The history of international law, understood as an object of intersubjective reality, reflected various territorial structures of human society. States, as bearers of international law, were made in course of history by wars that they led with each other. On the basis of thought of Carl Schmitt we can distinguish two historical structures of territory: the universal medieval empire and the modern sovereign states. Both of these structures were connected with distinct systems of international law and with distinct concepts of war. Since the turn of 19th and 20th century we can observe signs of decline of the Westphalian system of sovereign states. This process, accompanied by changes in concept of war, began to be fully expressed at the beginning of the 21st century in connection with so called war on terror. On the juridical concepts of war on terror and humanitarian intervention I show decline of the Westphalian system of sovereign states and possible return to the international structure of the medieval empire.

Aim of this paper is to explain used forced feeding of hunger strikers at the U.S. Prison at Guantanamo, when this technique is prohibited in international law. I used the sociology of Michel Foucault, who devoted himself to the topic of imprisonment. His work is often used in the interpretation of what is happening at Guantanamo. With the help of these interpretations were generated two hypotheses. I tested compiled hypotheses in study of literature including news articles, research papers, reports of human rights organizations, legislation, interviews with former camp detainees or camp staff etc. We conclude that the prisoners at Guantanamo are not fed to be kept alive, but rather to be punished for a hunger strike protest. The conclusions highlight a new form of relationship between state and its citizens, which calls for more comprehensive analysis of current form of government, which we are not able to cover in this work.

Seen as a valuable shortcut from Europe to Asia, the Northwest Passage could become an important shipping route, and Canada wants to be able to control it. However, the current Conservative Party government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper has led an aggressive, complex neorealist approach to securing sovereignty over the Passage consisting of loud diplomacy, military drills, and rejection of multilateral cooperation in the region. But this strategy that perceives Canada as a principle power is not sustainable. The government must accept that Canada simply cannot afford to unilaterally control and develop the Northwest Passage, and a liberal internationalist approach is what is needed. Rather than continuing to fight for international acknowledgment that the Passage is a domestic strait, Canada needs to recognize that the strait can be managed and developed much more effectively if it oversaw a multilateral development effort through the International Maritime Organization. This thesis will consist of five chapters: 1. The history of Canada and the Northwest Passage, 2. The benefits of a more accessible Arctic, 3. Challenges to developing a more open Arctic, 4. Three theoretical perspectives of Canadian foreign policy, 5. Returning to multilateralism: and effective Northwest Passage policy. Powered by...

In the Spanish region of Catalonia, the overriding political issue during more than adecade has been the conflict concerning the region’s aspirations for independence. Inpolitical science research, the withdrawal of a region from a state is called secession.This phenomenon highlights the conflict between peoples’ and nations right to selfdeterminationand the right of states to protect their borders and defend the nationalunity. This case study focuses on the supporters of Catalan independence and the aimof the study is to better understand the Catalan independence movement’s view on theconflict between self-determination and state sovereignty. The study investigates whyCatalonia has the right to become an independent state according to the independentmovement, what alternative ways Catalonia has toward independence and whatstrategies the independence movement makes use of. The study uses both textanalysis and qualitative interviews to respond the questions. The study shows thatthere are two main alternatives for the independence movement. One is a referendumaccepted by the Spanish state as a result of dialogue and negotiation, the other wayis to reach independence through a unilateral declaration of independence and the useof civil disobedience.

The analysis of the principle of the complementarity formula set out in the Rome Statute is at the heart of this dissertation. The research aims to critically reflect on the complementarity regime under the Rome Statute in relation to international crimes committed in the DRC since the incorporation of the Rome Statute into the Congolese legal system. This research argues that the implementation of the principle of complementarity poses difficulties of application, implementation, and interpretation and thus remains a less effective means of putting an end to international crimes. The findings of this research indicate an urgent need for the principle of complementarity being rethought by clarifying its content and scope. Victims of international crimes cannot to date rely on its implementation to obtain justice. This research adopts an essentially conceptual approach; moreover, the methodological approach adopted is that of qualitative research. This research calls for the principle of complementarity being rethought by clarifying its content and scope.

The relation between the Catalan nationalist forces as well as the other sub-nationalisms and the Spanish Government has been a matter discussed throughout all the Spanish democracy. In recent years the challenge to the Spanish state set by the Catalan government when taking a unilateral approach on Independence has resulted in the imprisonment and exile of political leaders. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the events that occurred in Catalonia after the Catalan elections of 2015 and the unilateral approach on self-determination taken by the Catalan Autonomous Government with the promise of a binding referendum. The laws passed by the Catalan government which were rejected by the Constitutional Court, as the law itself denied the authority of the Constitutional Court and declared independence. This resulted in the application of the 155th article of the Spanish Constitution, suspending autonomous government, to enforce the Constitutional Court’s resolutions by the Spanish government. The essay will focus on the discourses given by politicians to criticize or justify these actions, analysed through theoretical and political normative perspectives.

