Sovereignty is the subject of many debates in international relations. Is it the source of state authority or a description of it? What is its history? Is it strengthening or weakening? Is it changing, and how? This book addresses these questions, but focuses on one less frequently addressed: what makes state sovereignty possible? The Sovereignty Cartel argues that sovereignty is built on state collusion – states work together to privilege sovereignty in global politics, because they benefit from sovereignty's exclusivity. This book explores this collusive behavior in international law, international political economy, international security, and migration and citizenship. In all these areas, states accord rights to other states, regardless of relative power, relative wealth, or relative position. Sovereignty, as a (changing) set of property rights for which states collude, accounts for this behavior not as anomaly (as other theories would) but instead as fundamental to the sovereign states system.

In Islands of Sovereignty, anthropologist and legal scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn offers a new interpretation of the transformation of US borders during the late twentieth century and its implications for our understanding of the nation-state as a legal and political form. Kahn takes us on a voyage into the immigration tribunals of South Florida, the Coast Guard vessels patrolling the northern Caribbean, and the camps of Guantánamo Bay—once the world’s largest US-operated migrant detention facility—to explore how litigation concerning the fate of Haitian asylum seekers gave birth to a novel paradigm of offshore oceanic migration policing. Combining ethnography—in Haiti, at Guantánamo, and alongside US migration patrols in the Caribbean—with in-depth archival research, Kahn expounds a nuanced theory of liberal empire’s dynamic tensions and its racialized geographies of securitization. An innovative historical anthropology of the modern legal imagination, Islands of Sovereignty forces us to reconsider the significance of the rise of the current US immigration border and its relation to broader shifts in the legal infrastructure of contemporary nation-states across the globe.

Study of the growth and proliferation of foreign owned multinational enterprise, with particular reference to the role of USA therein - examines the economic implications for the balance of payments of host countries, the question of sovereigny, foreign investment in manufacturing industries, top management, political aspects (with particular reference to developing countries), cultural factors, decision making powers, etc. References and statistical tables.

In an increasingly complex and interdependent world, states resort to a bewildering array of regulatory agreements to deal with problems as disparate as climate change, nuclear proliferation, international trade, satellite communications, species destruction, and intellectual property. In such a system, there must be some means of ensuring reasonably reliable performance of treaty obligations. The standard approach to this problem, by academics and politicians alike, is a search for treaties with "teeth"--military or economic sanctions to deter and punish violation. The New Sovereignty argues that this approach is misconceived. Cases of coercive enforcement are rare, and sanctions are too costly and difficult to mobilize to be a reliable enforcement tool. As an alternative to this "enforcement" model, the authors propose a "managerial" model of treaty compliance. It relies on the elaboration and application of treaty norms in a continuing dialogue between the parties--international officials and nongovernmental organizations--that generates pressure to resolve problems of noncompliance. In the process, the norms and practices of the regime themselves evolve and develop. The authors take a broad look at treaties in many different areas: arms control, human rights, labor, the environment, monetary policy, and trade. The extraordinary wealth of examples includes the Iran airbus shootdown, Libya's suit against Great Britain and the United States in the Lockerbie case, the war in Bosnia, and Iraq after the Gulf War. The authors conclude that sovereignty--the status of a recognized actor in the international system--requires membership in good standing in the organizations and regimes through which the world manages its common affairs. This requirement turns out to be the major pressure for compliance with treaty obligations. This book will be an invaluable resource and casebook for scholars, policymakers, international public servants, lawyers, and corporate executives.

A Search for Sovereignty approaches world history by examining the relation of law and geography in European empires between 1400 and 1900. Lauren Benton argues that Europeans imagined imperial space as networks of corridors and enclaves, and that they constructed sovereignty in ways that merged ideas about geography and law. Conflicts over treason, piracy, convict transportation, martial law, and crime created irregular spaces of law, while also attaching legal meanings to familiar geographic categories such as rivers, oceans, islands, and mountains. The resulting legal and spatial anomalies influenced debates about imperial constitutions and international law both in the colonies and at home. This study changes our understanding of empire and its legacies and opens new perspectives on the global history of law.

The world's multinational enterprises face a spell of rough weather, political economist Ray Vernon argues, not only from the host countries in which they have established their subsidiaries, but also from their home countries. Such enterprises--a few thousand in number, including Microsoft, Toyota, IBM, Siemens, Samsung, and others--now generate about half of the world's industrial output and half of the world's foreign trade; so any change in the relatively benign climate in which they have operated over the past decade will create serious tensions in international economic relations. The warnings of such a change are already here. In the United States, interests such as labor are increasingly hostile to what they see as the costs and uncertainties of an open economy. In Europe, those who want to preserve the social safety net and those who feel that the net must be dismantled are increasingly at odds. In Japan, the talk of hollowing out takes on a new urgency as the country's lifetime employment practices are threatened and as public and private institutions are subjected to unaccustomed stress. The tendency of multinationals in different countries to find common cause in open markets, strong patents and trademarks, and international technical standards has been viewed as a loss of national sovereignty and a weakening of the nation-state system, producing hostile reactions in home countries. The challenge for policy makers, Vernon argues, is to bridge the quite different regimes of the multinational enterprise and the nation-state. Both have a major role to play, and yet must make basic changes in their practices and policies to accommodate each other.

In a set of cases decided at the end of the nineteenth century, the Supreme Court declared that Congress had "plenary power" to regulate immigration, Indian tribes, and newly acquired territories. Not coincidentally, the groups subject to Congress' plenary power were primarily nonwhite and generally perceived as "uncivilized." The Court left Congress free to craft policies of assimilation, exclusion, paternalism, and domination. Despite dramatic shifts in constitutional law in the twentieth century, the plenary power case decisions remain largely the controlling law. The Warren Court, widely recognized for its dedication to individual rights, focused on ensuring "full and equal citizenship"--an agenda that utterly neglected immigrants, tribes, and residents of the territories. The Rehnquist Court has appropriated the Warren Court's rhetoric of citizenship, but has used it to strike down policies that support diversity and the sovereignty of Indian tribes. Attuned to the demands of a new century, the author argues for abandonment of the plenary power cases, and for more flexible conceptions of sovereignty and citizenship. The federal government ought to negotiate compacts with Indian tribes and the territories that affirm more durable forms of self-government. Citizenship should be "decentered," understood as a commitment to an intergenerational national project, not a basis for denying rights to immigrants.

Equality is the endangered species of political ideals. Even left-of-center politicians reject equality as an ideal: government must combat poverty, they say, but need not strive that its citizens be equal in any dimension. In his new book Ronald Dworkin insists, to the contrary, that equality is the indispensable virtue of democratic sovereignty. A legitimate government must treat all its citizens as equals, that is, with equal respect and concern, and, since the economic distribution that any society achieves is mainly the consequence of its system of law and policy, that requirement imposes serious egalitarian constraints on that distribution. What distribution of a nation's wealth is demanded by equal concern for all? Dworkin draws upon two fundamental humanist principles--first, it is of equal objective importance that all human lives flourish, and second, each person is responsible for defining and achieving the flourishing of his or her own life--to ground his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in the value of the resources that each person commands, not in the success he or she achieves. Equality, freedom, and individual responsibility are therefore not in conflict, but flow from and into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life and politics. Since no abstract political theory can be understood except in the context of actual and complex political issues, Dworkin develops his thesis by applying it to heated contemporary controversies about the distribution of health care, unemployment benefits, campaign finance reform, affirmative action, assisted suicide, and genetic engineering.

This book offers an outlook on relations in the 21st century between national governments and multinational companies.