Explore the vast range of titles available.

State sovereignty is the foundation of international relations. This thought-provoking book explores the gap between seeing sovereignty as either absolute or relative. It argues that state sovereignty is both factual and judicial and that the 'loss' of sovereignty exists only at the margins of the international society. With many interesting real-world examples of ambiguous sovereignty examined, this is an important argument against those who are quick to claim that 'sovereignty' is under assault.

The article presents a critical assessment of the widespread conceptualization of the June 1967 War between Israel and its neighboring Arab states as a pre-emptive war both in academic and non-academic writing. Tracing the origins of the notion of pre-emptive war to international law, the article identifies three necessary conditions for such a war to be classified as pre-emptive: acute crisis combined with high alert levels; vulnerable offensive weapons; and strategic parity as regards to offensive capabilities. On the basis of a re-interpretation of the evidence produced by previous research, this article argues that the circumstances surrounding the Six Day War did not fulfill some of these necessary conditions. This conclusion also is supported by evidence related to the Israeli decision to launch a first strike.

Relative social and economic well-being in the aftermath of a state's collapse is usually explained on the basis of a single case, Somalia, and with reference to the impact of endogenous factors such as the repressive and predatory nature of the state which collapsed and the ability of civil society actors and institutions to fulfil those functions that are normally performed by a state. This article challenges this theoretical view. As can be seen from a study of Lebanon, relative well-being after state collapse is more common than it appears to be at first glance. Moreover, given the limited role that the Lebanese state played in the economic and political spheres before the breakdown of state authority in 1975, the repressive and predatory nature of the collapsed state cannot be the explanatory variable in this case. Exogenous factors, such as remittances from abroad, international loans bestowed upon residual state institutions and 'political money' from foreign powers, are the decisive factors generating such paradoxical developments. Study of Somalia and Lebanon also shows the limitations of the conceptualisations of state collapse prevalent in the literature.

The article rejects the notion conveyed by the expression 'the Cedar Revolution' that Lebanon has recently experienced radical political changes. On the basis of an empirical survey of recent developments, it identifies four elements of continuity; the confessional nature of Lebanese politics, the omnipresence of trans-national alliances, the confrontational nature of the political rhetoric and the continuation of foreign interventions in Lebanon's internal affairs. Making use of opinion surveys, it argues that some of these elements indicate the existence of an independence-integration cleavage in Lebanon which follows sectarian lines and which renders the conceptualization of Lebanese citizens as a collective actor able to exercise collective self-determination-either by gaining complete independence or establishing close ties with Syria-problematic. Finally, it argues at a theoretical level that the problem of collective agent and the ensuing problem of collective self-determination can potentially emerge in any polity where there is an independence-integration cleavage.

The article is a critical assessment of three explanations in relation to the question of which types of entities actually enjoy sovereign rights. Concluding that two of these—constitutional independence and legal criteria of statehood—are empirically untenable, it then focuses on a third, more plausible, answer: recognition as a state. Pointing out the almost consensual attitude toward the issue adopted by political scientists and finding the two doctrines of recognition formulated by international lawyers to be imbued with logical inconsistencies, the article concludes by remarking on the impossibility of discovering any clear pattern of state behaviour in this respect.

Andrew Arsan's \"Lebanon--a country in fragments\" is reviewed.

In the contemporary academic writing on sovereignty, the general tendency is one of skepticism. Many scholars argue that sovereignty of states is on the decline because of porous territorial borders and permeable decision-making mechanisms. Others target the concept as such, claiming that it lacks analytical utility and normative justification, while yet a third group reduces its meaning and utility to its presumed functions in disciplinary discourses and discursive practices. The main argument of this book is that these skeptical positions are based on confused, incoherent, or simplistic notions of sovereignty and that they are therefore untenable. Once we expose state sovereignty to conceptual explication and understand it correctly we cannot escape the conclusion that it denotes an all-pervading and important feature of world politics. It refers to a legal and actual status enjoyed by many but not all political entities and it designates an omnipresent empirical phenomenon, the complexities and the workings of which are intelligible to the human mind. In those few cases where we cannot give a clear-cut answer to the question about the sovereignty of a given entity, it is nevertheless possible to explain why this is the case and in which sense the entity in question is idiosyncratic. In order to substantiate these claims, this study will focus on those political entities that constitute the nexus of the concept, the phenomenon, and the ramifications of state sovereignty.

The point of departure for the analysis conducted in the preceding chapters was a set of empirical questions about the sovereignty of states and similar territorial entities. These were later compressed into three broad questions about state sovereignty: What is state sovereignty that is what does sovereignty as a descriptive concept refer to at the level of states and similar entities?Which kind of political entities are sovereign as a matter of fact and law?What types of difficulties are encountered when determining the sovereignty of such entities?

Any empirical or legal analysis of state sovereignty must begin by shifting the focus of attention from the concept of sovereignty to the referent that this concept, however vaguely, denotes, and moreover, from epistemological arguments that question the validity of the basic assumptions of empirical science to the stringent application of methodological principles that derive from these assumptions. On the basis of criteria formulated with reference to these two dimensions, that is, the object of study and basic methodological principles of empirical research, it will be possible to broadly identify those meanings of sovereignty that have relevance to empirical and legal studies, and finally, to demarcate the domain within this set of meanings that constitutes the object of study of this book: the concept, the phenomenon, and the ramifications of state sovereignty.