struggles of indigenous peoples for and of freedom within white settler states.21 In

particular, the issues surrounding the establishment of a legal right to native title in both

Australia and Canada have lead inexorably back to the study of the period (the 17th

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century in North America) when the extension of the sovereign power of European

empires began the long march of interactions with and domination of native peoples.22 A

reconsideration of sovereignty locates politics at multiple scales: from the local politics of

settler states to concerns over the increasingly difficult geopolitics of globalization. Thus,

such contemporary and historical struggles provide the public intellectual not only with

the opportunity to use these conflicts as entry points to the scholarly reappraisal of the

practical and theoretical aspects of their lineages, but also compel us to utilize this

ongoing scholarship in the process of active public engagement with these and similar

issues.

The paradox of a singular constitutional state needing to exist within territorial

boundaries on the one hand, while on the other requiring sovereign, legitimate authority

to enforce those boundaries, raises questions about the nature of sovereignty.

Specifically, what is its character and how might simply using notions of the state and

sovereignty together, as if they are interchangeable, unnecessarily bracket a number of

important geographical questions? While scholars of political thought such as Skinner

might interpret the “head” which Foucault insist we cut off as being a metaphor for the

absolute power of the state or of its sovereign, others, such as Sheehan, clearly caution us

against too quickly summarizing the joint historical development of both the state and

sovereignty as both modes of power are differentiated over time and over space.

Leverage on the applicability of sovereignty in geopolitical studies, then, requires some

conceptual archeology applied to the term itself. An appropriate starting point for such an

excavation may begin with recent attempts at reconceptualizing sovereignty.

III. Paradoxes of Sovereignty in Political Thought

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A quick browse through any number of recent texts on political thought leads to a

reoccurring trend in how sovereignty is taught – its direct connection with Thomas

Hobbes. In the last generation of scholars, no interpretation of Hobbes has been more

influential, nor indeed as controversial that that of Quentin Skinner. Skinner is Regius

Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. J.G.A. Pocock notes that

for a historian whose area of specialty is the history of political thought (representing

such a small slice of the overall historical profession) to hold this post is a testament to

Skinner’s undeniable stature within this field.23 Skinner has defended the two arguments

about Hobbes found so often in the textbook versions of sovereignty. First, that “the

essence of Hobbes’ theory of public power is thus that the person identifiable as the true

‘subject’ of sovereignty in any lawful state must be the person of the state itself.”24 From

this flows that the name “sovereign” applies to the representative (be it a single person or

an assembly of persons) authorized to act on the part of the state, and yet that the powers

exercised by this sovereign are the rightful possession, not of the representative who

wields them, but the state itself.25 Second, that Hobbes employed these arguments as

“[Hobbes] says, to pass unwounded between the opposing swords of ‘those that contend,

on one side for too great liberty, and on the other side for too much authority’,” in other

words, against both the theories of limited monarchy and divine right monarchy at issue

during the English Civil War.26 Thus, we may see in Skinner’s work the highest scholarly

elaboration of the conventional wisdom about sovereignty and Hobbes. Why then has

Skinner been so controversial?

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Skinner very explicitly aims much of his work on Hobbes and the seventeenth

century as a correction of errors committed under the influence of liberal, or Whig

ideology.

It is a measure of the predominant influence of the [W]hig ideology that [seventeenth century ancient constitutionalists] bogus history managed to displace disinterested historical enquiry so thoroughly that the continued existence of this alternative historical vision has itself been overlooked, even in works of modern scholarship.27

Skinner maintains that such Whiggish error is both a matter of overemphasis on the

uniqueness of Hobbes himself and obfuscation of the Hobbesian elements in Whig and

liberal thought.28 Skinner concludes this line of argument by noting that for all of its

pernicious effects on political thought, this ideological reading of the seventeenth century

left its “deepest mark […] on the study of history itself.”29 Thus, following Skinner, we

believe that an eventual reevaluation of sovereignty with also encompass a reevaluation

of traditional history (a theme to which we will return in section V).

Recent discussions of sovereignty have also developed a significant divergence

from the traditional Hobbesian formulation of the sovereign as the legal construction of a

preexisting state order in exploring instead Carl Schmitt’s formulation that “Sovereign is

he who decides on the exception [to the legal order].”30 The underlying justification often

proffered for adhering to Schmitt’s (a notorious Nazi jurist after all) concept of

sovereignty is that it restores an autonomous political realm defined by the friend/foe

distinction, a realm that is subsumed by liberalism’s focus on the “politics of consent.”31

Of all the authors that have used Schmitt as their touchstone in analyzing

sovereignty, none had generated more contemporary interest than Giorgio Agamben.32 In

an issue of the Journal of Law and Society devoted to “Democracy’s Empire,” many of

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the authors involved took up Agamben’s arguments for critical reappraisal.33 Rather than

accepting Agamben’s (and Schmitt’s) identification of sovereignty as an existential or

theological concept of political ontology, David Bates offers the alternative explanation

that this very formulation is the specific historical product of the inter- and intra-state

violence within the European culture of politics from which is emerged in the eighteenth

century. Bates writes:

We can speculatively argue that it was this forgetting [of the historical development of the sovereign state within a particular diplomatic-normative system] that paved the way for a new concept of the state, a state whose autonomy was not constrained by any legal boundaries, within the state or in the global sphere.34

