Sovereign Order of Royal El Roman Intro-angeles (polygyny) Family Sub-mission of the Jesus Christ' Holy See Teachings on His Kingdoms Mission, called the SOVEREIGN ORDER OF ROYAL EL-ROMANIA, The SO°RER†‡ Mission is a Bible scriptures studies, research, publications and teachings oriented sovereign polygyny family household basis mission order whereas Council of the Queens is the major organ and Queens are the principal research associates of the mission organization, Sovereign Order of Royal El-Romania, which aim to print (...) a book entitled "Christ Ministries Words: A Book of Bible Explanatory Testimonial of His Kingdom'', as Gen Hari Seldon's co-authors. Furthermore, the scope of the mission is to studies of the Holy Bible scriptures analysis to understand the doctrines of sacred theology of God's plan towards continuing development of humanity. (shrink)

This article takes interest in solidarity as sovereign responsibility. Sovereign responsibility is a nonproductive form of care that emerges at the interface of order defined by a privileging of economy and a general economy defined by a return to order of life lost to death. It is this return that unveils the existence and operations of a general economy that order presupposes. The article locates its discussion of sovereign responsibility at two levels of relationality. Firstly, it situates (...) its deliberations concerning sovereign responsibility in the family and among kin. Here it argues that as a form of solidarity, sovereign responsibility positions relations among kin as those of neighbours. Secondly, it shows that the question of the neighbour extends beyond kinship relations and into the realm of extra-kinship relations where others and strangers appear as neighbours. The overall argument of the article is that sovereign responsibility holds potential to facilitate an Afrocentred and counter-hegemonic response to the modern experience of alienation.Contribution: The modern experience of alienation, as well as how it can be challenged, are of interest to this article. The article recognises that numerous attempts have been made to try and address this problematic of alienation in modernity. What it claims has not been done is to engage that problem by taking Africa as an idea, and not just geography, seriously. (shrink)

This article investigates how the meanvariance efficient frontier defined by sovereign bonds of 20 developed countries is affected by the consideration of socially responsible indicators for countries in investment decision-making. For a global rating of socially responsible performances, we show that it is possible to build portfolios with an increased average rating without significantly harming the risk/return relationship. This result differs when considering sub-ratings related to the environment, social concerns and public governance. The results are good news for responsible (...) investors and suggest that socially responsible portfolios of sovereign bonds can be built without a significant loss of mean-variance efficiency. (shrink)

Through examining practices of torture, extra-judicial assassination, and first person accounts of soldiers on the ground, Bonnie Mann develops a new theory of gender.

Although sovereign jurisdictional authority is not itself a kind of property right for Hobbes, it is the object of the sovereign’s proprietary rights. Jurisdictional authority for Hobbes is foundationally over persons rather than territory, so that the sovereign’s territorial jurisdiction is parasitic on jurisdiction over persons. Territory nevertheless plays a significant role in determining subjects’ political obligations because the sovereign’s ability to protect subjects is necessary for such obligations, and control over space is necessary to protect (...) subjects. Yet Hobbes shows why the modern ideology of the state does not univocally posit the state as an intrinsically territorial entity. There are two traditions here: The Lockean one that, in grounding jurisdictional authority in private dominion over things, portrays the state as intrinsically territorial, and the Hobbesian one that, in deriving property rights from jurisdictional authority, does not. (shrink)

When can we say that a debt crisis has been resolved fairly? An often overlooked but very important effect of financial crises and the debts that often engender them is that they can lead the crisis countries to increased dependence on international institutions and the policy conditionality they require in return for their continued support, limiting their capabilities and those of their citizens to exercise meaningful control over their policies and institutions. These outcomes have been viewed by many not merely (...) as extremely unfortunate and regrettable, but also as deeply unfair. And indeed, increasingly potent popular movements have pressured governments, financial institutions, and the financial community to seek what they take to be fairer solutions to debt crises. The merits of these programs and proposals for dealing more fairly with sovereign debt remain hotly disputed. In this essay, we try to take a step back from the political fray and examine some more fundamental considerations that seem relevant to assessing the fairness of current arrangements governing economic exchanges related to debt contracts and alternatives that have been proposed to them.Our discussion is organized into seven sections. First, we characterize briefly the concept of fairness and its role in social evaluation. Second, we clarify what sovereign debt is, and, third, the ethical statuses that particular sovereign debts can have. Fourth, we identify and describe the main features of current practices related to sovereign debt. Fifth, we describe an "ideal picture" of creditor/debtor relations. We argue that in such a scenario a broad range of ethical considerations can plausibly be invoked in support of practices that closely resemble those presently governing sovereign debt. Sixth, we draw attention to the many ways in which in reality the relations between sovereign debtors and their creditors differ markedly from the relationships between the creditor and debtor in the ideal picture. Because of this, many of the ethical considerations that would support present practices were relations between sovereign debtors and their creditors to resemble more closely those depicted in the ideal picture fail to do so under present circumstances. We conclude, moreover, that the remaining ethical considerations that might be advanced in support of the present system are at best quite inconclusive. Finally, we describe briefly specific reform proposals to current practices. While we will not attempt to show that these proposals would necessarily make the rules governing economic exchanges relevant to sovereign debt more fair, we conclude, in light of our earlier analysis, that they must be given much more serious consideration than they have so far received in policy circles. Indeed, there are strong prima facie reasons to believe that some combination of these proposed policies might prevent or mitigate some of the most ethically regrettable outcomes of present practices and norms by changing the incentives of sovereign borrowers and those who lend to them. (shrink)

