Rethinking Sovereignty in an Era of Resurgent Nationalism and Populism

DOI10.1177/0090591719900223
Date01 June 2020
Published date01 June 2020
AuthorJonathan Havercroft
Subject MatterReview Essays
Political Theory
2020, Vol. 48(3) 378 –389
© The Author(s) 2020
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Review Essay
Rethinking Sovereignty
in an Era of Resurgent
Nationalism and
Populism
Sovereignty as Symbolic Form, by Jens Bartelson. London and New York: Routledge,
2014, 134 pp.
On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions, by Joan Cocks. London: Bloomsbury,
2014, 200 pp.
Popular Sovereignty in the West: Polities, Contention, and Ideas, by Geneviève Nootens.
London and New York: Routledge, 2013, 160 pp.
Sovereignty and Its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence, by Dimitris
Vardoulakis. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, 272 pp.
Reviewed by: Jonathan Havercroft, Politics and International Relations, University of
Southampton, Southampton, UK
DOI: 10.1177/0090591719900223
Interest in the concept of sovereignty seems to come in waves.1 There was a
focus on sovereignty in the early twentieth century between political scien-
tists who wanted the discipline to become the science of the state and their
pluralist rivals who felt that the state was a needlessly metaphysical con-
struct.2 A second wave that occurred in the interwar wars focused on ques-
tions of national self-determination in Europe. A third wave of interest in
sovereignty peaked in the 1960s and developed in the context of global
decolonization struggles. A fourth and ongoing wave of research in sover-
eignty began in the 1990s. The initial impetus for this latest focus on sover-
eignty was the end of the Cold War, and the rise of interest in globalization,
and with it claims that the sovereign state was fading away into a networked
form of transnational governance. When the Global War on Terror began in
2001, the academic study of sovereignty shifted to a focus on “states of
exception” and decisionism in light of the counter-terror policies of the Bush
administration. While it is too soon for scholarship to incorporate the twin
electoral shocks of the Brexit election in the United Kingdom and the victory
of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, both of these cam-
paigns were clearly framed as right-wing populist movements reclaiming
900223PTXXXX10.1177/0090591719900223Political TheoryBook Review
book-review2020

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