Search results

As social movements engage in transnational legal processes, they have articulated innovative rights claims outside the nation-state frame. This chapter analyzes emerging practices of legal mobilization in response to global governance through a case study of the “right to food sovereignty.” The claim of food sovereignty has been mobilized transnationally by small-scale food producers, food-chain workers, and the food insecure to oppose the liberalization of food and agriculture. The author analyzes the formation of this claim in relation to the rise of a “network imaginary” of global governance. By drawing on ethnographic research, the author shows how activists have internalized this imaginary within their claims and practices of legal mobilization. In doing so, the author argues, transnational food sovereignty activists co-constitute global food governance from below. Ultimately, the development of these practices in response to shifting forms of transnational legality reflects the enduring, mutually constitutive relationship between law and social movements on a global scale.

This chapter examines La Vía Campesina’s strategy of consolidating strategic alliances in its global struggle to build food sovereignty. After discussing some of La Vía Campesina’s initial challenges in working with nongovernmental organizations we focus on two case studies: first, La Vía Campesina’s work with Veterinarios Sin Fronteras, based in Spain, and second, the International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty. In both cases we analyze some of the convergences and divergences experienced by the social actors in efforts to build strategic alliances.

This chapter looks at how the concept of biopolitics can be used to understand the settler colonial legal orders. The focus is on the evolution of the definition of ‘Indian status’ in the Indian Act, which is the central piece of legislation in Canada’s Indian administration regime. Historically, the legal concept of Indian status was used as a way to constitute a population in relation to colonial sovereignty, and later was adapted as a mechanism to internally dividing the population through complex forms of legal domination. Scholars have turned to Michel Foucault’s studies of biopolitics and racism to understand how settler colonial sovereignty relates to a population on a territory. This chapter argues that Foucault’s analysis was radically historically embedded in a way that shapes its relevance to understanding settler colonialism. In Foucault’s original analysis, racism emerges as tool of the state in the relation between territory and sovereignty, which was characteristic in feudal Europe. In settler colonial legal orders such as Canada, however, sovereignty’s relation to the population is constituted in the absence of a prior connection to the land.

Sovereignty retains considerable currency today insofar as it fuses ordinary understandings of the state, the nation, and democracy. Against widespread expectations, however, the European Union has increasingly harnessed sovereignty as a source of vitality. We are thus witnessing a mainstreaming of populist politics, as the rhetoric of sovereignty no longer disqualifies new EU institutions and policies. This can be better understood if we consider sovereignty, from a constructivist perspective, as an evolving set of practices. First, sovereignty evolves within political and administrative circles, as European officials act to modify longstanding practices of state sovereignty. Second, sovereignty evolves in an increasingly politicized context, as political leaders dramatize EU crises in order to mobilize coalitions around new practices of popular sovereignty. This dual dynamic of state sovereignty and popular sovereignty is demonstrated in the case of the Eurozone and then extrapolated to the current trajectory of the EU polity against the benchmark of US federalism after the Civil War. An open question is whether sovereignty practices in the European Union will continue to evolve without compromising the Union's cosmopolitan and liberal objectives.

Food sovereignty has increasingly become a common political framework for alternative food movements seeking for radical change in the agrifood system. The transformative potential of food sovereignty is context-dependent, resulting in different approaches and strategies in different territories. In this chapter, we address the case of Catalonia (Spain), as an example of global North food sovereignty movement, in which consumers play a predominant role. Based on five discourses on food sovereignty previously identified as a political proposal for social change in Catalonia, namely “activism,” “anti-purism,” “self-management,” “pedagogy,” and “pragmatism,” we discuss internal divergences within the movement that lead to convergences with other political trends in the agrifood system. Despite the movement converges in several critical points at a conceptual level, such as what is the meaning of food sovereignty, or its understanding of the food sovereignty proposal as a vehicle for deepening democracy, it has strong divergences at the operational level, that is, on how to achieve the social and political change it seeks. A structuralist or agency-focused vision of social change and the relevance assigned to ideological affinity among actors are core elements explaining such divergences. In this chapter, the authors explore these internal divergences within the Catalan food sovereignty movement, which at the same time lead to convergences with other repoliticization concepts within the agrifood studies literature (specifically food democracy, food citizenship, and political consumerism).