Andrew Norris too finds that Agamben’s treatment of sovereignty is overly

philosophical, particularly when applied to the contemporary concerns that animate State

of Exception:

If the Bush-Cheney Administration is simply providing the sovereign decisions that are metaphysically necessary to maintain public order in the United States, one cannot fault it for acting tyrannically. Conversely, if it is indeed acting tyrannically, this is something that requires not metaphysical analysis and political theology, but practical, political resistance and institutional change. The choice between these two is hardly a decision in the sense of Schmitt’s ‘absolute decision.’ But it is, I would argue, the choice that we face.35

Benjamin Morgan is more interested in the possibilities opened up by Agamben’s

assertions concerning the future of law as a realm of play beyond any given set of

normative ends; “This negative definition of the figure of law – as law minus force and

application – removes law’s functionality and normativity while maintaining that

something called law still exists.”36 Peter Fitzpatrick and Richard Joyce attempt to

elaborate on how the indeterminacy of the boundary between law and the sovereign in

Schmitt actually helps resolve some of the contradictory aspects of Agamben’s

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conceptualization of the state noted by some of his critics (including those just

discussed).37

However, this general line of sovereignty theory remains mired in a particular

form of the sovereignty paradox, insomuch as the move towards political theology, while

aiming at a reestablishment of an autonomous “political” sphere, has the perverse effect

of seeing to foreclose any significant political resistance against the so-called state of

exception. In this we find agreement with the position of Paul A. Passavant, namely

that:

In sum, Agamben remains haunted by the very problems that motivated not only his critique of the state but also this attempt to remove this inquiry from political philosophy to “first” philosophy. At the end of Agamben’s theory of the state, politics remains.38

This inability to find sovereignty a theological refuge from politics itself stands as the

other side of the Hobbes’ coin, where only the legal order founded by the political state

can provide refuge from the incessant religious wars of the seventeenth century.

Therefore, in many ways the limitations of political thought in dealing with the paradoxes

of sovereignty return to a need to address the wider field of war and violence from which

sovereign orders struggle to escape. It is thus towards a consideration of sovereign states

as territories entities embedded within a backdrop of inter-sovereign competition,

diplomacy, and war we now turn.

IV. Paradoxes of Sovereignty in International Affairs

Curiously enough, scholars’ concerns over sovereignty have often bracketed or

outright ignored the role of territory in their conceptualizations. However, in

simultaneous and contradictory moves, concepts of sovereignty have insisted upon a

territorially bound state or at least acknowledged that bounded states exist as the modern

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summation of sovereign power in the modern age. However, political geographers’

contributions to this conversation have pointed out that the state is problematic and that

territory is more than a container of state power. Thus, moving scholarly concerns about

sovereignty to a conceptual place where truly interdisciplinary leverage may be applied to

sovereignty and its resulting paradox requires uncovering the means by which states,

territory, and sovereigns have been conflated in political geography and international

affairs.

In the last two decades the common wisdom about sovereignty (in both theory

and practice) in geography, international studies, and political theory has come under

attack from a number of different angles. This is perhaps the most notable within

international studies, a discipline in which the direct equation of states and sovereignty

has traditionally been dogmatically assumed. Predictably, a discipline rife with warring

theoretical traditions, these recent investigations have set sail from dissimilar ports. The

“international society” tradition is steeped in a social constructivist ontology and

historicist epistemology that treats sovereignty as a constituent norm of members of the

society of states. Thus, Robert H. Jackson has contended that the concept of sovereignty

is historically contingent, and that a fundamental shift in its status as an international

norm has taken place – a shift largely unnoticed by other traditions in the discipline of

international relations. The “liberal” tradition, on the other hand, adheres to a strong

individualism in ontology, methodology, and normative commitment. This often

manifests itself in an orientation towards a cosmopolitan concern with the global

capitalist economy and human rights. One such group of liberal scholars has focused on

transborder phenomena – such as global warming – that demand corresponding

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transborder (and thus transsovereign) responses. Yet another liberal critique of

sovereignty comes from those who identify and advocate an international community

willing to intervene in sovereign states due to ethnic conflict and humanitarian

emergencies. The “realist” tradition – long the dominant position within international

relations (IR) – shares with the international society tradition the conception of

sovereignty as a norm, but dissimilarly realists’ materialist, agent-centric ontology

defines states as the “real” object of inquiry. From this background, Stephen Krasner has

advanced the bold thesis that sovereignty has never been a major constitutive principle in

international politics, and has always willingly been sacrificed to the “logic of

consequences.”39 Finally, the emergent tradition (the word seems ill-fitting here) of

“poststructuralism” seeks to undermine any a priori reliance on states, sovereignty, a

constituent relationship between the two, or the individual and the market. This line of

critique has not had a demonstrable effect on the other traditions, primarily because it is

often couched in a philosophical questioning of epistemology atypical of international

relations as a wider discipline. A brief examination of each of these positions will show

that for all their attention to the fragility of sovereignty, none have fully unraveled the

sovereignty paradox.

In Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World,

Robert H. Jackson advances the argument that the concept of sovereignty has undergone

a number of reformulations in the past three hundred years – so much so that the practice

of sovereignty today bears little resemblance to the implicit theory of sovereignty which

underlies most thinking in international relations. Jackson identifies a period of “natural

law” sovereignty, which lasted from the European Middle Ages until the nineteenth

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century.40 European and non-European sovereigns confronted each other as different but

equal under natural law, yet, only European states were treated as “like units” under the

separate positive law of corpus Christianorum.41 This regime was supplanted in the

nineteenth century by the extension of the European system of positive law, bringing

hierarchy to the relations of European and non-European rulers. Positive sovereignty is

based upon the exercise of “capable and constitutional” statecraft – a standard that

derives from a particularly liberal conception of the state.42 Jackson argues that this is

not merely an expression of ethnocentrism in that it finds its basis in the “demonstrated

achievements of Europeans” in the fields of government and economics.43 However, he

does undermine this disavowal of ethnocentrism in acknowledging that such theories

were employed to “explain and justify the remarkable ascendancy of Western

Civilization above all others.”44

Jackson contends that with the decolonization of European overseas territories,

sovereignty again changed in practice. Whereas this process only took a few decades, the

changes were revolutionary.45 Jackson terms the current era one of negative sovereignty,

where formal legal recognition is all that stands between “quasi-states” in the Third

World and fragmentation, assimilation, and intervention.46

Although Jackson's analysis reveals the chimerical nature of sovereignty in much

of the world, it rests on the same assumptions as the prevailing wisdom that he

challenges. In order to classify countries as “quasi-states,” Jackson relies on the positive

law definition of sovereignty as “natural” or “true.” The “lack” of Third World states can

only be defined in relation to a (re)reified master signifier of sovereignty.

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Another critique of sovereignty comes from those who identify transborder issues

such as environmental change, disease, global crime, and refugees – as phenomena that

are not, and arguably can not be, managed by sovereign states. Maryann K. Cusimano's

edited volume, Beyond Sovereignty: Issues for a Global Agenda, is an exemplar of this

line of thought.47 Cusimano identifies numerous contemporary challenges to the practice

of sovereignty.

Sovereignty is challenged externally by the globalizing dynamics of open markets, open societies, and open technologies, which makes the borders of even strong states permeable by outside forces. Sovereignty is also under siege internally, from the rise of internal conflicts and subnational movements, as well as from the reinforcing crises of economic development […] which undermine the international and internal legitimacy on which sovereignty stands.48

This type of critique also contains a prescriptive agenda. While the “new” transboundary

issues are of pressing concern, the sovereign state is “wired for the sovereign military

confrontations of a bygone era.”49 For scholars like Cusimano, these issues and others

like them require equally transsovereign institutions to deal with policy-making and

implementation. While this is certainly a challenge to the sovereign state, what is

envisioned for the future is often merely the transfer of sovereignty to international or

global institutions. To merely argue over by whom sovereignty should be exercised

misses the critique of its generalized function within Western political thought; this

further, too, highlights the missing, or at least incomplete, geopolitics of sovereignty by

necessarily assuming its territoriality in reference to the waxing or waning of an all-too-

presumed Western nation state.

A third axis of critique centers on the challenges that ethnic conflict and

humanitarian intervention pose to sovereignty. A volume that is characteristic of this

position is David Wippman's (editor) International Law and Ethnic Conflict.50 This text

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identifies the resurgence of ethnic conflict as a de facto rejection of the sovereignty of

states, and thus such conflict becomes a problem de jure. In his introduction, Wippman

notes that the claims of states to sovereignty and the claims of ethnic groups to self-

determination are in sharp conflict: “The central problem for international law, then, is to

reconcile these two apparently conflicting norms.”51

Not only does the existence of ethnic conflict problematize sovereignty, so does

one of its major management strategies – intervention. Wippman highlights the

importance of this second fact by illustrating that “foreign intervention into internal

conflicts seems to be the rule rather than the exception.”52 In her contribution to the

same volume, Anne-Marie Slaughter draws out the implications of ethnic conflict

prevention and management for the theory and practice of sovereignty. She writes that

“states traditionally were conceived of as billiard balls and black boxes [in International

Relations],” however, human rights law (regarding ethnic conflict) has moved us closer

to the “imposition of formal requirements concerning the ways in which states are

themselves constituted.”53 This, of course, places international law above sovereignty,

rather than as an expression of sovereignty. Indeed, Slaughter makes explicit what that

new organizing principle should be – states must be treated “as subject to the sovereignty

of their subjects.”54 Again, we find a radical claim at the center of a challenge to

sovereignty – democracy as the constitutive principle of the world order. Yet, moving

from state to popular sovereignty (as the aforementioned shift to international/global

sovereignty) in no way addresses its fundamental paradox.

Finally, we come to the most strident and provocative mainstream critique of

sovereignty – that it has been more myth than practice all along. In making such an

20

argument, Stephen D. Krasner distinguishes between four different “meanings” of

sovereignty, which are not necessarily logically connected – domestic, interdependence,

international legal, and Westphalian sovereignty.55 He makes a number of simple, bold

assertions about world politics:

Norms are sometimes mutually inconsistent. Power is asymmetrical. No rule or set of rules can cover all circumstances. Logics of consequence can be compelling. Organized hypocrisy is the norm.56

Thus, Krasner treats sovereignty as a norm (meaning normative rule) while contending

that the violation of sovereignty is the norm (meaning typical behavior). What most

distinguishes his analysis from the other contemporary critiques discussed above is

Krasner’s insistence that this hypocrisy towards sovereignty has existed since the

beginnings of the interstate system.57

Krasner gives us three interrelated propositions about international politics, each

of which displace the centrality of sovereignty in practice. The first is that because

sovereignty is a norm, it (with other norms) has been “decoupled” with action because

“logics of [material] consequences have trumped logics of [normative] appropriateness”

in world politics.58 Therefore, the typical assumption that sovereignty is constitutive of

the international states-system is demonstrably false.

