Introduction: The Unholy Alliance against Sovereignty 1.
Politics Without Sovereignty
2. Sovereignty and the Politics of Responsibility 3. National
Insecurities: The New Politics of the American National Interest 4.
From State of War to State of Nature: Human Security and
Sovereignty 5. State-Building: Exporting State Failure 6. Country
Ownership: The Evasion of Donor Accountability 7. European Union: A
Process Without a Subject 8. Deconstructing Sovereignty:
Constructing Global Civil Society 9. Legalizing Politics and
Politicizing Law: The Changing Relationship Between Sovereignty and
International Law 10. How Should Sovereignty Be Defended?
St. John's College, Oxford, UK King's College, London Columbia University, USA
"Standing against the tide, this provocative volume provides one of
the best recent efforts to reiterate why state sovereignty remains
vital to a working, cooperative international order" G. John
Ikenberry Foreign Affairs"Echoing Churchill's famous aphorism about
democracy, Politics without Sovereignty argues that the sovereign
state is the worst form of governance except for all others. In a
forceful post-revisionist critique, the editors and contributors
contend that only the sovereign state allows both collective agency
and political accountability. Bemoaning the slide into global civil
society or global governance, only sovereignty, they claim, allows
peoples to shape their destinies in progressive ways. This volume
is a powerful challenge to current theory in international
relations and requires all of us to think deeper about the virtues
and necessity of global political change." David A. Lake,
University of California, San Diego, USA
"This multi-sided onslaught on fashionable notions and theories
about the decline and the mischiefs of state sovereignty is not
likely to convince all readers, but the authors' central point,
about the fact that political accountability and agency require
state sovereignty, is one that needs to be faced rather than evaded
out of distaste for the excesses and liabilities of sovereignty."
Stanley Hoffmann, Harvard University, USA
"Critical international relations theory has generally used its
cutting edge against traditional realist notions of sovereignty. An
orthodoxy has emerged which portrays the notion of sovereignty and
its embodiment in practice as a block to human emancipation. The
essays in this book reappraise the wisdom of this. Its chapters
provide bold, closely argued and provocative normative evaluations
of the notion of state sovereignty. The arguments here will start a
number of hares that will run and run. The book is the culmination
of an intellectual project that has been going for over a year, the
chapters in it have been refined in seminars and conferences. The
editors are skeptical of the idea that the withering away of the
state would usher in a utopia of cosmopolitan politics. Instead,
they argue that there is a close link between individual agents,
sovereign states and human liberty. The ideas in this book will be
tested in the vigorous reaction which will undoubtedly follow its
publication." Mervyn Frost, King's College London, UK
"In recent years the concept and practice of state sovereignty have
been subjected to searching analytical and normative critique. Not
only is sovereignty not what IR scholars long assumed it to be, but
the taken for granted equation of sovereignty with security and
justice has been severely questioned. Curiously, the defense of
state sovereignty has so far amounted to little more than the bland
reassertion of analytical state-centrism. Politics without
Sovereignty lifts this defense to a higher plane. Together, the
editors and contributors advance a defense of sovereignty that is
at once analytical, normative, and deeply political. It is a volume
that will confront and provoke, and in so doing fuel debate and, in
turn, insight." Chris Reus-Smit, Australian National University,
Australia
Ask a Question About this Product More... |