The Failure Of Popular Sovereignty

As the expanding United States grappled with the question of how to determine the boundaries of slavery, politicians proposed popular sovereignty as a means of entrusting the issue to citizens of new territories. Christopher Childers now uses popular sovereignty as a lens for viewing the radicalization of southern states' rights politics, demonstrating how this misbegotten offspring of slavery and Manifest Destiny, though intended to assuage passions, instead worsened sectional differences, radicalized southerners, and paved the way for secession. In this first major history of popular sovereignty, Childers explores the triangular relationship among the extension of slavery, southern politics, and territorial governance. He shows how, as politicians from North and South redesigned popular sovereignty to lessen sectional tensions and remove slavery from the national political discourse, the doctrine instead made sectional divisions intractable, placed the territorial issue at the center of national politics, and gave voice to an increasingly radical states' rights interpretation of the federal compact. Childers explains how politicians offered the idea of local control over slavery as a way to appease the South-or at least as a compromise that would not offend the states' rights constitutional scruples of southerners. In the end, that strategy backfired by transforming the South into a rigid sectional bloc dedicated to the protection and perpetuation of slavery-a political time bomb that eventually exploded into Civil War. Tracing the doctrine of popular sovereignty back to its roots in the early American republic, Childers describes the dichotomy between believers in local control in the territories and national control as first embodied in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. Noting that the slavery extension issue had surfaced before but obviously not been resolved, he shows how the debate over this issue played out over time, complicated the relationship between the federal government and the territories, and radicalized sectional politics. He also provides new insight into such topics as Arkansas and Florida statehood, the early phases of California's statehood bid, and the emergence of John C. Calhoun's common property doctrine. Laced with new insights, Childers's study offers a coherent narrative of the formative moments in the slavery debate that have been seen heretofore as discrete events. His work stands at the intersection of political, intellectual, and constitutional history, unfolding the formative moments in the slavery debate to expand our understanding of the peculiar institution in the early republic.

Sovereignty, originally the figure of 'sovereign', then the state, today meets new challenges of globalization and privatization of power.

Analyzing the "democratic" features and institutions of the Athenian democracy in the fifth century B.C., Martin Ostwald traces their development from Solon's judicial reforms to the flowering of popular sovereignty, when the people assumed the right both to enact all legislation and to hold magistrates accountable for implementing what had been enacted.

What role do the people play in defining and developing human rights? This volume explores the very topical issue of the lack of democratic legitimisation of national and international courts and the question of whether rendering the original process of defining human rights more democratic at the national and international level would improve the degree of protection they afford. The authors venture to raise the crucial question: When can a democratic society be considered to be mature enough so as to be trusted to provide its own definition of human rights obligations?

A political theorist teases out the century-old ideological transformation at the heart of contemporary discourse in Muslim nations undergoing political change. The Arab Spring precipitated a crisis in political Islam. In Egypt Islamists have been crushed. In Turkey they have descended into authoritarianism. In Tunisia they govern but without the label of “political Islam.” Andrew March explores how, before this crisis, Islamists developed a unique theory of popular sovereignty, one that promised to determine the future of democracy in the Middle East. This began with the claim of divine sovereignty, the demand to restore the sharīʿa in modern societies. But prominent theorists of political Islam also advanced another principle, the Quranic notion that God’s authority on earth rests not with sultans or with scholars’ interpretation of written law but with the entirety of the Muslim people, the umma. Drawing on this argument, utopian theorists such as Abū’l-Aʿlā Mawdūdī and Sayyid Quṭb released into the intellectual bloodstream the doctrine of the caliphate of man: while God is sovereign, He has appointed the multitude of believers as His vicegerent. The Caliphate of Man argues that the doctrine of the universal human caliphate underpins a specific democratic theory, a kind of Islamic republic of virtue in which the people have authority over the government and religious leaders. But is this an ideal regime destined to survive only as theory?

In 2011, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1973, authorizing its member states to take measures to protect Libyan civilians from Muammar Gadhafi’s forces. In invoking the “responsibility to protect,” the resolution draws on the principle that sovereign states are responsible and accountable to the international community for the protection of their populations and that the international community can act to protect populations when national authorities fail to do so. The idea that sovereignty includes the responsibility to protect is often seen as a departure from the classic definition, but it actually has deep historical roots. In Sovereignty and the Responsibility to Protect, Luke Glanville argues that this responsibility extends back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that states have since been accountable for this responsibility to God, the people, and the international community. Over time, the right to national self-governance came to take priority over the protection of individual liberties, but the noninterventionist understanding of sovereignty was only firmly established in the twentieth century, and it remained for only a few decades before it was challenged by renewed claims that sovereigns are responsible for protection. Glanville traces the relationship between sovereignty and responsibility from the early modern period to the present day, and offers a new history with profound implications for the present.

A path-breaking critical analysis of the meaning and interpretation of the German constitution in the Weimar years (1919-1933).

Offers an in-depth case study of the failure of popular constitution making in Turkey from 2011 to 2013.