What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one’s actions. In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R. Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.

Other Global Issues books are a rather eclectic mash up of topics, headlines du jour, with an "and now this!" organizational scheme. The "hot" topics may have cooled by press time, and the presentation to students is disjointed, not clear. The approach is often a "scare 'em and leave 'em" presentation of a global horror show of problems, without clear arguments about the connections among the issues, or integrated discussions of solutions. In contrast, Global Issues Beyond Sovereignty provides a thesis and a common narrative throughout the "issue" chapters. The range of responses to manage global issues are compared and discussed throughout. Global problems move at internet speed; governments do not move so quickly. This creates gaps in what citizens expect the state to do, and what countries have the capacities to do. This paradox is a problem not only for weak or failing states; even the strongest states in the system struggle in how to effectively respond to global issues, from cybersecurity to environmental toxins. States cannot solve or manage trans-sovereign issues alone. The power of the private sector is growing (both legal and illegal, for profit and non-profit), while state power is flat or in some places declining. While private sector actors have means to impact transnational issues, they do not have a public mandate to do so. Countries increasingly must learn how to play well with others; this is easier said than done. Attempts to manage global issues flow through three channels: public sector responses, private sector responses, and mixed public-private partnerships. All three channels are explored throughout the book, uniting the issue chapters in a common discussion of challenges and responses. The conclusion presents lessons learned for theory and practice from managing global issues.

Review: "Seventeen distinguished experts tackle profound issues related to titled subject. Farer's lively introduction furnishes clear, insightful framework; subsequent chapters provide strong theoretical and empirical bases with high-quality scholarship. States receiving case study attention, however, are limited; key ones such as Brazil and Argentina are not included"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57. http://www.loc.gov/hlas/

African American culture is often considered expressive, dramatic, and even defiant. In The Sovereignty of Quiet, Kevin Quashie explores quiet as a different kind of expressiveness, one which characterizes a person’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, and fears. Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture. The book revisits such iconic moments as Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s protest at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Elizabeth Alexander’s reading at the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama. Quashie also examines such landmark texts as Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Toni Morrison’s Sula to move beyond the emphasis on resistance, and to suggest that concepts like surrender, dreaming, and waiting can remind us of the wealth of black humanity.

This is the first work in political theory to bring together IR, comparative politics and political theory approaches to analyze the post-sovereign state and develop a new interpretative scheme for social and political scientists

Deepen your understanding of global issues with BEYOND SOVEREIGNTY: ISSUES FOR A GLOBAL AGENDA, International Edition. Author Maryann Cusimano Love helps you put the subjects of today’s headlines—such as global poverty and debt, the environmental crisis, terrorism, disease, WMD proliferation, international crime, drug trafficking, and human trafficking—into the larger context of globalization. Throughout, the author argues that since global challenges go beyond borders, the solutions to these challenges are to be found beyond sovereignty.

Around the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to "take back" sovereignty. The contributors to this collection use ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the state form. Examples from Spain to Afghanistan and from Western Sahara to Taiwan show how calls to take back control or to bring back order are best understood as longings for sovereign agency. By paying close ethnographic attention to these desires and their consequences, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty offers a new way to understand why these yearnings have such profound political resonance in a globally interconnected world. Contributors: Panos Achniotis, Jens Bartelson, Joyce Dalsheim, Dace Dzenovska, Sara L. Friedman, Azra Hromadžić, Louisa Lombard, Alice Wilson, and Torunn Wimpelmann.