Imagined Nations: Toward a Functional Approach to the Future of International Relations
Delaune, Timothy A.
2005
- Submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Abstract: Beginning with a review of definitions employed in scholarship on nationalism, including Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, this thesis moves directly to an examination of the loosening ties between political geography -- understood as the superimposition ... read moreon the globe of territorial boundaries marking the extent of state sovereignty -- and the functions and characteristics ordinarily associated with nationhood, in an effort to demonstrate that the requirement of international law that sovereignty and statehood follow control of territory only is increasingly out of step with the needs and verities of world politics and society. It then surveys some theories of networked nations and other nonstate communities, as well as historical and current examples of nonterritorial networks that in various ways present features similar to those commonly understood to be possessed by nations. It attempts to derive from these examples a functional approach to nationhood that is, an approach that defines nationhood not with respect to what a candidate nation is but rather according to what it does. Having advanced this functional approach to nationhood, the thesis then describes some candidate imagined nations, and examines two prison nation and queer nation more closely, in an attempt to evaluate the functional model's ability to track more closely than the legal definition of statehood candidate nations international roles and significance. It concludes with some tentative predictions about the future of the international system understood as one in which states are not the only, or even the primary actors, as well as some prescriptions for future research on the international personality of nonstate networks.read less
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- t148ft87g
- Component ID:
- tufts:UA015.012.DO.00079
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