Most central to the argument of this book, the characteristics that are associated with sovereignty […] do not provide an accurate description of the actual practices that have characterized many entities that have been conventionally viewed as sovereign states.59

Krasner’s final proposition goes beyond a critique of sovereignty. He argues that the

anarchical nature of the international system makes it nearly impossible for any kind of

international institution or norm to become embedded in practice.60 While in some ways

Krasner can be seen as providing a “total critique” of sovereignty, it is still a critique that

21

does not supersede (or even address) the sovereignty paradox. Krasner builds his

argument on an actor-oriented approach. He states that such an approach must “start with

simple assumptions about the underlying preferences of actors,” and that “these

preferences must be applicable to all actors across time and space” [Emphasis added].61

This runs counter to the central premises of our analysis – the historicity of events,

discourses, and practices. Thus, there remains the challenge of incorporating

poststructuralism’s critique of sovereignty with a focus on the practice of world politics.

Poststructuralists argue that the primary reason for the continued privileging of

sovereignty lies in its centrality to the construction of modern social reality. Thus any

challenge to the salience of sovereignty is immediately suspect in traditional analyses.

Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat have pointed out: “this difficulty arises because

sovereignty as a master signifier conceals its status as will have been, constituting the

social order as always already.”62 R.B.J. Walker points to the centrality of sovereignty

in the basic political questions posed in the modern era:

Sovereignty and subjectivity express the possibility of resolving the relationship between universality and diversity in a particular place [the territorial state]. They do so … by resolving all relations of unity and diversity, space and time, and self and other in a space/body that is in principle capable of attaining universality in its particularity while taking its proper place as one particular space/body among other particular spaces/bodies.63

The poststructural critique of sovereignty seeks to “rearticulate the relationship between

the claims of universality and those of particularity or diversity” on a basis other than the

systems of states.64 In order to carry out such a critique:

[Poststructuralism] must involve an engagement with the conditions under which we have all become so easily persuaded that the dualisms that arose with modern accounts of sovereignty and subjectivity are the appropriate way of posing questions and answers about the future of political life.65

22

Too rarely have poststructuralist critics of sovereignty heeded this injunction. Thus,

poststructuralism has fallen on deaf ears by limiting itself to a critique of the practice of

international theory, yet failing to provide a corresponding rewriting of the practice of

geopolitics. As if a conviction without a sentence, such critical engagements with

international relations theory and/or geopolitical analysis rarely provide alternatives to

the presumed territoriality of the state.

Recent contributions to these debates have not been any more successful in

avoiding the pitfalls that underlie the paradoxical nature of sovereignty. Stéphane

Beaulac suggests that:

[C]ontrary to the overwhelming accepted view, 1648 does not close the final chapter on the multilayered system of authority in Europe. Rather, it constitutes but one instance where distinct separate political entities strived for more power through independence, which was only achieved long after the Peace. [Emphasis added]66

In contrast, Jason Farr argues bluntly that, “the Peace of Westphalia remains the

foundation of modern international relations.”67 Finally, David L. Blaney and Naeem

Inayatullah strike a quintessentially underdetermined note by making the compound

claim that, “We share the supposition that a return to the puzzle of sovereignty in

important for political and ethical inquiry. […] however, we believe that sovereignty – as

theory and practice – remains a site of political and ethical possibilities.”68

A recent collection of articles in Political Studies was devoted to addressing the

questions of sovereignty as affected (or not) by the attacks on September 11th, 2001.

Amitav Acharya takes Krasner’s notion of “organized hypocrisy” to task for failing to

distinguish between those “principled and organised departures from Westphalian

sovereignty aimed at protecting human security (as outlined in the R2P [“responsibility to

23

protect”] Report) from unilateral breaches of sovereignty” such as the 2003 US invasion

of Iraq.69 He refers to the later development as “disorganized hypocrisy” [emphasis

added]. As he writes:

Disorganised hypocrisy occurs when the leading state, backed by a small number of like-minded allies (often in disregard of their own domestic opinion), unilaterally changes (or attempts to change) the rules of sovereignty (or any other meta-norm) by falsely basing the change on previous and legitimate attempts at limiting sovereignty, and when such transgressions are contested by others in the international community who are themselves striving, through alternative arguments and modes of action, for a consensus on how to limit state sovereignty in a more legitimate and multilateral manner.70

Robert Jackson’s contribution to the issue restates his historical analysis of the changing

nature of sovereignty (discussed above), while throwing a heavy dose of skepticism at

claims inaugurating a post-sovereign age. Jackson concludes:

We clearly are no longer at the beginning of modern history, but it is far from certain that we are near the end, or that we have entered a post-sovereign era. If we are living in a world that some among us would label as postmodern, it is not a world that is likely to abandon the sovereign states system any time soon.71

The final article in the collection, by Adriana Sinclair and Michael Byers, surveys the

“the interdisciplinary literature of ‘IL/IR’ [International Law/International Relations]” in

order to assess (as their title inquires) “When US Scholars Speak of ‘Sovereignty’, What

