State Sovereignty and the Treaty-Making Power

US Treaty-making with American Indians

Native Americans are unique among domestic actors in that their relations with the United States government involve treaty-making, with almost 600 such documents signed between the Revolutionary War and the turn of the twentieth century. We investigate the effect of constitutional changes to the treating process in 1871, by which Congress stripped the President of his ability to negotiate direc...

Food Sovereignty: Power, Gender, and the Right to Food

One of the most enduring misconceptions about hunger is that it is primarily the result of a deficit in global food production. If this were so, we might expect food to be absent at times and in places where people die of hunger. Yet economist Amartya Sen has shown that in the majority of cases of widespread famine-related death since WWII, food has been available within the famineaffected area...

State Sovereignty and the Two Faces of Federalism

Workshop: the Nation-state and the Ecological Crisis: Sovereignty, Economy and Ecology Paper Title: 'greening the Nation-state: from Exclusive to Inclusive Sovereignty'

1. Introduction If a green posture towards the nation-state can be discerned from the diverse writings of green political theorists and fellow environmental sympathizers it is that the nation state plays, at best, a contradictory role in environmental management in facilitating both environmental destruction and environmental protection and, at worst, it is fundamentally ecocidal. 1 From eco-Ma...

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...