On the Temptations of Sovereignty: The Task of Catholic Social Teaching and the Challenge of UK Asylum Seeking

Abstract

This article offers an analysis of the main tenets of Catholic social teaching as they relate to the politics of asylum in a UK context. Addressing the multilayered and complex crisis of confidence and asylum seekers with regard the moral performance of the UK system, this article proposes that the significance of CST's contribution to public discourse has been heightened by three key shifts in state practice. While the constructive contours of this teaching are explored, to be of service to forced migrants CST itself requires a deeper understanding of and engagement with the political cultures that shape practices of democratic exclusion. To this end the conclusion proposes two areas for further dialogue between CST and asylum experience.     

Sovereignty: The Algerian Case

Books reviewed:
Matthew Connelly. A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 400 pp. Bibliography, Index. $55.00 (cloth), $26.00 (paper).     

The Idea of Indigenous Knowledge

The idea of ‘indigenous knowledge’ is a relatively recent phenomenon that, amongst other things, constitutes part of a challenge to ‘western’ thinking and conceptualization. Advocates of indigenous knowledge maintain that its study has profound educational and ethical relevance and also emphasise its significance in antiracist, antisexist and postcolonialist discourse, in general, and in terms of the ‘African Renaissance’, in particular. This paper argues the following: (1) ‘indigenous knowledge’ involves at best an incomplete, partial or, at worst, a questionable understanding or conception of knowledge; (2) as a tool in anti-discrimination and anti-repression discourse, ‘indigenous knowledge’ is largely inappropriate. I show, further, that in the development of ‘knowledge’, following some necessary conceptual readjustments in our understanding of this term, there is considerably greater common ground than admitted by theorists. It is this acknowledgement, not adherence to a popular concept of debatable plausibility that has profound educational, ethical and political consequences.     

The Challenge to the State in a Globalized World

Individual instances of state failure and collapse must be placed within a broader appreciation of the evolution of statehood within the international system. The idea that the inhabited area of the globe must be divided between sovereign states is a recent development, and likely to prove a transient one. Largely the product of European colonialism, and turned into a global norm by decolonization, it is threatened both by the inherent difficulties of state maintenance, and by processes inherent in globalization. States are expensive organizations to maintain, not only in economic terms but also in the demands that they make on their citizens and their own employees. Poor and dispersed peoples, and those whose values derive from societies without states, have found these demands especially burdensome. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union revealed the hollowness of existing models of sovereign states, and challenged the triple narratives on which the project of global statehood has depended: the narratives of security, representation, and wealth and welfare. While individual cases of state failure and collapse may owe much to specific circumstances and the behaviour of particular individuals, they must also be understood within the context of a world in which maintaining states has become increasingly difficult.     

坚守还是让渡——二战后英国人主权观述论

英国人对主权让渡的认识经历了较为复杂的过程:从欧洲一体化初期不愿让渡主权,到加入欧共体时出现"无关主权"、"共享主权"和"威胁主权"三种认知,之后逐渐形成主流共识:一方面,让渡部分主权、融入欧洲一体化有利于增进英国国家利益;但另一方面,无论"亲欧派"还是"疑欧派"都坚持英国的核心主权不可让渡的原则,并且不认同欧洲联邦是欧洲一体化的终结目标。英国政府采取务实主义的态度,既通过"非政治化"努力避免主权让渡成为与欧共体/欧盟合作的障碍,又坚守英国的法理主权地位,部分主权的让渡与否取决于对本国利益的权衡和国内政治的需要。英国人对主权让渡的"保守"态度是他们认知主权的一种"英国方式",但它并没有改变英国人的上述主流共识。     

The Iranian Nuclear Challenge

In December 2003 Iran signed an Additional Protocol to its Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Authority. The signing followed 18 months of mounting international pressure on Iran to prove its benign motives following revelations about past failures to declare work on uranium enrichment and plutonium separation–the two routes to producing nuclear weapons-grade material. Although Iran has strenuously denied having a nuclear weapons programme, both the United States and the European Union have been highly suspicious. However, their responses to Iran have shown a divergence in how to counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The way forward on Iran will be influenced significantly by the extent to which the American and European approaches can be reconciled or otherwise.     

经济全球化与民族国家的主权保护

经济全球化是一个发展过程,也是一个客观现实。经济全球化对威斯特伐利亚体系所确立的传统的民族国家主权进行着挑战,但并未导致主权的终结。对包括中国在内的发展中国家来说,必须积极参与国际经济秩序的重构,才能有效地维护国家利益和捍卫国家的主权。     

Sovereignty and inconvenience: The significance of Bentham's exasperation

This article explores the meaning of ‘inconvenience’ and ‘convenience’ in legal and philosophical reasoning. The argument is that such considerations were crucial in the practice of Australian courts in marking out the boundaries of judicial propriety in relation to parliamentary proceedings. This argument is made with recourse to usages of the terms in constitutional debates of the seventeenth century. The older meanings of these terns have now been lost to Australian constitutional law. Hence, I argue, the problem of the boundaries of judicial propriety must be the subject of broader or more theoretical considerations such that the political preferences of judges will be less capable of insulation from their judgments.     

Indigenous peoples' rights to their cultural heritage

Abstract

This paper discusses indigenous peoples' rights to their cultural heritage, using the example of rights to indigenous human remains, held by institutions, universities, scientific centres and museums. It addresses international developments in indigenous cultural policy at the United Nations and the European Union, with specific reference to Australia and the United Kingdom. It also outlines issues relating to indigenous peoples' collective rights, free, prior and informed consent, ownership of indigenous human remains and the issue of benefit sharing and sustainable justice. There are now several international declarations, conventions and policies in place to assist indigenous people in gaining some form of control and protection over their heritage, however, these international instruments are often unco-ordinated and lacking in any enforcement mechanisms and they hold little sway with those who retain indigenous human remains against the wishes of descendant communities.     

20世纪50年代台湾当局维护南沙群岛主权的斗争

20世纪50年代,菲律宾政府利用"克洛马"事件,妄图侵占南沙群岛,尽管海峡两岸处于分裂对立状态,但仍然采取一致立场反对菲律宾侵犯中国南沙群岛主权,不过,在当时特定的国际环境下,只有台湾当局有正式的渠道可以跟菲律宾政府进行直接交涉。由于台湾当局采取了一系列"外交"、军事的措施来维护南沙群岛主权,得以暂时挫败菲律宾侵犯中国领土的图谋。这些措施具有特殊的作用和积极的意义,对当前海峡两岸携手维护南海主权也有一定的借鉴。     

The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-constructivist Challenge to Environmental History

This article discusses the program of environmental history within the larger discipline of history and contrasts it with more recent contributions from post‐constructivist science. It explores the ways in which post‐constructivism has the potential to productively address many of the shortcomings of environmental history's theories and models that environmental historians themselves have begun to view with a critical eye. The post‐constructivist authors discussed in this article, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, both represent challenges to the ways in which nature and the natural sciences tend to be conceptualized as non‐problematized entities within environmental history. They also challenge the ways in which dichotomies of nature and culture tend to be reproduced within the program of environmental history. It is argued that these post‐constructivist contributions represent a radical and arguably more truly historical way of introducing non‐human actors into the historical narrative, and thus represent a potential reinvigoration of environmental history that would embrace a more radical historicity, greater diversity, and openness to difference.