The Sovereignty And Its Discontents (SAID) working group was established in 2005 with two aims:

As part of this project, SAID convenes seminars, workshops, conferences, and public debates. Please see the links on the left-hand menu for forthcoming events of interest. SAID has published some of the fruits of this research with Routledge in an edited collection in 2007. For more information about the book, click here: Politics without Sovereignty: A critique of contemporary international relations. SAID is a working group of the British International Studies Association (BISA).

The dawn of the twenty first century has been a turbulent one for the international system of states. Many of the norms and rules that governed international relations for over half a century have been systematically undermined over the last decade, between the end of the Cold War and the launching of the ‘war on terror’. While nation building and democratisation efforts have ostensibly sought to re-build viable, strong and independent states from the Balkans to the Middle East, the international community continues to affirm its claim to override the sovereign rights of states in order to defend human rights, remedy ‘state failure,’ check terror, and halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

State sovereignty has long been held to be the basic pre-condition for the operation of international relations. But how has state sovereignty changed since the end of the Cold War? During the 1990s a consensus emerged in international politics that called state sovereignty into question. Many commentators, scholars and policy makers associated sovereignty with aggressive nationalism and internal repression. In the era of globalisation, sovereignty came to be seen as a barrier to progressive political, cultural and economic transformation. Many analysts and policy makers openly called for the construction of a new, so-called ‘post-Westphalian’ or ‘post-modern’ international system, that would be based on restraining state sovereignty through practices like ‘sovereignty as responsibility’, and on cultivating alternatives to the sovereign state, such as international organisation, NGOs, ‘global civil society’, and even placing certain states under ‘trusteeship’. But has the war on terror shattered this ‘post-Westphalian’ vision? Many have claimed that the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 have prompted a return to unilateralism and power politics, sidelining the multilateral institutions, international laws and human rights awareness achieved in the 1990s.

The following are some of the questions that SAID will seek to address:

One of the founding premises of SAID is that many of the competing schools of thought within international studies can be re-assessed in light of a widespread intellectual scepticism toward sovereignty. We believe that this scepticism toward sovereignty represents a tacit orthodoxy within the field. SAID will seek to probe the limitations of this new orthodoxy by testing it against recent developments in international politics. In so doing, SAID seeks to avoid a rehash of the schisms that divide ‘rationalist’ and ‘reflectivist’ approaches in the discipline, and instead to provide a more focused terrain for discussion and research. Therefore SAID seminar series and conferences will appeal to a critically-minded audience who are frustrated with the insularity of the competing approaches that currently dominate the discipline of international studies. SAID will seek to critically re-appraise sovereignty on both theoretical and empirical levels. SAID will also to seek to explore state sovereignty in relation to a wide variety of international relationships – such as the European Union, global civil society and international law.