Sovereignty And Judgement As Social Constructs

State sovereignty is an inherently social construct. The modern state system is not based on some timeless principle of sovereignty, but on the production of a normative conception that links authority, territory, population, and recognition in a unique way, and in a particular place (the state). The unique contribution of this book is to describe and illustrate the practices that have produced various sovereign ideals and resistances to them. The contributors analyze how the components of state sovereignty are socially constructed and combined in specific historical contexts.

This book explores the interplay between sovereignty, politics and law through different conceptualizations of sovereignty. Despite developments such as European integration, globalization, and state failure, sovereignty proves to be a resilient institution in contemporary international politics. This book investigates both the continuity and change of sovereignty through an examination of the different ways it is understood; sovereignty as an institution, as identity; as a (language) game; and as subjectivity. In this illuminating book, Aalberts examines sovereign statehood as a political-legal concept, an institutional product of modern international society, and seeks an interdisciplinary approach that combines international relations and international law. This book traces the consequences of this origin for the conceptualization of sovereign statehood in modern academic discourse, drawing on key jurisprudence and international treaties, and provides a new framework to consider the international significance of sovereignty. As an innovative approach to a critical institution, Constructing Sovereignty between Politics and Law will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, international relations theory and international law.

This book asks whether sovereignty can guarantee international equality by exploring the discourses of sovereignty and their reliance on the notions of civilisation and savagery in two historical colonial encounters: the French explorations of Canada in the 16th century and the domestic troubles linked to the Wars of Religion. Presenting the concept of ‘civilised sovereignty’, Mathieu reveals the interplay between the domestic and external claims to sovereignty, and offers a dynamic analysis of the theory and practice of the concept. Based on extensive archival research, this book provides an in-depth intellectual picture of the theory and practice of sovereignty in early modern France by focusing on the discourses deployed by French political theorists. Mathieu applies performativity in order to denaturalise these discourses of statehood and reveals how the domestic and international constructions of sovereignty feed into one another and equally rely on appeals to civilisation and savagery. Overall, the book questions the ‘myth of sovereignty as equality’ and reflects on the persistence of this association despite the overwhelming empirical evidence that it institutes international hierarchies and inequalities. Representing a major intervention in the existing IR debates about sovereignty, this book will be a valuable resource for researchers working on issues of sovereignty and equality in IR.

"Taste is everything, Hans says, for it produces the primary values that guide our lives. Taste is the fundamental organizing mechanism of human bodies, a lifelong effort to fit one's own rhythms and patterns of the natural world and the larger community. It is an aesthetic sorting process by which one determines what belongs in - a conversation, a curriculum, a committee, a piece of art, a meal, a logical argument - and what should be left out. On the one hand, taste is the source of beauty, justice, and a sense of the good. On the other hand, as an arbiter of the laws of fair and free play, taste enters into more ominous and destructive patterns - but patterns nonetheless - of resentment and violence."--Jacket.

The English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century produced two political thinkers of genius: Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington. They are known today as spokesmen of opposite positions, Hobbes of absolutism, Harrington of republicanism. Yet behind their disagreements, argues Arihiro Fukuda, there lay a common perspective. For both writers, the primary aim was the restoration of peace and order to a divided land. Both men saw the conventional thinking of the time as unequal to that task. Their greatest works — Hobbes's Leviathan of 1651, Harrington's Oceana of 1656 — proposed the reconstruction of the English polity on novel bases. It was not over the principle of sovereignty that the two men differed. Fukuda shows Harrington to have been, no less than Hobbes, a theorist of absolute sovereignty. But where Hobbes repudiated the mixed governments of classical antiquity, Harrington's study of them convinced him that mixed government, far from being the enemy of absolute sovereignty, was its essential foundation.

This book presents a selection of revised and updated papers presented in September 2018 at the International Conference ‘Rethinking the Crime of Aggression: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives’, which was held in Marburg, Germany, and hosted by the International Research and Documentation Centre for War Crimes Trials (ICWC). In light of the activation of the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court concerning the crime of aggression, international experts from various disciplines such as law, history, the social sciences, psychology and economics came together to enhance the understanding of this complex and challenging matter and thereby opened a cross-disciplinary dialogue regarding aggressive war and the crime of aggression: a dialogue that not only addresses the historical genesis of the current situation, the content of the new aggression provisions, their implementation in practice and their possible regulatory effects, but also instigates perspectives for investigating future developments and issues. Stefanie Bock is Professor of Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, International Criminal Law and Comparative Law in the Department of Law at the Philipps University of Marburg in Germany and Co-Director of the International Research and Documentation Centre for War Crimes Trials. Eckart Conze is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History in the Department of History at the Philipps University of Marburg in Germany and Co-Director of the International Research and Documentation Centre for War Crimes Trials.

This book is a critical study of the concept of sovereignty and its relationship to responsibility. It establishes a clear distinction between empirical and normative definitions of sovereignty and examines the implications of these concepts in relation to intervention, international law, and the world state.

Sovereignty marks the boundary between politics and law. Highlighting the legal context of politics and the political context of law, it thus contributes to the internal dynamics of both political and legal systems. This book comprehends the persistence of sovereignty as a political and juridical concept in the post-sovereign social condition. The tension and paradoxical relationship between the semantics and structures of sovereignty and post-sovereignty are addressed by using the conceptual framework of the autopoietic social systems theory. Using a number of contemporary European examples, developments and paradoxes, the author examines topics of immense interest and importance relating to the concept of sovereignty in a globalising world. The study argues that the modern question of sovereignty permanently oscillating between de iure authority and de facto power cannot be discarded by theories of supranational and transnational globalized law and politics. Criticising quasi-theological conceptualizations of political sovereignty and its juridical form, the study reformulates the concept of sovereignty and its persistence as part of the self-referential communication of the systems of positive law and politics. The book will be of considerable interest to academics and researchers in political, legal and social theory and philosophy.

The book examines the intellectual history of the concept of sovereignty from a sociological perspective. Informed by the sociologists Max Weber and Niklas Luhmann, it addresses the concept as the centre of constitutional controversy and as a resource to deal with paradoxes of power in constitutional democracies. It discusses the dilemmas of sovereignty that appear in the wake of the emphasis on political representation, human rights and European integration. The book marks a significant contribution to the scholarly debate on the foundation of constitutional democracy.