This chapter analyzes the semiotic construction of US claims to sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Building on semiotic theories in sociology and theories within critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies, it presents an interpretive analysis of state, military, and academic discursive strategies. The US empire-state attempts to construct colonial narratives of race and sovereignty that rehistoricize the history of Hawaiians and other Indigenous peoples. In order to make claims to sovereignty, settler-colonists construct narratives that build upon false claims to superiority, advancement, and discovery. Colonial resignification is a process by which signs and symbols of Indigenous communities are conscripted into the myths of empire that maintain such sovereign claims. Yet, for this reason, colonial resignification can be undone through reclaiming such signs and symbols from their use within colonial metanarratives. In this case, efforts toward decolonial resignification enacted alternative metanarratives of peoples' relationships to place. This “flip side” of the synecdoche is a process that unravels the ties that bind layered myths by providing new answers to questions that underpin settler colonial sovereignty.

Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, this essay seeks to show (illegal) alienage in U.S. law in new lights. First, this essay demonstrates how the emergence of a positive law of citizenship, through which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the importance of citizenship for rights, is a relatively recent and historically contingent development in U.S. law. Second, this essay shows how the concept of “sovereignty” plays different roles in the U.S. positive law of citizenship and (illegal) alienage. This essay seeks also to evaluate the limits and possibilities of alternatives to “sovereignty” as grounds for the rights of noncitizens in the United States. And it seeks to make the point that the apolitical valences of “territoriality” and “social productivity” vis-à-vis “sovereignty” in U.S. law render illegal alienage in particular misleadingly outside the realm of the political. Ultimately, this essay seeks also to challenge understandings of “sovereignty” in political theory by integrating law and political theory, and to recast legal discourse on illegal alienage by turning attention to “sovereignty.”

U.S. military facilities abroad are key sites around which foreign citizens and U.S. officers negotiate questions of sovereignty with a particular intensity. Between 1999 and 2009, Manta, Ecuador, was home to one of the most strategic U.S. Air Force “forward operating locations” (or FOLs) in the Western hemisphere. While rejected by most Ecuadorian legal scholars, anti-FOL activists, and the current Ecuadorian administration as a violation of national sovereignty, the facility was widely embraced by residents of the city itself, who actively rejected this characterization of “violation” by arguing that the FOL was, on the contrary, a strategic means of bolstering their “municipal sovereignty.” Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research on and around the FOL in 2006–2007, this chapter tracks the efforts of Manta residents, U.S. military personnel, and anti-base activists to both circumscribe and expand the various registers in which they articulated their understandings of “sovereignty.”

In this paper, I foreground the concept of economic sovereignty in order to clarify strategies that undergird the practices of, and hindrances to, political sovereignty. I argue that current critical discourses on sovereignty can be significantly furthered with careful examination of the framework of economic strategies that support, and are often driving forces of, these political actions. To illustrate the importance of these complex strategies, I focus on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ (EBCI) casino and small-business markets during the volatile years of the Great Recession. This discussion begins by investigating continued Native Nation economic precarity in the context of economic actions taken by US governments specifically with regard to gaming regulation. I then explain the strategic methods by which Native Nations have addressed and mitigated some of these incursions, thereby highlighting how such strategies disrupt the settler–colonial narrative of the agency-less indigenous state. These strategies are enacted at both government and individual levels through (1) the economic development experiences of Native Nations in relation to their distinctive hybrid political–economic governmental structures, such as the EBCI’s charter of incorporation that also serves as its national constitution, and (2) the strength of the EBCI small-business market in supporting these efforts. In arguing for this framework of economic strategies, this study contributes to understandings of global indigenous communities’ current strengths and vulnerabilities by thoroughly disentangling models of economic sovereignty from economic power, demonstrating how discussions of political economy must engage with issues of economic sovereignty.

Current business challenges force companies to exchange critical and sensitive data. The data provider pays great attention to the usage of their data and wants to control it by policies. The purpose of this paper is to develop usage control architecture options to enable data sovereignty in business ecosystems.

The architecture options are developed following the design science research process. Based on requirements from an automotive use case, the authors develop architecture options. The different architecture options are demonstrated and evaluated based on the case study with practitioners from the automotive industry.

This paper introduces different architecture options for implementing usage control (UC). The proposed architecture options represent solutions for UC in business ecosystems. The comparison of the architecture options shows the respective advantages and disadvantages for data provider and data consumer.

In this work, the authors address only one case stemming from the German automotive sector.

Technical enforcement of data providers policies instead of relying on trust to support collaborative data exchange between companies.

This research is among the first to introduce architecture options that provide a technical concept for the implementation of data sovereignty in business ecosystems using UC. Consequently, it supports the decision process for the technical implementation of data sovereignty.