Describes development of European and English theory and practice of kingship, sovereignty, and clemency from early Christian period through 1788. Focuses on tension between claims of royal prerogative including pardon power and development of constitutional monarchy governed by rule-of-law principles.

This chapter explores post-conflict diplomacy in the Iraq War by introducing the idea of “inter-conflict diplomacy,” or how the United States interacted and negotiated with different Iraqi power brokers while building an Iraqi state from the ground up and participating in ongoing military conflict. In contrast to claims that the United States “imposed” democracy there, it argues that US concerns over Iraqi sovereignty, as well as Iraqis’ assertions of their national sovereignty, limited the United States’ ability to reshape Iraqi politics and society. It provides case studies on the making of the Iraqi Constitution from 2003 to 2005 and the negotiations over the continued US role in Iraq after 2008 to illustrate this argument. Finally, it examines how the concept of “intra-conflict diplomacy” might usefully illuminate other US interventions where the boundaries of war, peace, sovereignty, and legitimate authority are disputed and fluid.

This chapter describes the “global health system” as the organized social response to cross-border health risks. The global health system is comprised of actors whose primary intent is to improve health, along with the rules and norms governing their interactions. The system should perform four essential functions: producing global public goods, managing externalities, mobilizing solidarity and providing stewardship. However, the ability of the system to do so is impeded by three types of governance challenges – the sovereignty, sectoral and accountability challenges. This chapter calls for stronger global health governance.

This chapter considers the anarchist critique of nineteenth century constitutionalism, the first step in our reconstruction of anarchist constitutional theory. Rejecting the view that anarchism is simply a new form of radical democracy, or via media between liberalism and Marxist-Leninism, we show that nineteenth-century anarchists pressed the republican critique of domination against constitutionalism, honed a critique of social contract theory to reject sovereign law as an instrument for rulemaking and challenged the idea that constitutent power power was or is a check on arbitrary power. The first part of the chapter sets out an anarchist account of constitutionalism’s statist bias. The second examines the arguments about slavery and enslavement. In the third and fourth parts, we consider how these critiques informed anarchist conceptions of sovereign law and constituent power, the lynchpins of the ‘political’ constitution. In the final part, we show how anarchist anticonstitutionalism seeded and promoted the constitutional dissolution of power in the social constitution - the anarchist alternative.

This chapter introduces the main approach developed in International Leviathans through (1) a sociological understanding of sovereignty and (2) the concept of international administration. First, the chapter presents a new take of the debate between Kelsen and Schmitt around sovereignty and presents the sociological understanding of sovereignty by unpacking sovereignty practices. It makes the case for analysing the socio-political or socio-legal struggles happening between competing claims of political authority and accountability. It then discusses and theorises the concept of ‘international administration’, pointing out the limitations of two strands of the literature: the functionalist approach, defining international administrations through the functions they ought to perform as underlined in their mandate, and the normative approach, focusing on self-proclaimed goals and objectives. I posit that sovereignty practices deployed by international officials are social practices which cannot be understood solely through mandates or stated goals – they need to be understood through the reality on the ground, created by claims of political authority deployed by actors and the concomitant claims of accountability these practices elicit.

This chapter presents the central claim of the book, arguing that sovereignty practices emerge at the confluence of struggles – on the one hand, by actors asserting the political authority over a specific territory and, on the other hand, through resistance to this move by actors pursuing accountability and the responsibilisation of sovereign actors. I claim that practices of political authority – expressed through effective rule over territory – are central, constitutive acts of world politics, entailing specific obligations. Broadening the study of sovereignty practices beyond state relations, I argue that understanding how specific actors such as international organisations act as sovereign actors opens up new perspectives on international accountability and obligations in world politics.

British colonisation of what were belatedly acknowledged as Aboriginal lands, as part of the European colonisation of the continent, began in January 1788.

The establishment of a penal colony at Port Jackson (Gadigal Land), oblivious to the hundreds of Indigenous nations inhabiting the continent, was to be the start of the British process of reshaping the continent in their own image.

