On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions

Joan Cocks is Professor of Politics on the Ford Foundation at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, USA. She is the author of Passion and Paradox: Intellectuals Confront the National Question (2002) and The Oppositional Imagination: Feminism, Critique and Political Theory (1989 and 2013), as well as numerous articles on Marxism, feminism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, sovereignty, and violence.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on bloomsburycollections.com.Winner of the 2015 David Easton Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association (APSA)Global forces are eroding the ability of states to exert sovereign control over their populations, territories, and borders. Yet when dominated subjects across the world dream of freedom, they continue to conceive of it in sovereign terms. Sovereign freedom haunts the imagination of oppressed ethnic minorities, popular masses ruled by foreign powers or homegrown tyrants, indigenous peoples, and individuals chafing under customary or governmental restrictions. On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions draws on political theory and on two case studies - the encounter between Anglo-American settlers and Native American tribes, and the search for Jewish sovereignty in Palestine - to probe the allure of the idea of sovereign freedom and its self-defeating logic. It concludes by shifting its sights from political to economic sovereign power and by pursuing intimations of non-sovereign freedom in the contemporary age.

On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions critically reassesses some of the basic concepts that underpin Western political theory.

Endorsements from major US theorists Bill Connelly, Jim Tully, Bonnie Honig