Welcome to the third issue of Volume 33 of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.
This Issue presents a variety of perspectives on state sovereignty and various developing challenges to it, as well as non-state actors in international relations. While none of the articles directly address the novel coronavirus pandemic that has radically altered the landscape of world politics in recent months, they implicate core themes that specialists and non-specialists alike will contend with as we come to terms with the pandemic and its implications: the limits of sovereignty in a world beset by urgent transnational challenges, and the role that non-state actors play in helping us meet them. We hope that all of our readers have remained safe during these trying times, and thank in particular our authors, reviewers and contributors who have continued to dedicate their time and expertise to our Journal despite such significant disruptions in all of our daily lives.
In this Issue’s first article, Pietro Marzo develops the case of Tunisia as a study of the underlining conditions needed for a favourable environment in promoting international democracy, through both non-state and state actors such as elites. In the second article, Lacin Oztig offers a novel perspective for rethinking sovereignty, exploring the implications of private security companies and their involvement in the prevention and regulation of unauthorized flows of people across international borders. ‘Borders are central institutions of state sovereignty,’ contends Oztig, and thus the delegation of responsibility for border control to private security companies implicates ‘both to the internal and external dimensions of state sovereignty’ (p. 2).
The third article, by Peter Newell & Richard Lane, offers a focused look at how climate change is shaping the development and evolution of state energy politics to an extent that was not possible when the issues was frequently overlooked in previous decades ago. Newell and Lane argue that the constant reminder of the consequences of global warming has transformed how states deal with energy politics to the point of creating a ‘Climate for Change’ that influences states to be more mindful of their energy policies. In the fourth article of this volume, Diana Panke addresses the politics of climate changes through another prism. Panke “opens the black box of environmental negotiations” in International Organizations (p. 15) to investigate the participation of distinct member states in the production of rules and norms aimed at “greening of international politics”. Panke’s work provides great insight into the causes of the varying behaviour of distinct states in international negotiations regarding climate change.
In the fifth article, Marianna Charountaki addresses a persistent gap in International Relations scholarship regarding non-state actor behaviour and change in foreign policy. Through the use of a multi-layered analysis method, Charountaki examines the role of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government and its call for an independence referendum in 2017 as an example of how non-state units and actors can have a significant impact on regional and international politics. The sixth article, authored by Aaron Ettinger, discusses whether the notion of “principled realism” is able to represent United States foreign policy under Trump. After exposing the limitations of such a concept, Ettinger contends that the notion of “populist sovereignty”, in turn, offers greater insight into the doctrine and priorities of Trump’s foreign policy.
In the final article of this issue, Pedro Salgado takes a historical turn to analyse how class agency is a crucial element in the constitution of modern sovereignty. Salgado delves into the struggles among multiple colonial and metropolitan socio-economic classes through which Brazil acquired its formal political independence from Portugal in 19thCentury. He proposes that this class-based account remediates the Eurocentrism frequent in accounts of state formation, by focusing on the agency of non-European social groups in the production of state sovereignty in the periphery of the modern international order.
The Editorial Team at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs is pleased to provide a platform for such outstanding scholarship, and we encourage our readers to further engage with it on our department’s blog, In the Long Run (http://www.inthelongrun.org).
Editors-in-Chief, Cambridge Review of International Affairs