Problematic Sovereignty

Some of the most pressing issues in the contemporary international order revolve around a frequently invoked but highly contested concept: sovereignty. To what extent does the concept of sovereignty -- as it plays out in institutional arrangements, rules, and principles -- inhibit the solution of these issues? Can the rules of sovereignty be bent? Can they be ignored? Do they represent an insurmountable barrier to stable solutions or can alternative arrangements be created? Problematic Sovereignty attempts to answer these and other fundamental questions by taking account of the multiple, sometimes contradictory, components of the concept of sovereignty in cases ranging from the struggle for sovereignty between China and Taiwan to the compromised sovereignty of Bosnia under the Dayton Accord. Countering the common view of sovereignty that treats it as one coherent set of principles, the chapters of Problematic Sovereignty illustrate cases where the disaggregation of sovereignty has enabled political actors to create entities that are semiautonomous, semi-independent, and/or semilegal in order to solve specific problems stemming from competing claims to authority.

Coit D. Blacker is deputy director and senior fellow at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies. During the first Clinton administration, he served as special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs and senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council. John Boli is professor of sociology at Emory University. A native Californian and graduate of Stanford University, he has published extensively on the topics of world culture and global organizations, education, citizenship, and state power and authority in the world policy. His books include The Globalization Reader, Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations Since 1875, and Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual. His current projects include a book on the origins, structuration, and consequences of world culture since 1850, and a longitudinal study of the impact of world-cultural trends on transnational corporations. Thomas C. Heller is the Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies at Stanford University Law School and senior fellow at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies. He currently writes about and teaches international and comparative economic law, legal theory, and law and political economic development. His principal preoccupation for the past seven years has been the evolution of international environmental regimes, both as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and as a lawyer trying to design mechanisms to encourage the building of cleaner energy systems in the restructuring of the energy sectors of China and India. Stephen D. Krasner is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and a senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He has written about American foreign policy, international regimes, and relations between industrialized and developing countries. His recent publications include Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy and Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics (co-editor). Robert A. Madsen is a fellow at Stanford University's Asia/Pacific Research Center. He also works as an analyst and author for the Economist Intelligence Unit and is the Asia Strategist for Soros Real Estate Partners, a private-equity fund that invests in corporate restructuring around the globe. Madsen writes frequently on the politics and economics of China, Taiwan, and Japan. Michael McFaul is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. He is also a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Peter and Helen Bing Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of several monographs on postcommunist politics and economics. His latest book, Russia's Troubled Transition from Communism to Democracy: Institutional Change during Revolutionary Transformations, will be published in the summer of 2001. Michel Oksenberg is a senior fellow at the Asia/Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. He has taught Chinese politics and Chinese foreign policy at Stanford, Columbia University, and the University of Michigan. He served on the National Security Council staff during the Carter administration and as president of the East West Center in Honolulu. His most recent publications include China Joins the World with Elizabeth Economy, China's Uncertain Future with Michael Swaine, and "China A Tortuous Path onto the World's Stage" in The Major Powers, edited by Robert Pastor. Condoleezza Rice is a Hoover Senior Fellow and professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She completed a six-year tenure as Stanford's Provost in June 1999. Her teaching and research interests include the politics of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, the comparative study of military institutions, and international security policy. Her publications include Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (1995) with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin, and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984). She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. James McCall Smith is assistant professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He received his doctorate from Stanford University and worked as a Luce Scholar in Hong Kong, China, during 1996-97. Shibley Telhami holds the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Abraham D. Sofaer is the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and professor of law (by courtesy) at Stanford University Law School. He was a United States district judge in the Southern District of New York from 1979 to 1985, and the legal adviser at the U.S. Department of State from 1985 to 1990. He has written extensively in the areas of international law and national security. Susan L. Woodward is senior research fellow at the Centre for Defence Studies, King's College, London. She was previously senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and professor of political science at Yale University, Williams College, and Northwestern University, among others. She is the author of Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990 (1995) and Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (1995).