By the end of the 20th century the once great modern European empires had gone - well, almost! Today, scattered around the world, there are small territories, remnants of empire that for one reason and another have eschewed independence and retain links of various kinds with the former imperial power. This edited collection focuses primarily on those territories in the Caribbean and Pacific which retain these 'colonial' ties. The issues affecting them such as constitutional reform, the maintenance of good governance, economic development, and the risks of economic vulnerability are important concerns for all territories both independent and non-independent. However, the ways in which these issues are addressed are somewhat different in small sub-national jurisdictions because of the particular regimes in place and the tensions inherent between the territories and their respective metropoles. The book brings together academics, policy-makers, constitutional lawyers, and civil servants to provide an insight into the complexities, contradictions, challenges and opportunities that help to define the non-independent territories of the Caribbean and Pacific, and their long-standing but sometimes awkward ties with their metropolitan powers.
Comprehensive and timely, this Handbook identifies the key characteristics, challenges and opportunities involved in the politics of small states across the globe today. Acknowledging the historical legacies behind these states, the chapters unpack the costs and benefits of different political models for small states.
This book offers a fresh analysis of constitutional, economic, demographic and cultural developments in the overseas territories of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Ranging from Greenland to Gibraltar, the Falklands to the Faroes, and encompassing islands in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, and the Caribbean, these territories command attention because of their unique status, and for the ways that they occasionally become flashpoints for rival international claims, dubious financial activities, illegal migration and clashes between metropolitan and local mores. Connell and Aldrich argue that a negotiated dependency brings greater benefits to these territories than might independence.
This edited collection examines the realities of the last remnants of the European colonial empires in the Caribbean, namely the British, Dutch and French overseas territories. Although known and perhaps infamous for their role as high-end tourist destinations and financial centres, these small jurisdictions are complex and multifaceted places. While this volume considers their role as financial centres, it does so from alternative and original perspectives by examining how the sector shapes the internal dynamics of these Caribbean societies, and how it is itself shaped by global trends. A range of contributions is included that highlight other key issues. Political relations between the territories and their metropolitan centres and with the European Union are the focus of several chapters, highlighting the stresses and strains, and in many cases the unfulfilled expectations of devolved governance. Further chapters describe the economic instability and factors of political conflict faced by some of these societies and the available options to address them. Finally, several chapters reflect more specifically on the territories’ internal social and ethnic dynamics, and the hierarchies and inequalities that result. Bringing together a variety of different disciplinary perspectives, from political science to sociology, and from anthropology to geography, this book will be of great interest to any academic or student who wishes to see how an often overlooked part of the world is actually a key site of socio-economic transformation and a crucial nexus in global affairs. Sébastien Chauvin is a sociologist and an Associate Professor at the Institut des Sciences Sociales at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research deals with immigration, citizenship, gender, sexuality, law and labour in France and the USA. With Bruno Cousin, he has also developed a multi-sited research programme on social and symbolic capital and the cultural sociology of economic élites, with a focus on Western Europe (élite male social club sociability), the Caribbean region (Saint-Barthélemy), and new forms of conspicuous consumption among the global super-rich. His other ongoing writing explores the intersections of race, nationalism, sexuality and citizenship in the Netherlands, France and the USA. Peter Clegg is Associate Professor in Politics and Head of the Department of Health and Social Sciences at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. He was formerly Visiting Research Fellow at both KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of South East Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden, Netherlands, and at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES), University of the West Indies, Jamaica. His main research interests focus on contemporary developments within the United Kingdom Overseas Territories and the international political economy of the Caribbean. Bruno Cousin is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po, France, and an affiliate of the Centre of European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE), France. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Lille, France, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University, USA, and has held visiting positions at NYU, the University of Amsterdam and Birkbeck. His research interests focus on class relations, residential segregation, social capital and forms of bourgeois sociability, and the modes of élites’ legitimization. He is currently conducting research with Sébastien Chauvin on Saint-Barthélemy (French West Indies), whose first results have been published in Ethnologie française and Geographies of the Super-Rich (2013), and he has recently co-authored Ce que les riches pensent des pauvres (2017).
This book explains how leaders in the Caribbean and Pacific regions balance the autonomy-viability dilemma of postcolonial statehood - that political self-determination is a hollow achievement unless it is accompanied by economic development - by practising statehood à la carte. Previous research has focused on the pursuit of decolonial self-determination through and above the nation state, via regionalism and internationalism, or by creating non-sovereign alternatives to it. This book looks at how communities have sought the same goals below the state, including via secession and devolution. Downsizing is typically portrayed as the antithesis of progressive, cosmopolitan internationalism and employed as evidence for the claim that the age of anticolonial self-determination has ended. In this book, Jack Corbett shows how these movements are animated by similar ideas and motivations that are rendered viable by the simultaneous pursuit of regional integration and forms of non-sovereignty. He argues that the à la carte pursuit of political and economic independence through, above, and below the state, and via non-sovereign alternatives to it, is a pragmatic response to the contradictions inherent to coloniality.
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.
This is an in-depth analysis of the various methods used by small states to overcome their vulnerabilities in the international arena. With its balanced approach and variety of contributions, this book is of interest to researchers and academics who focus on the developing world or multilateral diplomacy.
The dynamics for any moves for political independence in the 21st century are very different from those of the 20th. The aspirations of former colonies to independence are grinding to a halt; the rationale for selfdetermination is increasingly driven by strategic and pragmatic economic arguments, and not so much by nationalist appeals. Meanwhile, creative governance, fiscal vicissitudes and membership of supra-national bodies have ushered in examples of ‘sovereign states’ that approximate suzerain entities. Are independence movements active today aspiring to a different kind of sovereignty from their 20th century predecessors, one that secures autonomy at home, but which maintains a special relationship with a larger, richer, country? This collection critically reviews the origins, policies and aspirations of independence movements from the world’s subnational island jurisdictions, where a distinct and separate geography tends to facilitate the emergence of an equally distinct political and cultural identity. These island territories are the world’s top candidates for achieving sovereign status. And yet various factors are preventing them from making the final push towards independence. This book was originally published as a special issue of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics
Studies of the global political economy have rarely engaged with development in the Caribbean, the thought of its indigenous intellectuals, or the non-sovereign territories of the region. Matthew Bishop compares the development of the independent English-speaking islands of St Lucia and St Vincent and their non-sovereign French neighbours, Martinique and Guadeloupe. By explaining how distinctive patterns of British and French colonialism and decolonisation came to bear on them, he investigates how very different patterns of development have subsequently ensued, often with startling consequences in this era of globalization and crisis. By engaging with the empirical reality of the Caribbean, his study sheds light on a range of wider debates relating to development, indigenous thought, post-colonial sovereignty, small states, and the contemporary evolution of the global political economy.