Do They Mean?”72 They argue that while American academic discussions of sovereignty

tend to divide into “statist” and “popular” strands, both of these approaches fail to ever

question the United States as the model and exemplar of proper sovereignty. Sinclair and

Byers write:

Regardless of whether they evince a statist or popular conception of sovereignty, and regardless of whether they support or oppose international law and international institutions, they almost never suggest that the sovereignty of the United States should be compromised.73

24

While critiquing the hegemonic creation of application of concepts by American and

allied writers in international affairs is nothing new, Sinclair and Byers do bring a needed

dose of pointedly political analysis to the conversation. However, even in these recent

additions to the literature on sovereignty motivated by the events of the last few years, the

thinking tends to follow existing lines of disagreement, and employ established concepts.

How then to summarize such a diversity of discussions of sovereignty? On the

one hand, sovereignty is frequently said to be the product of events in European political

life during the middle of the 17th century, centered on the Peace of Westphalia. On the

other, sovereignty is more of an abstract concept in law, the contours of which are always

in flux without the need to abandon the term itself. Finally, sovereignty appears to be an

aspect of the current international system ill-suited to describe and respond to the

emerging re-territorialization of political conflict at various scales. In a metaphorical

sense, scholars have argued for the state system as if it were alive, like T. S. Elliot’s

“patient etherised upon a table,” when in fact, and paradoxically, the state is dead and

only appears to exist via continuous discursive resuscitation.74

IV. The Perils and Paradoxes of Territoriality

Geopolitics suffers not so much from misunderstanding the role that territory

plays in the affairs of state and international politics, but rather, geopolitics has labored

under territory’s heavy weight. Much like the student taking his or her introductory

course in geography – a student who may be expected to master “countries and capitals”

– the contemporary discussion of international politics rests squarely on the state and its

borders. Thus, like the collection of borders on maps, our knowledge of the spatial

25

organization of political power is also disjointed, mythologized, and is increasingly

unsatisfactory as a heuristic, let alone, explanatory device.

This is as problematic as it is unsurprising. Territorial order situated the modern

state as both the aggregator of domestic political demands and supporter of the extension

of capital over increasingly diverse spaces. As such, territorial order became the sine qua

non of political authority in the emerging European state system. Because of this,

territory, like sovereignty, inherits a particular historical discourse that was and continues

to be associated both with the power of the state to act internally, as well as externally.

For example, Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society holds at center stage the role

of territory and sovereignty in world politics. According to Bull, the state, and the

international systems to which states belong, is the fundamental building block of

international politics. Put simply:

The starting point of international relations is the existence of states, or independent political communities, each of which possesses a government and asserts sovereignty in relation to a particular portion of the earth’s surface and a particular segment of the human population. On the one hand, states assert, in relation to territory and population, what may be called internal sovereignty, which means supremacy over all other authorities within that territory and population. On the other hand, they assert what may be called external sovereignty, by which is meant not supremacy but independence of outside authorities.75

Bull’s quintessentially modern, liberal formation of the international system treats

sovereignty as exercised by powers, rather than experienced by populations, and territory

as given rather than applied in that process. In contrast, Foucault argues that traditional

history, in particular international history, is tied directly into the functioning of power

presented as right and exercised, in part, thought the ritualistic glorification of that power

which ultimately takes on the form of the state.

26

Given the pattern that the conventional presentations of the concept of

sovereignty frequently exhibit perhaps a place to begin the detangling of sovereignty and

the state may be found in an excavation of practical resistances to such organization of

political discourse. What other ideas and forms of power contended with the artificial,

impersonal sovereign state during the early modern period? Foucault suggests that just

such an alternative political discourse, what he terms historico-political discourse, was

“if not constituted, at least clearly formulated at the beginning of the great political

struggles of seventeenth century England.”76 Foucault characterizes this discourse

according to the following elements. First, society is characterized as being composed by

a binary structure. “There are two groups, two categories of individuals, or two armies,

and they are opposed to each other.”77 Secondly, therefore, this is the “first” discourse

that can speak as an “I” or a “we” as opposed to the universal pronouncements familiar to

philosophy and law.

In the general struggle he is talking about, the person who is speaking, telling the truth, recounting the story, rediscovering memories and trying not to forget anything, well, that person is inevitably on one side or the other: he is involved in the battle, has adversaries, and is working toward a particular victory.78

Foucault identifies one of the earliest texts to flaunt both of these aspects in François

Hotman’s Francogallia (1573).79 Martin Dzelzainis has noted the influence of Hotman

on English theories of the ancient constitution.80 While Dzelzainis draws our attention to

the irony that the theory of the ancient constitution was in fact a recent invention (of the

sixteenth century), the structure of common law theories of the ancient constitution

conform to rather traditional molds of historical and juridical discourse, unlike that which

Foucault is interested in recovering.81 Finally, in constructing its voice as partiality to a

conflict, this discourse redefines the relationship of truth and war. Instead of the

27

association of truthful discourse with peace and/or neutrality, this discourse instead

associates truth with a weapon to be employed within the general economy of the relation

of forces aimed at victory.82

Such a discourse is opposed to the traditional discourse within which Hobbes’

theory of sovereignty is deployed. At its point of emergence, this new discourse

challenged the workings of philosophical-juridical right.

