Delegating sovereignty to international organizations (IOs) is both increasingly common and controversial. I address the sources of current controversies in three claims. First, although alleged otherwise, sovereignty is eminently divisible. From practice, indivisibility should not be a barrier to delegating to IOs. Second, it is intuitive that longer chains of delegation will be more likely to...

International investment law can be criticized for its understanding of sovereignty. Informed by the works of Koskenniemi, this article re-imagines ‘sovereignty’ based on a host state population exercising its right to economic self-determination. Recent transparency initiatives in international investment law support this conceptualization of sovereignty. Further, the stance taken aligns with ...

Data sovereignty, a catch-all term to describe different state behaviours towards data generated in or passing through national internet infrastructure, has become a topic of significant international debate in the wake of the Snowden revelations. A spectrum of approaches has emerged, with the United States and its allies viewing data ‘localisation’ as a threat to a free and open global interne...

Economic and political globalisation are inevitably accompanied by a kind of ideological globalisation, a transnational ideology which legitimises them. In other words, an ideology to justify, on the one hand, the minimisation of the state’s role in the economy —which, in a market economy system implies a corresponding maximisation of the role of the market and private capital— and, on the othe...

The links among environmental change, notions of security, and social conflicts in the Brazilian Amazon are multiple and complex. Successive Brazilian governments and the Brazilian military have found a distinct relationship between environmental matters and security issues through a focus on state sovereignty. This relationship is often articulated in terms of defending national sovereignty in...

This discussion paper explores conceptualisations of food security produced by the World Trade Organisation and the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations and examines a responsive policy framework food sovereignty – championed by the farming and peasant movement Via Campesina. Conflict over the use and appropriation of plant genetic resources is examined to highlight tensions...

In this paper we define the problem and scope of data sovereignty – the coupling of stored data authenticity and geographical location in the cloud. Establishing sovereignty is an especially important concern amid legal and policy constraints when data and resources are virtualized and widely distributed. We identify the key challenges that need to be solved to achieve an effective and un-cheat...

Why do groups want to secede and where are we most likely to see demands for self-determination? We propose an economic explanation whereby a tradeoff between income and sovereignty implies that, other things being equal, richer regions are more likely to want more autonomy and conflict arises due to a disparity between desired and actual levels of sovereignty. We provide simple empirical tests...

Food sovereignty has been defined as "the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems." Human health is an implied component of this definition through the principle of healthy food. In fact, improved human health is commonly cited as a benefit of transfo...

The choice to give up sovereignty to another state helps explain the development of international hierarchy, while resistance often results in conflict as states instead use coercion to assert their control. This paper develops an explanation of why actors support giving up sovereignty to another state. The argument uses domestic politics to explain hierarchy, expanding beyond the existing lite...