Dozens of countries have established Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) in the last decade or so, in the majority of cases employing those funds to manage the large revenues gained from selling resources such as oil and gas on a tide of rapidly rising commodity prices. These funds have raised a series of ethical questions, including just how the money contained in such funds should eventually be spent. This article engages with that question, and specifically seeks to connect debates on (...) SWFs with debates onglobaljustice. Just how good are national claims to the great wealth contained in SWFs in the first place? Using the example of Norway's very large SWF – derived from selling North-Sea petroleum – I show that national claims are at least sometimes very weak, with the implication that the wealth in many such funds is ripe for redistribution in the interests of global justice. I conclude by offering some guidance for how the money contained in such funds could best be spent, with the goal of advancing global justice. (shrink)

Although sovereign jurisdictional authority is not itself a kind of property right for Hobbes, it is the object of the sovereign’s (not the state’s) proprietary rights. Jurisdictional authority for Hobbes is foundationally over persons rather than territory, so that the sovereign’s territorial jurisdiction is parasitic on jurisdiction over persons. Territory nevertheless plays a significant role in determining subjects’ political obligations because the sovereign’s ability to protect subjects is necessary for such obligations, and control over space is (...) necessary to protect subjects. Yet Hobbes shows why the modern ideology of the state does not univocally posit the state as an intrinsically territorial entity. There are two traditions here: The Lockean one that, in grounding jurisdictional authority in private dominion over things, portrays the state as intrinsically territorial, and the Hobbesian one that, in deriving property rights from jurisdictional authority, does not. (shrink)

Genetic resources are a key resource for much biomedical research. Pathogenic genetic resources are of value in the identification, surveillance, understanding, and development of vaccines, treatments, and other responses to major public threats such as pandemic influenza outbreaks. Significant attempts have been made to improve the international governance of infectious disease over the last decade, but the handling of pathogenic genetic resources remains contentious and problematic. The need to address the deficiencies in current arrangements (e.g., the World Health Organization's Pandemic (...) Influenza Preparedness Framework) is urgent because future outbreaks are likely to revert to the past situation in which developed states secured vaccine supplies for their own populations while leaving developing countries vulnerable to the pandemic. Thereby, the collaboration of developed countries with vital international systems such as the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System is disincentivized. The current international approach to pathogenic genetic resources is based on the sovereign rights of states and access and benefit-sharing arrangements that stem from those rights. While this approach is consistent with international rules on other types of genetic resources, herein I argue that this is an inappropriate approach to pathogens on both political (serving public health goals) and ethical grounds (e.g., equity and justice). Instead I argue for a (modified) common heritage approach to pathogenic genetic resources, based on their intrinsic qualities (e.g., rapid mutation, easy transmissibility) and their value to global efforts to respond to disease outbreaks. I will further argue for de-linking access to these resources from benefit-sharing requirements; explaining that while there are strong justifications for both, their linkage (particularly for pathogenic genetic resources) is problematic and detrimental to the achievement of its intended goals (i.e., ensuring equitable benefit-sharing in return for access being granted). (shrink)

This Article examines the concept of sovereign trusteeship in the context of the history of empire. Many accounts of sovereign trusteeship and the responsibility to protect explain the development of those concepts in terms of seventeenth century natural law theories, which argued that the origins of the social contract were in subjects seeking self-preservation. The state, accordingly, was based upon its duty to protect its subjects, while also having a secondary responsibility for subjects beyond its borders arising from (...) human interdependence. I shall show that the concepts underlying sovereign trusteeship - human fellowship, self-preservation and the protection of others’ interests - were as entangled with the expansion of early modern states as they were with the justification of those states themselves. The legacy of that history is that arguments employed to justify sovereign trusteeship and the responsibility to protect remain highly ambiguous and subject to rhetorical manipulation. On the one hand, they can be represented as underpinning a new liberal international order in which states and international organizations are accountable to the human community, not only to their own subjects. On the other, these same terms can be deployed to justify expansionism in the name of humanitarianism, as they have done for hundreds of years. Only by paying careful attention to the contexts in which these claims are made can we discriminate the intentions behind the rhetoric. (shrink)

The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam. By A. Azfar Moin. South Asia across the Disciplines. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Pp. xvii + 343. $55, £38 ; $28, £19.50.

