Sovereignty and the State in International Relations M1

Establishment

ESPOL European School of Political and Social Sciences

Language of instruction

French, English

This course occurs in the following program(s)

Training officer(s)

JANIS GRZYBOWSKI

Period

Presentation
Terms
Resources

Présentation

Modalités

Forms of instruction

In order to pass the course, each student has to fulfill four requirements. The final grade of the course is composed of the following assignments:

(1) Participation (20%): This is a very reading-heavy class. Each student is expected to read all assigned texts before each class and participate actively in class discussions. Students may miss one session without justification, any other absence must be justified.

(2) Paper (30%): Each student writes a short discussion paper of about 1000 (+/- 100) words in one week of the course in sessions 3-7, in which (s)he critically engages with all the compulsory readings for that session. The paper should not simply summarize the readings but rather make an independent argument. Papers must be submitted by 2pm the day before class. Every hour of delayed submission leads to a reduction of a full point in the grade.

(3) Authors’ attorney (15%): Students pick one session (from sessions 3-7, but different from the one chosen for writing the paper) to defend the authors against any and all critique that might come up in the class discussion, irrespective of differences between the authors.

(4) Group debates (35%): Students will be subdivided into groups for sessions 8-11 to debate specific questions in a moderated format. Details will be discussed in the course.

Evaluation

Examen : coeff. 100

Ressources

Bibliography

PART I: STARTING POINTS|| 1 Introduction (10/01)|| No readings.|| , || 2 The pledge: The elusive ubiquity of the state and sovereignty (17/01)|| Kissinger, Henry. Diplomacy. New York: Simon and Schuster, chapter 4 (“The Concert of Europe: Great Britain, Austria, and Russia”), pp. 78-102.|| Skocpol, Theda, and Kenneth Finegold. 1982. “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal.” Political Science Quarterly 97(2): 255-278.|| Gupta, Akhil. 1995. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State.” American Ethnologist 22 (2): 375-402.|| McConnell, Fiona. 2009. “De Facto, Displaced, Tacit: The Sovereign Articulations of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile.” Political Geography 28(6): 343-352.|||| PART II: HISTORIES OF THE STATE AND SOVEREIGNTY|| || 3 Origins? Violence, majesty, and myth (20/01)|| Bourdieu, Pierre. 1994. “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field.” Sociological Theory 12(1), 1-18.|| Scott, James. 2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press, introduction, 1-35.|| Clastres, Pierre. 1989 [1974]. Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, New Jersey: Princeton University Press (chapter 11: “Society against the State”), 189-218.|| Costa Lopez, Julia. 2020. “Political Authority in International Relations: Revisiting the Medieval Debate” International Organization, 74(2), 222-252.|||| 4 From authority to bureaucratization and (self-)discipline (27/01)|| Bloch, Marc. 1973 [1924]. Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France. London: Routledge, introduction, 1-8.|| Hobbes, Thomas. 1968 [1651]. Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. Harmondsworth: Penguin, chapter XVII (“Of the Causes, Generation, and Definition of a Commonwealth”), 111-115.|| Scott, James. 1998. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, chapter 2 (“Cities, People, Language”), 53-83.|| Hull, Matthew S. 2008. “Ruled by Records: The Expropriation of Land and the Misappropriation of Lists in Islamabad.” American Ethnologist 35(4): 501-518.|| Wedeen, Lisa. 1998. “Acting ‘as if’: Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40(3), 503-523.|||| 5 Sovereign foundations? Pouvoir constituant, revolutions, and states of exception (03/02)|| Arendt, Hanna. 1963. On Revolution. London: Penguin, chapter 2 (“The Meaning of Revolution”), 21-58.|| Schmitt, Carl. 2005 [1922]. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago: Chicago University Press, chapter 1 (“The Definition of Sovereignty”), 5-15, and 4 (“On the Counterrevolutionary Philosophy of the State: de Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortés”), 53-66.|| Trotsky, Leon. 1937. Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, and co., chapter 5 (“The Soviet Thermidor”), 86-114.|| Humphreys, Stephen. 2006. “Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception.” European Journal of International Law 17(3): 677-687.|||| PART III: THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE WORLD|| 6 Empire, colonies, and the state form (10/02)|| Benton, Lauren. 2009. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, chapter 1 (“Anomalies of empire”), 1-39.|| Adelman, Jeremy. 2008. “An Age of Imperial Revolutions.” The American Historical Review 113(2), 319-340.|| Armitage, David. 2004. “The Declaration of Independence in World Context.” OAH Magazine of