[T]he essential function of the technique and discourse of right is to dissolve the element of domination in power and to replace that domination, which has been reduced or masked, with two things: the legitimate rights of the sovereign on the one hand, and the legal obligation to obey on the other.83

Yet, it is also opposed to, what up to that time (and arguably much past it), constituted the

discourse of history.

It seems to me that we can understand the discourse of the historian to be a sort of ceremony, oral or written, that must in reality produce both a justification of power and a reinforcement of the power. It also seems to me that the traditional function of history, from the first Roman annalists until the late Middle Ages, and perhaps the seventeenth century and even later, was to speak the right of power and to intensify the luster of power. It had [these] two roles.84

Instead of tracing the continuity that justifies the rule of the king, this new discourse

expresses the memory of discontinuity – of that “endlessly repeated play of dominations”

which undermines any and all claims to rule as right.85 Rather than narrating power

exercised as law, instead monarchical rule was exposed as the fruits of conquest.

Finally, society appears not (as in Hobbes) after the establishment of the civil

peace, but conversely as a compound of previously different peoples, forced together in

the ongoing process of struggle. Although it may be tempting to associate this counter-

history exclusively with popular struggles against the king and juridical power, such a

temptation should be resisted. While this new discourse emerges in the English-speaking

28

world as a popular, critical position, it spread by means of “circulating very quickly from

one oppositional group to another […] but it was shared by different enemies or different

forms of opposition” and later was adopted by anti-monarchical French aristocrats, and

eventually folded back into statist discourse itself (in the form of state racism).86

Accepting (for now) Foucault’s rough view of such a new discourse, why are our

textbooks not filled with definitions of sovereignty as domination, usurpation, and

continual warfare; why is it the formulations of traditional philosophical, juridical, and

historical discourses remain at the heart of our contemporary vocabulary; why have we

yet to cut off the king’s head in political theory?

Bull’s statements, particularly those concerning the importance of the state as a

means of enforcing order in the international system, are emblematic of the glorification

of the territorial, constitutional state. The explicit manner in which both the institutions of

the state and their tandem territorial manifestations exist in international law as the result

of ritualized, traditional historical discourse, the discourse of institutions of the state and

their ability to exert power, thus should be thought of as a juridical discourse.

In order to extend this investigation to cover the second aspect of the “sovereignty

paradox” – the disentangling of the history of sovereignty from the supposed historical

necessity of the territorial state – one must also ask how the philosophical/historico-

juridical discourse of sovereignty has maintained its centrality in the history of political

thought, international relations, and geography, while at the same time it was displaced

from its centrality in European history by the development and transfiguration of the

state-form and social power. To a great extent, the terrain of sovereignty’s longevity is as

much a product of 19th century historiography as the 17th century struggles which

29

underlie the wars of religion, the Peace of Westphalia and the writings of such iconic

theorists of sovereignty as Bodin and Hobbes. As Foucault writes:

On the one hand, the theory of sovereignty was, in the seventeenth century and even the nineteenth century, a permanent critical instrument to be used against the monarchy and all the obstacles that stood in the way of the development of the disciplinary society. On the other hand, this theory, and the organization of the juridical code centered upon it, made it possible to superimpose one the mechanism of discipline a system of right that concealed its mechanisms and erased the element of domination and the techniques of domination involved in discipline, and which, finally, guaranteed that everyone could exercise his or her own [consumer] sovereignty rights thanks to the sovereignty of the state.87

Thus the discursive articulation of sovereignty was adapted to new use during the very

process by which the practice of sovereign power was removed from the center of social

life to be replaced by the doctrines of raison d’etat and polizeiwissenschaft,88 an

increasingly global capitalist economy and disciplinary society,89 and the eventual

admixture of these elements in liberal governmentality.90 This in turn engendered a

reemergence of an oppositional historico-political discourse, now transformed into the

discourse of class struggle and the political doctrine of revolution.91 Finally, this

nineteenth century version of historico-political discourse (once again defined in terms of

race) is used contra oppositional its heritage as a defense of the “sovereign” state and

“normal” society against elements from within, now defined as racially impure.92

It is also, not coincidently, in the mid-19th century that we see the emergence of

both the rapid extension of European political domination of other regions of the globe

via the “new imperialism” and the theory (also laced with racial overtones) of the modern

states-systems from the German historical school or Göttengen. As Edward Keene writes:

Their thesis that the distinction between the medieval and moderns worlds can be understood in terms of the development of a decentralized system of sovereign states, a Staatensystem, has exercised a pervasive influence on historical,

30

sociological, and political theoretical scholarship over the last 200 years, and continues to do so today […]93

This interpretation of European history was also an explicitly political salvo fired at the

proponents of the French revolution.94 Therefore, by the middle of the 19th century,

sovereignty once more found itself at the disposal of a conservative view defending the

rights of monarchy.

The history of international affairs, much of which descended from the German

historical school, thus continues to teach the foundational nature of sovereignty, while

European domestic and social history, dominated by the descendents of Whig and

Marxist thought, does not. Therefore, one must gain a critical distance from both the

problem of sovereignty that continues to obsess the history of political and international

thought, and the “rise of the state” narrative so common to European history to have a

vantage point from which to examine how the former may be a result of the latter.95

VI. History, Sovereignty, Territory: the problem of ungovernable subjects

Approaching sovereignty involves acknowledging that it both informs a juridical-

historical concept, the state, as well as itself existing as a discursive mode of

understanding. This may result in any number of paradoxes, only one of which has been

discussed above. Moreover, since the Peace of Westphalia, both the state and territory as

associated with it, have become increasingly linked, such that too often “countries and

capitals” have become the very coin of the realm in political geography (and, in

particular, geographical education).