The existence of sovereign rights over genetic resources is today well recognized in international law. However, the legal status of such resources in terms of property rights is still unclear. The consideration of this issue requires a clear distinction between physical and intangible property. Legislation in developed countries has extended patent protection to genetic resources, in addition to the protection of plant varieties via breeders' rights. The extension of protection and the implementation of the TRIPs Agreement may have important (...) implications for breeding programs and trade in seeds. While intellectual property protection of genetic resources is rapidly advancing, considerable work is still to be done to ensure the compensation for the informal innovations made by local and indigenous communities. (shrink)

Tracing key biblical topics recurrent in Grotian and Hobbesian discourses on the church-state relationship, The Sovereign and the Prophetsexamines Spinoza's Old Testament interpretation in the Theologico-political Treatiseand elucidates his effort to establish what Hobbes could not adequately offer to the Dutch: the liberty to philosophize. Fukuoka develops an original method for understanding seventeenth-century biblical arguments as a shared political paradigm. Her in-depth analysis reveals the discourses that converged on the question, 'Who stands immediately under God to mediate His will (...) to the people?' This subtly nuanced theme not only linked major theoreticians diachronically--from the Remonstrants such as Grotius to the anti-Hobbesian jurist Ulrik Huber (1636-1694)--but also synchronically built the axis of resonances and dissonances between Leviathanand the Theologico-political Treatise. (shrink)

The article aims to investigate the problematic relationship between populism and democracy by comparing the conceptions of ‘the people’ and popular sovereignty which they presuppose. In the first two sections, the populist and the democratic ‘peoples’ are reconstructed, and the unbridgeable gap dividing them is highlighted. The discussion of the democratic people requires a concise analysis of the main contemporary democratic frameworks, including deliberative democracy, ‘neo-Roman’ republicanism, agonistic democracy. The article works out the implications of the incompatibility between the two (...) ‘sovereign peoples’ identified, and concludes that such an incompatibility undercuts the kinship of populism and democracy. While populism is often said to intertwine with democracy in some way, the article argues that it significantly departs from democratic theory and practice, and belongs to a distinct conceptual space. It cannot be made to overlap with ‘illiberal democracy’, a ‘democratic myth’, a crude electoral majoritarianism, nor does it amount to hiding undemocratic policies into properly democratic justifications. The boundary dividing populism and democracy, therefore, starts unfolding at the level of the conception of the people. While democratic theory invariably assumes a people intended as simultaneously heterogeneous and united, populism conceives of the people as a moral whole, internally undifferentiated, whose homogeneity and intrinsic righteousness preclude the task of specifying what popular sovereignty ultimately means. Such specification, on the other hand, is inescapable for any democrat assuming the people as a composite unity. The last section addresses four possible objections to the argument, variously formulated by Ernesto Laclau and by scholars approaching populism from a post-Laclauian or discursive-performative perspective. (shrink)

This essay examines the concept of sovereign debt in both political‐economic and theological registers. Elaborating the dynamics of monetary economy, I demonstrate how postures of indebtedness characterize the relationship between sovereign power and the governed. While taxation signals the debt of obedience and fealty owed to sovereignty, the monetary circuit reveals that sovereign power exists in a state of indebtedness to the governed. The morally valenced proximity between debt and guilt helps to perpetuate such relations. Tracing these (...) resonances and resemblances in the theological realm, I consider the centrality of debt as a structuring principle in key soteriological traditions within Christian thought. Not only does God appear to uphold debt logic, but God, I claim, becomes identified with debt and marked as a debtor. The divine sovereign as debtor and as enforcing debt provides cues for earthly sovereigns and legitimates cultures of debt. In light of the theopolitical legacy in the West, the mutual influence between theology and the political realm, refiguring this set of influential theological concepts may prove helpful in decentering debt as a governing principle in modern life. (shrink)

