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Sovereignty and Territory: Stakes and Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2017

Extract

Over the course of the last twenty years, two historiographical movements have challenged the notion of sovereignty, particularly that of the “natural” anchoring of an absolute, statal form of sovereignty in a uniform territory as its perfected model. On the one hand, the experience of globalization that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall—and which fed talk of the “end of nation-states”—led to a new examination of the political organization of the contemporary world, which in part “deterritorialized” the issue of political control. On the other hand, the extraordinary rise in studies of colonial empires has established that sovereignty, far from being the homogeneous block of the jurist’s refined concept, could be exercised in varying degrees and even be conceived as multiple and “layered.”

Type
Sovereignty and Territory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2014

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References

1. Camilleri, Joseph A. and Falk, Jim, The End of Sovereignty: The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Aldershot: E. Elgar, 1992)Google Scholar; Bartelson, Jens, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 1993)Google Scholar; Shinoda, Hideaki, Re-Examining Sovereignty: From Classical Theory to the Global Age (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jackson, Robert, Sovereignty: The Evolution of an Idea (Cambridge: Polity, 2007)Google Scholar; and Pemberton, Jo-Anne, Sovereignty: Interpretations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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3. Skinner, Quentin, “The Sovereign State: A Genealogy,” in Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept, ed. Kalmo, Hent and Skinner, Quentin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 26–46 Google Scholar.

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5. For an example of how these new definitions circulated, see Armitage, David, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

6. Ozouf-Marignier, Marie-Vic, “De l’universalisme constituant aux intérêts locaux: le débat sur la formation des départements en France (1789-1790),” Annales ESC 41, no. 6 (1986): 1193–213 Google Scholar, citation p. 1210.

7. Among the many works on this topic, see the proceedings of the conference held at the Institut catholique d’études supérieures on April 7–8, 2008: Centre de recherches Hannah Arendt, ed., La souveraineté dans tous ses états (Paris: Éd. Cujas, 2011).

8. Sassen, Saskia, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Agnew, John, Globalization and Sovereignty (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009)Google Scholar.