Week 2: Sovereignty #Phalia?

This week the class looked at what the processes of globalization and/or global governance are doing to the State. While some like Weiss (2005) argue that these processes have actually augmented the state, others such as Golden and Vogel (2010) argue that globalization integration has brought many benefits, but also created new kinds of systemic risk, which threaten it.

On the other hand, authors such as Lake (2010) and Scholte (2004) argue that part of the problem in answering this question is that our framework for analysis in IR is  outdated. Lake believes that the conception of sovereignty in much of IR theory is linked to an overly formal-legal concept of authority. Scholte believes that IR has been too based upon territorialism/statism and that it should recognize that we are moving towards a “post-Westphalian” sovereignty where decisions are made at the municipal/local/provincial, regional (supra-regional) and transworld levels.  As such, we should understand the world as having “polycentric” governance: that is governance which occurs through diverse and often interconnected public and private arrangements on varying scales from local to global. “This situation has lacked a clear centre of command and control of the sort that Westphalian sovereign once provided.”

One interesting aspect of the discussion was that it went almost immediately from “territory” to “identity” – is the fact that globalization is challenging statist notions of identity an issue? And if so, was a identity a “zero-sum game” or capable of many layers? There seemed to be some convergence around the idea that state-identity was still the most important (after all, one of the worst situations to be in is that of a “stateless person”) and that layers or alternate identities posed by globalization/global governance did not necessarily make someone any less of a citizen.

Next week we are looking at key actors in global governance which are centres of international rule making: international organizations.

Week 2 Power Point: http://ge.tt/6T3JUrV/v/0?c (a sovereignty backgrounder)