This article provides an original exploration of the self-identified populist coalition leading the Italian government between 2018 and 2019. The analysis, informed by a governmentality approach, starts by scrutinising the economic, social, and cultural issues framed as political “problems” by the coalition, also highlighting the tensions underlying such constructions. The second step charts how this political subject sought to address those problems by deploying an array of political technologies. From examining these two dimensions, the article then can discern the composite (...) rationality—techno-sovereignism—that drove precariously the coalition’s art of government. Finally, the article sketches out some forms of contestation against the techno-sovereignist operations, whose significance may stretch beyond the Italian borders. Overall, although the Italian populist coalition turned out to be ephemeral, the dynamics that characterized its emergence and functioning could still be used heuristically to understand the interactions and reciprocal adjustments possibly used by right-wing and technocratic populist groups to exert political power conjointly. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic is global and affects all countries in the world. The difference in the financial impact assessment of its outbreak concerns, inter alia, the state of preparation of the public sector in the previous period. The article assumes that countries which coordinated the structure of sovereign assets and liabilities before 2020 were less exposed to the negative effects of financial risks resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The study uses data and methodology of the International Monetary Fund and (...) the authors’ measures dedicated to the public sector to assess the sovereign asset and liability management (SALM). As part of the results, the negative value of net worth and the national net welfare index for the studied countries, including Poland in the period before the pandemic crisis, were indicated. In addition, the level of the loans mismatch on the public balance sheet and the scale of the increase in financial risk in the first year of COVID-19 are presented. Conclusions of research make it possible to assess the impact of COVID-19 on Sovereign Asset and Liability Management. (shrink)

The desire to defend a state against attacks by a non-state actor requires thinking about counter-attacking without violating the sovereign equality of the territorial state because targeting a non-state actor on the territory of that state may violate its sovereignty. This paper evaluates the main views on self-defense by states against non-state actors by studying the Just War Theory and argues that self-defense against a non-state actor is allowed if the counter-attack complies with the principle of sovereign equality. (...) Sovereign equality is the prohibition of states from dominion over other states because states are equal to one another. This principle can be respected by allowing self-defense against non-state actors to occur only if the state consented to the use of force on its territory or if that state is incapable of controlling or unwilling to control the non-state actor. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 304-317 [Access article in PDF] Sovereign Love and Atomism in Racine's Bérénice Ellen Mcclure ALTHOUGH CRITICS HAVE NOTED links between the new science of the seventeenth century and the works of La Fontaine and Molière, 1 a similar influence of Epicureanism or even Cartesianism upon French classical tragedy is harder to trace. No two areas of seventeenth-century cultural life would seem farther apart (...) than the emerging science, with its rejection of Aristotelian categories as inadequate to experienced reality, and classical French tragedy, with its antimaterialism and claims to universal truth often bolstered by references to none other than Aristotle himself. Yet René Pintard reminds us that the 1660s and 1670s—the period when many of the tragedies we regard as "classical" were written—saw a strong renewal of interest in the philosophies articulated in the first half of the century. 2 So widespread was this interest that Pierre Gassendi's friend and follower Bernier was able to publish an edition and translation of the philosopher's works in 1674-1675 which proved to be a resounding success. It is hard to believe that the much-discussed new science somehow missed writers of tragedies, especially given the extensive contacts between Molière, La Fontaine and Racine.In this article, I demonstrate this influence by positing that Racine's play Bérénice, ostensibly a reworking of a well-known love story that Corneille was also producing on the Paris stage at the same time, is in part a reflection on the pressing question of what holds the universe together. Through his exploration of the possibility of satisfactory love between two independent sovereigns, Racine explores issues that the revival of Epicureanism had brought into the philosophical foreground. This reading of the play brings into focus the incredibly [End Page 304] important, yet too-often neglected, 3 role of Antiochus, the character whom Racine invented for his version of the play. I will show that his tragic in-betweenness offers a necessary alternative to Titus' and Bérénice's valorization of self-contained sovereignty. I Before embarking on a close reading of the play itself, however, I would like to offer a brief survey of the debate to which I believe Racine refers. Both Michel Foucault and Timothy Reiss have identified the seventeenth century as a transitional period between the age of correspondences exemplified in Aristotelian philosophy and the age of representation and quantification that characterized eighteenth-century thought. 4 This transition, however, was far from smooth, as philosophers sought to articulate a universe whose separate and radically de-hierarchized elements remained somehow joined together.For most seventeenth-century philosophers, the sacrifice of Aristotelian categories and scholasticism in no way lessened the imperative for a sense of divine order and causation. Gassendi's often self-contradictory efforts to reconcile Epicurus and Christianity provide perhaps the most striking example of this transitional struggle. The atomism posited by Epicurus through Lucretius posed particular difficulties for a Christian worldview. A world governed by the chance interactions of atoms eliminates any sense that things happen for a purpose; God cannot be the benevolent author and overseer of the universe. Gassendi's equal respect for atomism and for Christianity should be read as evidence of the profound struggle between separateness and interconnection (or, as Gassendi would call it, harmony) taking place during this period. 5 For, as Bloch points out, although Gassendi partially reconciled the demands of the two systems by situating atoms in an uncreated, infinite, and contiguous space and time, he continued to hold to the profoundly troubling existence of the void in the universe. Once again, the chief objection to the void implicit in atomism was religious, since if God is everywhere, the void cannot exist, and likewise, God cannot create nothing. The revival of stoicism supplied instead a vision of the universe ultimately comprised and held together by an ethereal pneuma that some neo-Stoics did not hesitate to identify as a sort of divine presence. 6 Descartes himself made heroic attempts, in his Principes... (shrink)

