In fragile states, domestic and international actors sometimes take the momentous step of sharing sovereign authority to provide basic public services and build the rule of law. While sovereignty sharing can help address gaps in governance, it is inherently difficult, risking redundancy, confusion over roles, and feuds between partners when their interests diverge. In Sovereignty Sharing in Fragile States, John D. Ciorciari sheds light on how and why these extraordinary joint ventures are created, designed, and implemented. Based on extensive field research in several countries and more than 150 interviews with senior figures from governments, the UN, donor states, and civil society, Ciorciari discusses when sovereignty sharing may be justified and when it is most likely to achieve its aims. The two, he argues, are closely related: perceived legitimacy and continued political and popular support are keys to success. This book examines a diverse range of sovereignty-sharing arrangements, including hybrid criminal tribunals, joint policing arrangements, and anti-corruption initiatives, in Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Lebanon, Timor-Leste, Guatemala, and Liberia. Ciorciari provides the first comparative assessment of these remarkable attempts to repair ruptures in the rule of law—the heart of a well-governed state.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dozens of alliances asserting shared sovereignty formed in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries. Many accounts of state formation struggle to explain these leagues, since they characterize state formation as a process of internal bureaucratization within individual states. This comparative study of alliances in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries focuses on a formative time in European history, from the late fifteenth century until the immediate aftermath of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, to demonstrate how the sharing of sovereignty through alliances influenced the evolution of the Empire, the Dutch Republic, and their various member states in fundamental ways. Alliances simultaneously supported and constrained central and territorial authorities, while their collaborative policy-making process empowered smaller states, helping to ensure their survival. By revealing how the interdependencies of alliance shaped states of all sizes in the Empire and the Low Countries, Christopher W. Close opens new perspectives on state formation with profound implications for understanding the development of states across Europe.
Through a comparative study of alliances in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries, Christopher W. Close offers new perspectives on how alliances in early modern Europe promoted shared sovereignty, and how this influenced the evolution of states in early modern Europe.
Many conflicts throughout the world can be characterized as sovereignty conflicts in which two states claim exclusive sovereign rights for different reasons over the same piece of land. It is increasingly clear that the available remedies have been less than successful in many of these cases, and that a peaceful and definitive solution is needed. This book proposes a fair and just way of dealing with certain sovereignty conflicts. Drawing on the work of John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, this book considers how distributive justice theories can be in tune with the concept of sovereignty and explores the possibility of a solution for sovereignty conflicts based on Rawlsian methodology. Jorge E. Núñez explores a solution of egalitarian shared sovereignty, evaluating what sorts of institutions and arrangements could, and would, best realize shared sovereignty, and how it might be applied to territory, population, government, and law.
Viewed through an interdisciplinary lens, this study analyzes Westphalian sovereignty, the global economy, ethnonationalism, territorial identity, the state of nature, implications of weak and failed states, conflict management, and shared sovereignty in the negotiation process. This project reexamines sources of conflict and demonstrates the moral ramifications of shared sovereignty as a diplomatic alternative to violence.
How does EU membership affect national sovereignty? This edited volume offers a broader perspective on sovereignty relying on the international law concept.
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,3, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), language: English, abstract: Although the process of globalisation is an old-dated phenomenon, which can be settled back to the first intercontinental commercial exchanges (cf. Streeck 2005), only recent events have modified the traditional relation among nation-states. The collapse of the Berlin wall and the downfall of the USSR, the growth of the Pacific Asian economies and the expansion of new communication systems have dissolved the conventional threefold partition of the globe in the idea of a “one world” structured on an axis organised in three principal regional blocks: North America, Western Europe, and Pacific Asia (cf. Taylor/ Flint 2000:4-5). Globalisation has altered all core tasks of the nation-state concerning territoriality, taxation and citizenship. The formulation of policies has shifted from the national context to a complex environment, which embraces the regional and international dimension. These circumstances have affected the representative role of the state as decisional system and have led to a situation, in which sovereignty is shared among multiple actors, who have to deal with new sources of legitimisation beyond the domestic environment (cf. Luhmann 1994:15-20). Thus, traditional foundations for the political order are destabilized due to the fact that “vertically organised national cultures and national economies are gradually being replaced by new horizontal and global networks” (van Ham 2001:37-8). From this angle, the European Union (hereafter also EU or Union) could be conceived as a regional answer to the process of globalisation, in which European integration is adapting European societies, economies and political organisations to a globalised competitive rule system (cf. van Ham 2001). Nevertheless, if the understanding of the EU as a regional variant to globalisation explains the necessity of European integration, it leaves ground for questions regarding the changes in the relationship between governance and government. Moreover, assumed that European integration, owing its intergovernmental bias, is chiefly managed by national executives (cf. Moravcsik 1993), a multi-level system of governance undermines the core functions of governments as principal linkage between the institutional level of decision-making and the society (cf. Poguntke 2000). In this dissertation I will evaluate, at the example of the European Union, the hypothesis that governance has eclipsed government. The intention is to analyse if the European decisional system has destabilized the role of national governments and eroded the classical link between national institutions and society. Furthermore, I will analyse to which degree these supposed changes are to be ascribed to the institutional configuration of the European Union.
