Book review: After Sovereignty: On the Question of Political Beginnings
| Author | Helen Carr |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466391102000401 |
| Date | 01 December 2011 |
| Published date | 01 December 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
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objective of the law must surely be to ensure that culture can be better and more equitably
shared in and co-created, as opposed to preserved in the practices of the privileged/
empowered. In recognizing and reifying culture, courts must be cognizant of plurality
(i.e. the need for different cultures to live interactively), identity complexity (i.e. multiple
roles being held by single actors), and changing socio-economic and environmental cir-
cumstances (i.e. which may make some culturally-based or group practices untenable).
These propositions are essential to justice as we understand it in the West (i.e. to
achieving the equal protection of the law, with which several of the chapters engaged),
but all jurisdictions (and legal institutions) which claim to be civilized must accept them
to some degree. But that may just be my own cultural mores speaking.
SHAWN H.E. HARMON
University of Edinburgh, UK
CHARLES BARBOUR AND GEORGE PAVLICH (eds), After Sovereignty: On the Question
of Political Beginnings. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, 192 pp., ISBN 9780415490412, £80
(hbk), ISBN 9780415685320, £24.95 (pbk).
The starting point for this carefully crafted and theoretically rich collection of papers is the
crisis provoked by the ‘ungluing’ of the association between sovereignty and the state as a
consequence of multiple and contested developments, including global capitalism, the ‘war
on terror’, the cross-border struggles of migrants and refugees, and the re-emergence of reli-
gion as a form of political identification which transcends national boundaries. The potential
of ‘after sovereignty’ as a theme is captured by McVeigh and Pahuja who explain it as both
quest and loss: ‘As quest, sovereignty is engaged as a promise, a promise of sovereignty to
come; as loss, the narrative is of a time of sovereignty that has passed whether mourned or
disputed’ (p. 97). Humphreys expands upon the challenge and complexity of sovereignty:
We struggle to locate it, capture it, know it, have it – but finally we never do. It precedes and
escapes us, not only as the basis of a political order into which we emerge, but also as the
condition of our own capacity to make or alter that political order. In this sense, we are
always after sovereignty. (p. 146)
Pavlich and Barbour’s editorial aim is to provide resources for this intellectual struggle,
‘for the urgent, if necessarily complex and diffuse, effort to rethink the idea of sovereignty
in the fracturing political terrains of our world’ (p. 1). To a large extent the aim is
achieved, although I have some concerns about the accessibility of the collection to those
who may not be so...
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