The mention of “self-control” calls up certain stock images: Saint Augustine struggling to renounce carnal pleasures; dispassionate Mr. Spock of Star Trek; the dieter faced with tempting desserts. In these stock images reason is almost always assigned the power and authority to govern passions, desires, and appetites. But what if the passions were given the power to rule—what if, instead of sovereign reason, there were sovereign sentiments? My dissertation examines three sentimentalist conceptions of self-control: David Hume’s conception of (...) “strength of mind”; Adam Smith’s conception of “self-command”; and Jane Austen’s examination of these conceptions. Hume divests reason of motivational power, and with this new moral psychology comes a new conception of self-control. Humean strength of mind is indirect, artificial, and social—a regulatory system that humans cannot develop until societal systems of government and regulations have been instituted. Smith accepts Hume’s anti-rationalist arguments, but he emphasizes that only certain sentiments are fit to rule. And he argues that self-control develops without the sophisticated external conditions posited by Hume. Smithian self-command is the capacity to modify one’s feelings in accordance with a regulative ideal: the sentiments of an imagined impartial spectator. Austen responds to these conceptions, illustrating and complicating them. Sense and Sensibility explores the difficulties of discerning the feelings of others, and Persuasion dramatizes the difficulties of distinguishing strength of mind in another, offering sets of characters for the reader’s scrutiny, each with a competing claim to strength of mind. Taken together, Austen’s novels offer a fuller and more delicately shaded depiction of the sort of self-control that Hume and Smith imagine in their philosophical works. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to engage with the readers in a theoretical reflection on nursing practices in forensic psychiatric settings. In this paper, we argue that practices of exclusion in forensic psychiatric settings share some common ground with Agamben's description of sovereign power and, consequently, the possible creation of zones of exception in this environment. The concept of exception is, therefore, purposely used to shift our thinking, highlight the political forces surrounding exclusionary practices in forensic psychiatric nursing, (...) and explore the ethical tensions that arise for nurses who become entangled in the control of these zones of exception. We argue that ethical and political discussions regarding this phenomenon are necessary if we wish to further understand the complexities of this field of practice and promote constructive change. (shrink)

For International Relations scholars, discussions of globalization inevitably turn to questions of sovereignty. How much control does a country have over its borders, people and economy? Where does that authority come from? _Sovereign Lives_ explores these changes through reading of humanitarian intervention, human rights discourses, securitization, refugees, the fragmentation of identities and the practices of development.

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of (...) pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty, a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals. (shrink)

The "sovereign individual" (hereafter, the SI) is almost universally held to be part of Nietzsche's positive ethical ideal.1 Focus on this isolated description at the start of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality results in a reconstruction of Nietzschean personhood and ethics based on the capacity to make and keep promises. For example, the SI has been used to understand us as "self-conscious beings capable of standing in autonomous ethical relations to ourselves" with a "fundamental duty" (...) to do so and with a duty to act ethically with regard to each other.2 Attempts to reconstruct a Nietzschean ethic based on the SI passage have resulted in uncharacteristically Kantian results, because of the .. (shrink)

In this paper I give some reasons why ‘saving for future generations’ is not as straightforward as it sounds and when we might be skeptical of the permissibility of states saving for future citizens, even though such savings are often seen to be morally praiseworthy. I emerge with an account of when state savings for future citizens through sovereign wealth funds may be morally permissible. I argue that we ought to follow a modified version of Armstrong’s criteria for the (...) moral permissibility of sovereign wealth fund savings. That is, states are entitled to the full proceeds from the sale of a natural resource until their citizens’ basic rights are secured. Once they are, states are entitled only to the improved value of the resource, so long as they have not excluded others from the opportunity also to improve the resource. States may create sovereign wealth funds based on this improved value and, due to justified compatriot partiality, may choose to distribute those funds to current or future members of the state, even if non-citizens may be worse off and/or in greater need. Any residual value of the resource extraction must be redistributed globally. (shrink)