The authors assert that sovereignty can no longer be seen as a protection against interference, but as a charge of responsibility where the state is accountable to both domestic and external constituencies. In internal conflicts in Africa, sovereign states have often failed to take responsibility for their own citizens' welfare and for the humanitarian consequences of conflict, leaving the victims with no assistance. This book shows how that responsibility can be exercised by states over their own population, and by other states in assistance to their fellow sovereigns. Sovereignty as Responsibility presents a framework that should guide both national governments and the international community in discharging their respective responsibilities. Broad principles are developed by examining identity as a potential source of conflict, governance as a matter of managing conflict, and economics as a policy field for deterring conflict. Considering conflict management, political stability, economic development, and social welfare as functions of governance, the authors develop strategies, guidelines, and roles for its responsible exercise. Some African governments, such as South Africa in the 1990s and Ghana since 1980, have demonstrated impressive gains against these standards, while others, such as Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sudan, have failed. Opportunities for making sovereignty more responsible and improving the management of conflicts are examined at the regional and international levels. The lessons from the mixed successes of regional conflict management actions, such as the West African intervention in Liberia, the East African mediation in Sudan, and international efforts to urge talks to end the conflict in Angola, indicate friends and neighbors outside the state in conflict have important roles to play in increasing sovereign responsibility. Approaching conflict management from the perspective of the responsibilities of sovereignt
Gibraltar is an Overseas Territory of the UK within the EU, which has for three centuries been at the centre of a dispute between Britain and Spain, a dispute based on traditional perceptions of sovereignty. Hitherto the dispute has been managed in a predominantly bilateral way, but this has prevented the people of Gibraltar having an equal say on the issue of Gibraltar's sovereignty and decolonisation. It has produced a paradox of governance and constitutionalism that encases the Gibraltar people. This book considers the effects of sovereignty and the culture of bilateralism on the dispute, and examines the resulting deficits of governance and democracy. In assessing the evolution of the themes underlying the dispute it asks how its resolution might be facilitated by the application of ideas drawn from the modern legal context of late sovereignty, pluralism and stateless nationalism, suggesting that a productive trilateral approach and recognition of the legal and societal context could enable an enduring settlement. The author marries theories from international relations, constitutional law and public international law in the context of modern literature on sovereignty and nationalism, applying these theories to the case-study of Gibraltar with emphasis on constitutionalism in its international and EU context to produce a ground-breaking addition to the literature on stateless nationalism, late sovereignty and constitutional pluralism. As such it also complements recent studies of sub-state societies, regions or nations within Europe and elsewhere, including Catalunya, the Basque Country and Scotland and Wales, and in the broader Commonwealth context, other British overseas territories. This book will be of interest to lawyers, political scientists, constitutional historians and constitutionalists.
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,3, European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), language: English, abstract: Although the process of globalisation is an old-dated phenomenon, which can be settled back to the first intercontinental commercial exchanges (cf. Streeck 2005), only recent events have modified the traditional relation among nation-states. The collapse of the Berlin wall and the downfall of the USSR, the growth of the Pacific Asian economies and the expansion of new communication systems have dissolved the conventional threefold partition of the globe in the idea of a "one world" structured on an axis organised in three principal regional blocks: North America, Western Europe, and Pacific Asia (cf. Taylor/ Flint 2000:4-5). Globalisation has altered all core tasks of the nation-state concerning territoriality, taxation and citizenship. The formulation of policies has shifted from the national context to a complex environment, which embraces the regional and international dimension. These circumstances have affected the representative role of the state as decisional system and have led to a situation, in which sovereignty is shared among multiple actors, who have to deal with new sources of legitimisation beyond the domestic environment (cf. Luhmann 1994:15-20). Thus, traditional foundations for the political order are destabilized due to the fact that "vertically organised national cultures and national economies are gradually being replaced by new horizontal and global networks" (van Ham 2001:37-8). From this angle, the European Union (hereafter also EU or Union) could be conceived as a regional answer to the process of globalisation, in which European integration is adapting European societies, economies and political organisations to a globalised competitive rule system (cf. van Ham 2001). Nevertheless, if the understanding of the EU as a regional variant to globalisation explains the nec
