Sovereignty

In this post, Chris Gilligan continues his discussion of the topic of sovereignty and nationalism. Here he looks at ways in which one-sided conceptions of ‘the people’ are employed by advocates of popular sovereignty, in ways that disavow the racism inherent in popular sovereignty.

In my previous blogpost I briefly outlined Bernard Yack’s argument that both an ‘ethnic’ conception of ‘the people’ as a ‘national community’ and a ‘civic’ conception of ‘the people’ as a ‘political community’ are integral to the doctrine of popular sovereignty. In this post I draw on the distinction between

Chris Gilligan, author of Northern Ireland and the Crisis of Anti-racism, introduces the first in a series of Blog posts on the topic of sovereignty and nationalism. 

Sovereignty seems to have become something of a buzzword for populist nationalists in recent years. American President, Donald Trump, for example, used the terms ‘sovereign’ or ‘sovereignty’ twenty-one times in his maiden speech to the United Nations, in 2017. In the United Kingdom (UK), the term was, and continues to be, widely invoked by advocates of the UK revoking its membership of the European Union (EU). The term has been