The choice of greenhouse gas emissions accounting method is important because it affects the way climate burdens are allocated between states. This paper investigates the significance of state jurisdiction for this choice. It assesses three arguments from jurisdiction against consumption-based emissions accounting: the fairness argument from retrospective responsibility; the fairness argument from prospective responsibility; and the effectiveness argument. It argues that former two arguments fail since attributing emissions to importing states neither unfairly blames these states nor asks too much of (...) them. However, the effectiveness argument provides a strong potential reason against consumption-based emissions accounting. To the extent jurisdictional control is needed to reduce some emissions, and production-based accounting incentivizes states to reduce these emissions, there is a reason of environmental effectiveness for sticking with production-based accounting. (shrink)

Power and leadership are typically theorized as exercises of sovereignty in the western tradition of thought. This essay takes up Michel Foucault’s challenge to escape the ‘spell of monarchy’ in our thinking in order to move beyond sovereign models of power. Interdisciplinary scholarship on complex adaptive systems provides fertile ground for this endeavor, illustrating the dynamics of post-sovereign power and opportunities for post-sovereign leadership. Viewing human organizations as complex adaptive systems helps us to theorize leadership without over-simplifying (...) its nature or exaggerating its potential. It also undermines the prevailing identification of sovereign power as the only antidote for anarchy. (shrink)

By making sovereign decisions, ordinary individuals, too, can work towards the peaceful resolution of conflicts or reduce their carbon footprint. Making such sovereign decisions is not easy for individuals who are taught to follow orders and norms. For this reason, the book supplements the comparative analysis of Schmitt and Bonhoeffer with an action-guiding decision-making framework.

This chapter examines Thomas Hobbes’s ideas about the concept of the sovereign in politics. It explains that Hobbes believed that there are no meaningful limitations on who can be sovereign and on what sovereigns are entitled to do and suggests that both accounts are fairly radical for their uncompromising insistence on natural equality and political inequality. It also discusses Hobbes’s thoughts about the theory of authorization and the application of the idea of duty to sovereigns in his books (...) Leviathan, Elements of Law, and De Cive. (shrink)

This essay explores the historical roots of biopolitics by investigating the structural homology between the supremely virtuous king discussed in Aristotle’s Politics and the sovereign living law advanced in On Law and Justice, accepted here as authored by Archytas of Tarentum. Archytas’s sovereign incarnates a divine law in order to ground the written law of the city and to constitute the way of life proper to the citizenry. The identity of life and law in his person exempts this (...) sovereign from the written laws he grounds just as Aristotle’s king cannot be subjected to law because he is a law unto himself. Despite this homology, Archytas’s sovereign exemplifies a highly determinate way of life fully constituted by law while an analysis of Aristotle’s king reveals a double determination of the virtuous exemplar as both sovereign and exile. This double determination both exhibits and complicates the logic of exclusion that, for Agamben, makes Western politics biopolitical from its inception. (shrink)

There is resistance to policies that would reduce overall consumption levels to promote sustainability. In part, this resistance is aided by the economic concept of consumer sovereignty (CS) and its presumption that choice promotes wellbeing. We investigate the concept of consumer sovereignty in the context of deepening concerns about sustainability and scrutinise whether the two concepts are compatible. We draw on new findings in psychology on human decision-making traits; we take into account increasing awareness about human dependencies on ‘functioning’ ecosystems (...) and uncertainties on how ecosystems, human activities and human wellbeing are interlinked. We conclude that commitment to the concept of consumer sovereignty is incompatible with sustainability due to human characteristics, the difficult-to-predict behaviour of ecological systems and ignorance about the impact of human action on natural systems. We propose that the choice-set of available goods and services on markets should be constrained when consumption patterns can be linked to degradation of services provided by nature when those services are seen as crucial for human wellbeing. We advocate constraining the available choice-set through established governmental institutions aided by deliberative processes that engage members of the general public. Finally, we acknowledge that such processes are imperfect; nevertheless, we foresee that they will be essential for fostering wise decision-making and moving towards sustainability. (shrink)

