Full Description
This Research Handbook offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary account of sovereignty as one of the most contested concepts in law and politics. Bringing together leading scholars from a wide range of traditions, it examines sovereignty not only as a legal doctrine and political claim, but also as a symbolic form.
Chapters trace the epigenesis of sovereignty from Ancient Greece, Rome and Byzantium to the modern state, revealing how religious, metaphysical and philosophical ideas shaped its development. A unique comparative section explores Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Confucian, Indigenous and settler-colonial traditions, showing how different worlds imagine authority, legitimacy and collective self-rule. The volume also investigates the functional, normative and symbolic dimensions of sovereignty in contemporary constitutionalism, including debates on democratic authority, European integration, secession, illiberalism and populism. Further contributions analyse sovereignty's entanglement with exceptionalism, labour, biopolitics and trans-constitutionalism. The concluding chapters examine why sovereignty persists as a powerful political imaginary, assessing its critiques and re-articulations—from political theology and relational ethics to feminist, anarchist and decolonial perspectives.
The Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Sovereignty is an essential resource for scholars and students of law, political theory, intellectual history and international relations, as well as practitioners concerned with constitutionalism and global governance.
Contents
Contents
PART I EPIGENESIS: SOVEREIGNTY IN EUROPEAN HISTORY,
RELIGION, AND PHILOSOPHY
1 Power and legitimation: ideas of 'sovereignty' in classic Athens 11
Antoni Abat i Ninet
2 Sovereignty and empire under Rome 29
Clifford Ando
3 Sovereignty in Byzantium: concepts and practices 40
Anthony Kaldellis
4 The nexus between sovereignty and the rise of the modern state 57
Kostas Chrysogonos
5 The phantom of sovereignty in contemporary political philosophy 74
Seyla Benhabib
PART II SOVEREIGNTY BEYOND EUROPE
6 Contesting sovereignty: indigenous legal and political responses to settler
colonialism in Canada 94
Amy Swiffen
7 Shared sovereignty and shared humanity in the Jewish rabbinic tradition: a
forgotten tradition 112
Suzanne Last Stone
8 Perfect match or impossible union: Islamic conceptions of sovereignty 126
Masoud Zamani and Majid Nikouei
9 Sovereignty from Confucian perspectives 144
Wen-Chen Chang and Pei-Jung Li
10 The politics of law and sovereignty in colonial India: dharma, artha, and
the ideological origins of the Republic of India 159
Sunil Purushotham
PART III FUNCTIONAL AND SYMBOLIC DIMENSION OF SOVEREIGNTY
11 Caught between theoretical and practical reason: Immanuel Kant's
'inscrutable' sovereign 182
Panu Minkkinen
12 Sovereignty's trajectory within the bounds of modern democratic
constitutionalism 194
Michel Rosenfeld
13 Sovereignty and the European Union: an enduringly awkward fit 218
Neil Walker
14 Secession and sovereignty 236
Costanza Margiotta
15 Sovereignty, illiberalism, and populism 252
Giuseppe Martinico
PART IV SOVEREIGNTY IN ITS CONTESTED CONTEMPORARY SETTINGS
16 Sovereignty and exceptionalism: rights, constitutions and security 284
Chris Thornhill
17 Between over-sovereignty and under-sovereignty: symbolic force and
transconstitutional limits of state sovereignty 303
Marcelo Neves
18 Labour as constituent power 321
Emilios Christodoulidis
19 Biopower and sovereignty in Foucault and Agamben 342
Tom Frost
PART V WHY SOVEREIGNTY?
20 For a critique of sovereignism 361
Nadia Urbinati
21 The epigenesis of the sovereign fantasy: from political theology to
relational exposure 375
Marinos Diamantides
22 International relations and the myth of sovereignty as equality: difference
and the hierarchies of race and civilisation in the making of sovereignty 405
Xavier Mathieu
23 Reclaiming power: anarchism, sovereignty and indigenous thought 422
James R. Martel
24 The context of the governed: popular sovereignty as the projection of
"democracy" 433
Zoran Oklopcic
25 Feminist perspectives on sovereignty 452
Ruth Houghton
