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From Empire to Sovereignty—and Back?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2014

Jens Bartelson
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Extract

Sovereignty apparently never ceases to attract scholarly attention. Long gone are the days when its meaning was uncontested and its essential attributes could be safely taken for granted by international theorists. During the past decades international relations scholars have increasingly emphasized the historical contingency of sovereignty and the mutability of its corresponding institutions and practices, yet these accounts have been limited to the changing meaning and function of sovereignty within the international system. This focus has served to reinforce some of the most persistent myths about the origin of sovereignty, and has obscured questions about the diffusion of sovereignty outside the European context.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , Summer 2014 , pp. 251 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 See, for example, Spruyt, Hendrik, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Bartelson, Jens, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reus-Smit, Christian, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Philpott, Daniel, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern International Relations (Princeton: Princeton, N.J. University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

2 See, for example, Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morefield, Jeanne, Covenants without Swords: Liberal Idealism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Bell, Duncan, ed., Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (New York, N.J.: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Koskenniemi, Martti, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Keene, Edward, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Anghie, Antony, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

4 See, for example, Brett, Annabel S., Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elden, Stuart, The Birth of Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Branch, Jordan, “‘Colonial Reflection’ and Territoriality: The Peripheral Origins of Sovereign Statehood,” European Journal of International Relations 18, no. 2 (2012), pp. 277–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Branch, Jordan, “Mapping the Sovereign State: Technology, Authority, and Systemic Change,” International Organization 65, no. 1 (2011), pp. 1–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See Schmidt, Sebastian, “To Order the Minds of Scholars: The Discourse of the Peace of Westphalia in International Relations Literature,” International Studies Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2011), pp. 601–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See, for example, Glanville, Luke, Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect: A New History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.