When should binding debt contracts not be repaid? This article argues that whenever the repayment of sovereign debt threatens the human rights of the citizenry, this provides a weighty normative reason to prioritize the fulfilment of the latter over the former. Since there are specific, non-coincidental reasons to fear that a high indebtedness of states may result in the undermining of the socio-economic and the collective human rights of a state’s citizenry, the more specific thesis defended in this article (...) is the following: whenever debt repayment undermines the socio-economic and collective human rights of the state´s citizenry, states have a normatively weighty reason to prioritize the fulfilment of the citizen’s human rights over meeting their contractual debt payment obligations vis-à-vis their creditors. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that one of the most important impulses that structure Hegel's account of religion is the need to show gratitude for the gift of creation. Beginning with the “Love“ fragment and 1805-6 Realphilosophie , I first explore what it means to see God's relationship to spirit as one of externalization or divestment ( Entäusserung ). Then, relying on the Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, I argue that Hegel takes Christianity to be the Consummate Religion (...) because it not only offers its own divestment to match God's, but actually takes itself to participate in God's own divestment. This leads to a discussion of revealed religion in the Phenomenology , which, in contrast to simpler forms of religion such as the worship of luminous being ( Lichtwesen ), is able to conceive of a divine generativity in which spirit actively participates. I conclude by identifying two political implications of the centrality of divestment in Hegel's account. First, it means that, since Hegel takes Christianity to be unique in its representation of divine divestment, he cannot be a simple pluralist on religious truth. Second, Hegel's emphasis on divestment in his various accounts of religion helps set up his critique of sovereignty from the standpoint of philosophy or absolute knowing. While religion still clings to a vision of humanity as sovereign over nature, its origin in gratitude for creation proves to be incompatible with this vision. (shrink)

The concept of sovereignty still generates a considerable amount of debate in the discipline of International Relations. Using myth as a heuristic device, I argue that part of this confusion result...

This essay explores letter writing in late ancien régime France as a means of political contestation. Drawing from Rancière's notion of "illegitimate speakers," I retrace the story of an obscure Bastille prisoner, Geneviève Gravelle, whose letters to the king and the French public reveal the simultaneously political, literary, and aesthetic barriers impeding such illegitimate speech and the strategies used in attempting to overcome them. Attending to the historical-poetic context in which Gravelle's letters were composed and circulated, I elaborate, first, a (...) politics of voice that highlights the uncertain and multiply mediated processes on which political speech depends, and second, a politics of reading and writing in which sovereignty is both challenged and impersonated through the epistolary form. (shrink)

In his book Political Theology, Carl Schmitt compared the freedom of God over and beyond the laws of nature to sovereign power, understood as transcending the laws of the state. Philosopher Jacques Derrida has argued that such a Schmittian political theology undermines the possibility of democracy from within. Yet in this paper I would like to develop Derrida’s understanding of justice in order to show that it functions in a similar way to Schmitt’s understanding of sovereign power. Because (...) justice is always singular for Derrida, it transcends politics and is identified with a transcendent alterity beyond the iterability of the law. If Schmitt’s understanding of power as a State of Exception undermines democracy from within, by placing justice in a dimension beyond politics and the law, Derrida’s notion of justice also functions as a State of Exception and undermines the democratic project from without, depriving it of its performative power. (shrink)

Following on from _The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I_, this book extends Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the connections between animality and sovereignty. In this second year of the seminar, originally presented in 2002–2003 as the last course he would give before his death, Derrida focuses on two markedly different texts: Heidegger’s 1929–1930 course _The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, _and Daniel Defoe’s _Robinson Crusoe. _As he moves back and forth between the two works, Derrida pursuesthe relations between solitude, insularity, (...) world, violence, boredom and death as they supposedly affect humans and animals in different ways. Hitherto unnoticed or underappreciated aspects of _Robinson Crusoe _are brought out in strikingly original readings of questions such as Crusoe’s belief in ghosts, his learning to pray, his parrot Poll, and his reinvention of the wheel. Crusoe’s terror of being buried alive or swallowed alive by beasts or cannibals gives rise to a rich and provocative reflection on death, burial, and cremation, in part provoked by a meditation on the death of Derrida’s friend Maurice Blanchot. Throughout, these readings are juxtaposed with interpretations of Heidegger's concepts of world and finitude to produce a distinctively Derridean account that will continue to surprise his readers. (shrink)

