A Genealogy of State Sovereignty

Sovereignty and Sociology: from State Theory to Theories of Empire

Imperial crisis is the analytical axis on which turn two national states of emergency: the Weimar Republic (1918!1933) and the United States on the so-called “Eve of Destruction” (1965!1975). But while Max Weber disagreed with Carl Schmitt with respect to the problem of sovereignty at the core of the German imperium, American sociologists ! even those inspired by Weber ! by and large did not re...

State Sovereignty and the Two Faces of Federalism

The genealogy of genealogy of neurons

Two scenarios of neuronal evolution (monophyly and polyphyly) are discussed in the historical timeline starting from the 19th century. The recent genomic studies on Ctenophores re-initiated a broad interest in the hypotheses of independent origins of neurons. However, even earlier work on ctenophores suggested that their nervous systems are unique in many aspects of their organization and a pos...

Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics

I propose a concept of effective sovereignty to argue that states participate in sovereignty regimes that exhibit distinctive combinations of central state authority and political territoriality. Two basic conclusions, drawing from recent research in political geography and other fields, are that sovereignty is neither inherently territorial nor is it exclusively organized on a state-by-state b...

Rewriting nation-state: borderland literatures of India and the question of state sovereignty

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