Of course, this is a poor approximation of the scope of geopolitical inquiry. This

paper suggests that not only is the state weak at dissecting and explaining the articulation

of power over space, but that it, in fact, presumes sovereignty and subsumes territory,

31

thus limiting analysis of a range of actors, such as: NGOs, indigenous activists, global

markets, etc. Placing sovereignty front and center in geographical analysis, understanding

and engaging the paradoxes associated with it, and engaging with sovereignty’s

association with territory contributes to geopolitical analysis. Indeed, recently Hartmut

Behr has outlined the case for just such an integrative approach:

Since the modern principle of territoriality was constructed by, and based on, four sub-principles, it is by investigating into shifts of these sub-principles that we can further identify and concretize de-territorialization. These sub-principles are: sovereignty, integration, border and security.96

Political geographers and students of geopolitics have much to gain by taking territory

and sovereignty together, as mutually reinforcing spatial articulation of power.

Of the many possible research agendas that emerge from such a consideration is

to look at the state less in terms of its functional utility or threatened efficaciousness in a

globalizing era and more at it both as the result of and continued perpetrator of a specific

historical discourse that necessarily leaves both sovereignty and territory as derivative

mechanisms of power, rather than subjective exercises of power. Rather than avoid

thinking about the state in the contemporary era, geographical analysis would be served

well to think about the state as part of a larger problem that necessitates a reconsideration

of both sovereignty and territoriality.

32

1 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon

(New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 121.

2 James J. Sheehan, “AHA Presidential Address: The Problem of Sovereignty in

European History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 1 (2006): 2.

3 Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998),

109-110.

4 Colin Flint, Introduction to Geopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 189.

5 John Agnew, Making Political Geography (London: Arnold, 2002), 56-63.

6 Isaiah Bowman, The New World: problems in political geography (World Book

Company: New York, 1928).

7 Particularly illustrative of this point and prescient on the part of Bowman is his

lengthy discussion of “Yugoslavia and the Adriatic,” which is accompanied by four-color

maps illustrating the “Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.” See Bowman, 354-

361.

8 Bowman, 30.

9 Bowman, 20-30.

10 Neil Smith’s compelling and exhaustive discussion of Bowman is helpful and

important to note here. While Bowman’s discussion of the role of the state and the

difficultly of managing populations may have been prescience be was clearly never

progressive on issues of representation. More pointedly, his apprehension of the problems

of states may be more or less couched in the larger context of American colonization and

internationalism of the period. Nevertheless, the point remains that despite these attitudes,

Bowman’s hesitancies about the state bear weight in the 21st century. See, in particular,

33

Part Three of Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to

Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

11 The term “messy geopolitics” is borrowed from Flint (2006) and underscores in

his work some of the same concerns as are addressed in this paper.

12 Jean Gottmann, “Geography and International Relations,” in Political and

Geographic Relations, ed. W.A. Douglas Jackson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,

1964).

13 Richard Hartshorne, “The Functional Approach in Political Geography,” in

Political and Geographic Relations, ed. W.A. Douglas Jackson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:

Prentice-Hall, 1964), 93.

14 John Agnew, “The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of

International Relations. Theory,” Review of International Political Economy 1, no. 1

(1994): 60.

15 John Agnew, “Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in

Contemporary World Politics,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95,

no. 2 (2006): 437-461.

16 Agnew, 445.

17 Ersun N. Kurtulus, “Theories of Sovereignty: An Interdisciplinary Approach,”

Global Society 18, no. 4 (2004): 362.

18 Kurtulus, 353.

19 For the legal arguments on both sides, and the centrality of national sovereignty

to them see the US Department of Justice, Legal Authorities Supporting the Activities of

the National Security Agency Described by the President (Washington, DC: GPO, 2006);

34

and the American Civil Liberties Union’s Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive

Relief (ACLU, et al. v. NSA, et al.) filed in the United States District Court, Eastern

District of Michigan, Southern Division (January 17, 2006), and currently pending before

the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (Case Nos. 06-2095/2140).

20 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC: GPO,

2006), 18.

21 The phrase “struggles for and of freedom” is James Tully’s. See Tully, “The

Struggles of Indigenous Peoples for and of Freedom,” in Political Theory and the Rights

of Indigenous Peoples, ed. Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton, and Will Sanders (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 2000), 36-59.

22 For the legal basis of native title within the common law of Australia and

Canada, respectively, see Mabo v. Queensland (1992) 175 O.L.R. 1; and Delgamuukw v.

British Columbia, (1997) 3 S.C.R. 1010.

23 J.G.A. Pocock, “Quentin Skinner: The History of Politics and the Politics of

History,” Common Knowledge 10, no 3. (2004): 534.

24 Quentin Skinner, “Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state,” in

Visions of Politics, Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

2003), 177.

25 Skinner, “Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state,” 199, 200, 202.

26 Skinner, “Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state,” 204, 204-208.

27 Quentin Skinner, “History and ideology in the English revolution,” in Visions of

Politics, Volume III: Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 247.

