Sovereignty at Sea: The law and politics of saving lives in mare liberum

This article analyses the interplay between politics and law in the recent attempts to strengthen the humanitarian commitment to saving lives in mare liberum. Despite a long-standing obligation to aid people in distress at sea, this so-called search and rescue regime has been marred by conflicts and political standoffs as states were faced with a growing number of capsising boat migrants potentially claiming international protection once on dry land. Attempts to provide a legal solution to these problems have resulted in a re-spatialisation of the high seas, extending the states’ obligations in the international public domain based on geography rather than traditional functionalist principles that operated in the open seas. However, inadvertently, this further legalisation has equally enabled states to instrumentalise law to barter off and deconstruct responsibility by reference to traditional norms of sovereignty and maritime law. In other words, states may be able to reclaim sovereign power by becoming increasingly norm-savvy and successfully navigating the legal playing field provided by the very expansion of international law itself. Thus, rather than being simply a space of non-sovereignty per se, mare liberum becomes the venue for a complex game of sovereignty, law and politics

Money for Nothing: Everyday Actors and Monetary Crises

Why do monetary unions fail? Structural approaches that focus on shifts in the distribution of capabilities ascribe non-elites limited agency to influence large-scale political and economic change. Existing agent-centred approaches tend to simplify the social dynamics of the everyday politics of money by concentrating on how elites determine formal changes within monetary systems. Answers to this question from a material-based perspective often point to a breakdown in elite political support, driven by actors’ material incentives to cheat on their multilateral commitments rather than cooperate to overcome the collective action problem that a monetary union entails. Recent ideational perspectives have focused on the role of shared economic ideas among elites, as well as elite struggles over national identity, as crucial ingredients in the construction, maintenance, or failure of a monetary union. While drawing on the insights of rationalist and constructivist theories, this article uses a historical sociology approach to argue that the everyday actions taken by non-elites as survival strategies in a monetary crisis provide an important additional ingredient for understanding monetary system change. This approach is illustrated through a case study of the collapse of the ruble zone monetary union over 1991–1993