Publication date:
15 December 2017Length of book:
290 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781538105184
This provocative and important text offers a new way of thinking about sovereignty, both past and present. Distinguished geographer John Agnew boldly challenges the widely popular story that state sovereignty is in worldwide eclipse in the face of the overwhelming processes of globalization. He argues that this perception relies on ideas about sovereignty and globalization that are both overstated and misleading. Agnew contends that sovereignty-state control and authority over space is not necessarily neatly contained in state-by-state territories, nor has it ever been so. Yet the dominant image of globalization is the replacement of a territorialized world by one of networks and flows that know no borders other than those that define the Earth itself. In challenging this image, Agnew first traces the ways in which it has become commonplace. He then develops a new way of thinking about the geography of effective sovereignty and the various geographical forms in which sovereignty actually operates in the world, offering an exciting intellectual framework that breaks with the either/or thinking of state sovereignty versus globalization.
Take back control! Read and digest John Agnew’s Globalization and Sovereignty. In this second edition, the pioneer of political geography provides an indispensable guide to the contested contours of both of these slippery terms. If only we can place it in the hands of those who really need it.