The juridical reforms proposed by the Polish government have brought the attention of European institutions. The conflict concerns the matter of sovereignty, as the reforms conducts changes on domestic level. The paper discusses how national identity of states can shape the understanding of sovereignty. The paper aims to understand how sovereignty can be used as a political tool in relation between Poland and the European Union. The research question asks, “How Polish national identity constitutes the EU as a threat to sovereignty?”. To answer this question, the thesis applies poststructuralist’s concepts to the narrative analysis on speeches of the Polish President Andrzej Duda. The results of the thesis indicate that sovereignty can be understood subjectively, thus can be used as a political tool that can legitimise and justify policies as well as construct relations with others.

This thesis is concerned with the Canadian state’s rhetoric of reconciliation, the logic of exceptionality that supports it, and the ways this logic helps soften Indigenous communities for resource development. In formulating my theoretical framework, I draw from Agamben’s theories of sovereignty and states of exception, Mark Rifkin’s reworking of Agamben’s theories to accommodate a settler-colonial context, Pauline Wakeham’s application of the logic of exceptionality to rhetorics of apology and terrorism, and Glen Coulthard’s concepts of translation (as the attempt to bring Indigenous discourses and life ways into the realm of a Western/settler-colonial discourse of state sovereignty) and grounded normativity (as a way of making visible the contingency of such narratives of state sovereignty). Following the work of James Tully and John Borrows in Resurgence and Reconciliation, particularly the argument that transformative reconciliation must involve reconciliation with the living earth, my project aims to show that official reconciliation actually prevents the possibility of transformative reconciliation because of the role it plays in furthering an extractivist agenda by “exceptionalizing" Indigenous peoples and life-ways to rhetorically contain Indigenous anti-colonial or anti-industry actions, physically contain Indigenous dissenters during moments of crisis (i.e. states of exception), pre-emptively frame Indigenous dissenters as terroristic, and foreclose discussions of ongoing colonialism. / Graduate

As knowledge about the constellating set of environmental and social crises stemming from the neoliberal global food regime becomes more pressing and popularized among US consumers, it has brought Indigenous actors asserting their political sovereignty and treaty rights with regards to their homelands into new collaborations, contestations, and negotiations with settlers in emerging food politics domains. In this dissertation, I examine solidarities and affinities being forged between Coast Salish and settler food actors in Puget Sound, attending specifically to how contested sovereignties are submerged but at play in these relations and how settler desires for belonging on and to stolen Indigenous lands animate liberal and radical food system politics. The dissertation presents my ethnographic fieldwork in South Puget Sound over a period of 18 months with two related Coast Salish food sovereignty projects that brought Indigenous and settler food actors into weedy collaborations. One was a curriculum development project for Native and regional youth focused on the revitalization of Coast Salish plant landscapes, knowledge, pedagogies, and systems of reciprocity. The other was a campaign to counter the introduction of genetically engineered salmon into US food markets and coastal production facilities across the Western Hemisphere, which I situate within longstanding salmon-centered social and political struggles in Coast Salish territories in the context of Indigenous/settler-state relations. Throughout these engagements, I identified how multicultural, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist food movement frameworks share in common with neoliberal nature privatization schemes modes of disavowing the geopolitics of Indigenous sovereignty within the US settler state. The research reveals patterns in how Coast Salish food actors push back against the ways settler food actors are plugged into settler colonial governmentality. These insights, in turn, helped to make legible how inherited liberal mythologies of the nation-state and legal orders rooted in the doctrine of terra nulliuslimit the stakes of food system work in terms of inclusion and equality, and miss their collusion with structures that unmake the human-land relationships that Coast Salish people define as existential and (geo)political. In my analysis, I engage Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism to complicate Marxian, Deleuzian, and Foucauldian analyses of North American alternative food politics, while doubling back to consider the ways the disavowal of ongoing Indigenous dispossession functions across these literatures and the social practices they influence, ultimately to consider how food-centered scholarship, environmentalism, and politics in North America stand to be transformed by what I argue is a Coast Salish ‘politics of refusal’. This project is unique in attending to how settler colonial theory, Indigenous critical theory, and Indigenous politics in North America enrich and complicate the literatures provincializing the Nature-Culture divide, as well as a largely Marxian and antiracist critical food studies literature. It contributes to settler colonial studies as a project of redefinition for the study of US politics and society while specifically bringing that interdisciplinary project into the ambit of North American critical food studies scholarship.

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