Sovereign Wealth Funds have attracted significant attention over the past few years, as a result of their increasing role in the global economy and their controversial minority investments in distressed financial and infrastructure companies in Western economies. Although SWFs provide important benefits to home, host and global markets, they have been perceived by the Western mind as a growing threat to economic supremacy and national security. While the current legal scholarship provides an incomplete policy response, by either selectively referring (...) to specific legal instruments within the international law framework or proposing an entirely new legal regime, this Article attempts to address this crucial lacuna by providing an original and comprehensive legal analysis of the SWF phenomenon and its interaction with the preexisting framework of international law. The various abovementioned concerns have prompted various Western attempts to block SWF cross-border investments through legislative reforms or ad hoc protectionism of the executive branch. These governmental policies frequently violate international commitments in the international economic law arena and call for a closer look at the nature of such commitments and their respective implementation in the SWF environment. The Article looks at recent practices in Western countries aimed at blocking SWF investments, especially in the context of iconic brands and national champions. It then reviews various relevant provisions in international legal instruments, which are applicable to these potential investments, and examines the question of their violation by capital-importing countries. A proposed innovative adaptation to this new reality is provided. I argue that the existing framework of international investment law can provide adequate solutions to investment protectionism against SWFs. Regarding regulation of SWFs’ investments, since recent experience has underlined that SWFs function largely like any other commercial entities, there is a need to shift the discussion and terminology towards regulation of sovereign activity rather than sovereign funds. Finally, the Article explores the broad consequences of investment law and corporate governance reforms following the debate around SWF investments on maintaining healthy and productive cross-border economic relations in a globalized world. (shrink)

The central subject of Aristotle's ethics is happiness or living well. Most people in his day (as in ours), eager to enjoy life, impressed by worldly success, and fearful of serious loss, believed that happiness depends mainly on fortune in achieving prosperity and avoiding adversity. Aristotle, however, argues that virtuous conduct is the governing factor in living well and attaining happiness. While admitting that neither the blessings not the afflictions of fortune are unimportant, he maintains that the virtuous find life (...) more satisfying than other people do and, with only modest good fortune, they lead happy, enjoyable lives. Combining philological precision with philosophical analysis, the author reconstructs Aristotle's defense of these bold claims. By examining how Aristotle develops his position in response to the prevailing hopes and anxieties of his age, the author shows why Aristotle considers happiness important for ethics and why he thinks it necessary to revise popular and traditional views. Paying close attention throughout to the internalist dimension of Aristotle's approach - his emphasis on how the virtuous view their own lives and actions - the author advances new interpretations of Aristotle's accounts of several major virtues, including temperance, courage, liberality, and 'greatness of soul'. This work sets Aristotle in the broader cultural context of his time, tracing his attemps to accommodate and amend rival views. The author examines literary and historical sources as well as philosophical texts, showing the inherited values and traditional ideals that inform Aristotle's discussions and provide some of the basis for his conclusions. Presupposing no knowledge of Greek or specialized philosophical terminology, the book is designed to be accessible to all students of philosophy or classical antiquity. All quotations from ancient texts are translated. (shrink)

International policies often make the conferral of aid, debt relief, or additional trading opportunities to a country depend upon its having successfully implemented specific policies, achieved certain social or economic outcomes, or demonstrated a commitment to conducting itself in specified ways. Such policies are conditionality arrangements. My aim in this article is to explore whether conditionality arrangements that would make the conferral of debt relief depend on whether the debtor country achieves a certain status with respect to the human right (...) fulfilment of its population can be justified. I argue that many objections that are typically advanced against conditionality arrangements are unconvincing, and that the possible benefits of human rights conditionality are sufficient to warrant serious intellectual and practical exploration. Whether or not particular arrangements are justified cannot be determined in advance of such exploration. (shrink)

A commonly deployed signifier to render the political event of a riot intelligible, ‘chaos’ describes an affective condition of disorder and disarray. For some theorists of affect, such a condition of chaotic unpredictability suggests emancipatory potential. Recounting the 2018 May Day / May 1st protests in Paris, that both politicians and media declared to be a riot, this paper argues that to consider the riot as chaotic is to think and feel like a state. Critically interrogating the analytical purchase of (...) ‘chaos’ to describe a riotous assembly of bodies, this paper contends that ‘chaos’ is not only a theoretically impoverished concept to understand such political events, but also that sovereignty mobilizes ‘chaos’ as an affective infrastructure of governance to shore up attachment to the security state. Repudiating the sovereign logic of chaos, this paper presents a first-person encounter with a protest-declared-riot in order to explore the various affects that materialize around such events. Through ethnographic reflection, this paper outlines a series of affects that accompanied the day’s events, such as speculative optimism, fragility, suspicion, fear, boldness, and joy. In so doing, the paper develops an affective approach to theorize relations of political antagonism in the street, arguing that whereas the state weaponizes terror as a form of governance, the rioters weaponize joy as an affective means of resistance. (shrink)