Sovereignty under siege: globalisation and the state in Southeast Asia

It is commonly assumed that processes associated with globalisation are affecting the sovereignty of states. While the extent and implications of such processes may be debatable, globalisation presents even the most powerful states with new challenges to their autonomy and authority. In Southeast Asia, where the principle of sovereignty has been a crucial and jealously guarded part of regional governance structures, globalisation is an especially acute challenge for national governments. This paper examines the theoretical and policy implications of globalisation in Southeast Asia and argues that not only is globalisation threatening to unravel existing governmental practices in Southeast Asia, but that as a consequence we also need to re-think the way we understand core theoretical principles like sovereignty.

The possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty: The High Court and the Yorta Yorta decision

Race is fundamental in shaping the development of Australian law just as it has played its part in other former colonies, such as the United States, where a body of critical race theory has been established on the basis of this premise. Drawing on this theory I argue that the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty works ideologically to naturalise the nation as a white possession by informing and circulating a coherent set of meanings about white possession as part of common sense knowledge and socially produced conventions in the High Court's Yorta Yorta decision.

Bringing the state to England: Andrew Tooke's translation of Samuel Pufendorf's 'De officio hominis et civis'

Andrew Tooke's 1691 English translation of Samuel Pufendorf's De officio hominis et civis, published as The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature, brought Pufendorf's manual fo statist natural law into English politics at a moment of temporary equilibrium in the unfinished contest between Crown and Parliament for the rights and powers of sovereignty. Drawing on the authors' re-edition of The Whole Duty of Man, this article describes and analyses a telling instance of how--by translation--the core political terms and concepts of the German natural jurist's 'absolutist' formulary were reshaped for reception in the different political culture of late seventeenth-century England.

The love of a sage or the command of a superior: The natural law doctrines of Leibniz and Pufendorf

The study of natural law theories is presently one of the most fruitful areas of research in the studies of early modern intellectual history, and moral and political theory. Likewise the historical significance of the Enlightenment for the development of modernisation' in many different forms continues to be the subject of controversy. This collection therefore offers a timely opportunity to re-examine both the coherence of the concept of an early Enlightenment', and the specific contribution of natural law theories to its formation. The works of major thinkers such as Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Malebranche, Pufendorf and Thomasius are reassessed, and the appeal and importance of the discourse of natural jurisprudence both to those working inside conventional educational and political structures and to those outside - such as in the Huguenot diaspora - is evaluated. This volume will therefore be of importance to all those readers concerned to study the character of the debates in the period 1650-1750 surrounding moral and political agency, sovereignty and obligation, and the legitimation of religious toleration in the divergent states and patriotic contexts of Europe.

Thomasius on the toleration of heresy

Over two thousand years the Christian Church identified a wider range and a greater number of heresies than most other religions and, when secular authorities did not protected the heretics, took drastic measures to persuade the heretic to recant and to extirpate the false doctrine. Heresy, of course, is a word like a box [End Page 201] that at different times may hold many different ideas and so some articles are dealing with definitions and identifications that are not the same. The editors suggest that the articles show a profound change in culture in the eighteenth century which means that present day scholars can barely imagine the mind-set that produced medieval attitudes to heresy. This is the task some of the authors have set themselves while others seek to explain how the change came about as part of the historical search for truth.