The British (gradually, but with devastating force) imposed significant demographic, social, legal, cultural and spiritual changes upon all the inhabitants of the continent. This chapter focuses largely on how British law carried by those first Englishmen, which later evolved to become the dominant Anglo-Australian law, has had its inevitable effect on Indigenous traditions, largely detrimental, in almost every sphere of life and human endeavour

Chapter 5 explores the Global South’s role in shaping international law during the Cold War, challenging the dominant North Atlantic narrative. It highlights the Third World’s active engagement in creating and contesting international law through three case studies: Algeria’s war for independence, the Anglo–Iranian Oil case, and the establishment of a UN Commission on Transnational Corporations. Algeria used the Geneva Conventions to internationalise its struggle against France, redefining anti-colonial warfare as a legitimate fight for self-determination. The Anglo-Iranian Oil case at the ICJ underscored the contestation over international judicial authority, with Iran asserting its sovereignty against the UK. The UN Commission on Transnational Corporations illustrated the Third World’s alliance with the Soviet Union to challenge corporate power. These examples reveal the Cold War as a period of legal experimentation and contestation, with the Third World playing a crucial role in shaping international law and challenging retrospective assumptions about the era.

Chapter 7 explores how the proliferation of intelligence agencies during the Cold War brought into prominence the practice of international espionage, surveillance and covert intervention. As the 1960 U-2 incident exemplifies such practices were often the subject of significant contestation as to their legality in time of peace. Whilst the practice of surveillance was encouraged by an expanded concept of ‘national security’ it was often accompanied by a paradoxical commitment to secrecy. As secrecy intensified, public awareness of covert activities grew, and alongside it, accompanying practices of plausible deniability and ideological disavowal that undermined trust not just in public knowledge but in the possibility of legal judgment. We recount how contestation over the legality of espionage led, not only to a blurring of the categories of peace and war, but to the formation of a new legal framework for outer space that provided legal cover for ongoing surveillance to be undertaken by the rival Cold War powers. These developments profoundly impacted international law, sovereignty concepts, and global surveillance practices, shaping modern notions of global policing through surveillance and leaving a complex legacy in international relations.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has aspired to remain a major power in international relations. Until the mid-2000s, the country’s leaders sought to revive its great power status in partnership with Western nations. Since the mid-2000s, Russia has moved in the direction of challenging Western global priorities by stressing values of national sovereignty and patriotism. More recently, Russia has sought to establish areas of mutual noninterference in relations with the West. In 2022, this approach resulted in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the escalation of tensions and confrontation with the United States and NATO. Outside the West, Moscow has aspired to take advantage of global economic and geopolitical opportunities. The chapter reviews the main developments in Russian foreign policy since 1991, giving an overview of the country’s relations with Western and non-Western countries.

An overview of the topics addressed in fourteen original chapters investigating Leviathan’s relation to others of Hobbes’s works and its distinctive treatments of governance, law, liberty, motivation, and religion.

All The Seas Were Ink tells its story from the perspective of Abu Bakar of Johor at sea. Johor provides a sweeping view of Asia, from Asia: comparative political thought in practice, and in motion. We observe the evolving international order as it was made sense of, and renegotiated: in ships, ports, court rooms, world exhibitions, marriages. We revisit the history of Islamic constitutionalism, the modern Muslim state, and its entanglements in the international, through encounters, from Johor to Constantinople, Tokyo, Hawaii, London, Chicago. We do this in order to: draw the Malay world into conversation with scholarship on global Islam, its interconnections and exchanges, its expansion and limits; place the making of Islamic law in the entanglements of an evolving international sphere, and the international into its imperial hierarchies; and to approach law’s mobility as a puzzle, rather than an assumption. An early example of a modern Muslim constitution, the Johor Constitution was experimental and many-voiced, elaborating tensions among ideas of rule as dynastic, monarchical, Islamic, and representative. Islamic constitutionalism thus emerges as a global genre of law in motion.