28 Skinner, “History and ideology in the English revolution,” 255, 256-257.

35

29 Skinner, “History and ideology in the English revolution,” 263.

30 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty,

trans. George Schwab (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 5. See also Carl

Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, trans. George Schwab

(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of

Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).

31 See William Rasch, Sovereignty and its Discontents: On the Primacy of

Conflict and the Structure of the Political (London: Birkbeck Law Press, 2004).

32 See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt

(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Giorgio Agamben, Homo

Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 1998); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The

Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1999); Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti

and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Giorgio

Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans.

Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); and Giorgio Agamben,

State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

33 Stewart Motha defines the issue’s focus in the following terms: “Democracy’s

Empire attempts to capture the co-appearance of democracy as an unavowable mode of

politics that institutes and sustains freedom and equality – and modes of violence and

subjection.” Stewart Motha, “Democracy’s Empire: Sovereignty, Law, and Violence,”

Journal of Law and Society 34, no. 1 (2007): 1.

36

34 David Bates, “Constitutional Violence,” Journal of Law and Society 34, no. 1

(2007): 29.

35 Andrew Norris, “Sovereignty, Exception, and Norm,” Journal of Law and

Society 34, no. 1 (2007): 45.

36 Benjamin Morgan, “Undoing Legal Violence: Walter Benjamin’s and Giorgio

Agamben’s Aesthetics of Pure Means,” Journal of Law and Society 34, no. 1 (2007): 62.

37 Peter Fitzpatrick and Richard Joyce, “The Normality of the Exception in

Democracy’s Empire,” Journal of Law and Society 34, no. 1 (2007): 71.

38 Paul A. Passavant, “The Contradictory State of Giorgio Agamben,” Political

Theory 35, no. 2 (2007): 169.

39 Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton UP, 1999), 183.

40 Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the

Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 58.

41 Jackson, Quasi-states, 54.






47 Maryann K. Cusimano, “Introduction,” in Beyond Sovereignty: Issues for a

Global Agenda, ed. Maryann Cusimano (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2000).

37

48 Cusimano, “Introduction,” 12.

49 Cusimano, “Introduction,” 2.

50 International Law and Ethnic Conflict, ed. David Wippman (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell UP, 1998).

51 David Wippman, “Introduction: Ethnic Claims and International Law” in

International Law and Ethnic Conflict, ed. David Wippman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,

1998), 8.

52 Wippman, “Introduction,” 17.

53 Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Pushing the Limits of the Liberal Peace: Ethnic

Conflict and the ‘Ideal Polity’,” in International Law and Ethnic Conflict, ed. David

Wippman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1998), 144.

54 Slaughter, “Pushing the Limits,” 144.

55 Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy, 3.

56 Krasner, Sovereignty, 42.






62 Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat, “The Subject of the Political,” in

Sovereignty and Subjectivity ed. Jenny Edkins, Nalini Persram, and Veronique Pin-Fat

(Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), 7.

38

63 R.B.J. Walker, “The hierarchialization of political community,” Review of

International Studies 25 (1999): 154.

64 Walker, “Hierarchialization,” 155.

65 Walker, “Hierarchialization,” 156.

66 Stéphane Beaulac, “The Westphalian Legal Orthodoxy – Myth or Reality?”

Journal of the History of International Law 2 (2000): 150-151.

67 Jason Farr, “Point: The Westphalia Legacy and the Modern Nation-State,”

International Social Science Review 80, no. 3 & 4 (2005): 158.

68 David L. Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah, “The Westphalian Deferral,”

International Studies Review 2, no. 2 (2000): 30.

69 Amitav Acharya, “State Sovereignty After 9/11: Disorganized Hypocrisy,”

Political Studies 55, no. 2 (2007): 291.

70 Acharya, 278.

71 Robert Jackson, “Sovereignty and its Presuppositions: Before 9/11 and After,”

Political Studies 55, no. 2 (2007): 315.

72 Adriana Sinclair and Michael Byers, “When US Scholars Speak of

‘Sovereignty’, What Do They Mean?” Political Studies 55, no. 2 (2007): 319..

73 Sinclair and Byers, 338.

74 T.S. Eliot, “The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”

http://www.cs.amherst.edu/ccm/prufrock.html (accessed June 22, 2007).

75 Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics

(London: Macmillan, 1977), 8.

39

http://www.cs.amherst.edu/ccm/prufrock.html

76 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France,

1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), 49.

77Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 51.

78 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 51.

79 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 118-122.

80 Martin Dzelzainis, “Ideas in Conflict: political and religious thought during the

English Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution

(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 33.

81 Ibid.




85 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Essential Foucault:

Selections from the Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow

and Nikolas Rose (New York: The New Press, 2003), 358.



88 Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political

Reason,” in The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Michel

Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: The New Press,

2003), 192-200.

89 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed. (New

York: Vintage Books, 1995).

40

90 See Chapter Three of Seán Patrick Eudaily, The Present Politics of the Past:

indigenous legal activism and resistance to (neo)liberal governmentality (New York:

Routledge, 2004).



93 Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism, and

Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 15.

94 Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society, 13-14.

95 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political

Stability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 39.

96 Hartmut Behr, “Political territoriality and de-territorialization,” Area 39, no. 1

(2007): 112.

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Sovereign Geopolitics? – Uncovering the “Sovereignty Paradox

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