{"id":149,"date":"2024-04-04T05:34:18","date_gmt":"2024-04-04T02:34:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sisu.ut.ee\/defactostates\/political-community-flux\/"},"modified":"2024-04-22T12:36:45","modified_gmt":"2024-04-22T09:36:45","slug":"political-community-flux","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sisu.ut.ee\/defactostates\/political-community-flux\/","title":{"rendered":"Political Community in Flux: Identity, Sovereignty and Democracy in a Transforming World"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong><span lang=\"EN-US\">Funded by Institutional research funding (IUT20-39) of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, 2014-2019<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span lang=\"EN-US\">This research examined the reconfiguration of the construction of sovereignty, identity and democracy (SID), both in discourse and political practice, in the context of the transformation of political community. It deconstructed the SID nexus while revealing its embeddedness in particular forms of political community, showed how discursive constructions of SID are used to legitimize specific political realities, explored conflict between codified norms and contemporary political practice, and demonstrated how ambiguity surrounding SID gives rise to instrumental use of legal norms; and proposed solutions to dilemmas arising from regional integration. This research provided insights into a range of controversial issues including secession, humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion, clashes over history and memory, policies aiming at transitional justice, the functioning of representative institutions, and global debates about democracy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span lang=\"EN-US\">The work is organized in three research clusters (RCs), each concentrating on different connections within the sovereignty-identity-democracy nexus. The \u201cContested Sovereignty\u201d RC highlights the dilemmas that arise when sovereignty is perceived to conflict with the positive ideals of democracy or to be \u2018earned\u2019 in the course of democratization. The RC focuses on three sets of interrelated problems. First, it examines the norms and practices pertaining to the \u2018earning\u2019 and granting of sovereign status in world politics, with particular focus on the identity and democracy related criteria employed in the process of recognition. This strand of research focuses on the problematique of de facto states and other sovereignty claimants. Second, the RC examines the polemical uses of the term \u2018sovereignty\u2019 in contemporary discourses about the legitimacy and justifiability of humanitarian intervention and secession. It shows how the different prioritization of the norms of sovereignty, democracy and human rights underlies the clash between the \u2018responsibility to protect\u2019 and the \u2018obligation to refrain.\u2019 Third, the RC will include a political theory component examining the relationship of human rights as a universalistic and cosmopolitan principle to sovereignty as a political expression of the state\u2019s moral status. <\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span lang=\"EN-US\">The RC posits the following working hypotheses: <\/span><\/p>\n<ul style=\"text-align: justify;\">\n<li><span lang=\"EN-US\">International legal sovereignty does not constitute a precondition for democracy understood as a political rule based on accountability and representativeness; <\/span><\/li>\n<li><span lang=\"EN-US\">Democratic credentials are increasingly gaining relevance as a criterion for acceptance and integration into the international community. The principle of \u2018standards before status\u2019 is pursued (along with other legitimation strategies) both by sovereignty claimants and the international community; <\/span><\/li>\n<li><span lang=\"EN-US\">Protection of human rights, peace enforcement, transitional justice and democracy promotion are distinct practices rooted in different core values (those of individual rights, collective security, and democracy) and hence in tension with each other;<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span lang=\"EN-US\">The erosion of states\u2019 capacity to foster the closure of political community does not necessarily engender the wider emergence of an anti-statist cosmopolitan sentiment among populations.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span lang=\"EN-US\">The empirical scope of the RC includes instances of secession and humanitarian intervention from around the world (e.g. in the West Balkans and Caucasus) as well as unrecognized states such as Northern Cyprus, Transnistria, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Taiwan. It will also scrutinize layers of sovereignty in the EU, with particular attention to the sovereignty aspirations of various autonomous regions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 Funded by Institutional research funding (IUT20-39) of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, 2014-2019 This research examined the reconfiguration of the construction of sovereignty, identity and democracy (SID), both in discourse and political practice, in the &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":66,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-149","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sisu.ut.ee\/defactostates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sisu.ut.ee\/defactostates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sisu.ut.ee\/defactostates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sisu.ut.ee\/defactostates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/66"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sisu.ut.ee\/defactostates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sisu.ut.ee\/defactostates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1996,"href":"https:\/\/sisu.ut.ee\/defactostates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/149\/revisions\/1996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sisu.ut.ee\/defactostates\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}