Robert Latham

Questions of sovereignty are unavoidable when considering the production of social power within the context of modernity and globalization. If sovereignty refers to the existence of a highest or supreme power over a set of people, things, or places, then we ought to question whether sovereignty can be legitimately `located' in an agent like a state. Is not supremacy more accurately associated with the structures of relations that set the terms for - or are constitutive of - a domain of social existence? This social sovereignty offers us a way to understand not only how both state and nonstate actors can together be central to the governance of social domains, but also how communities can fashion sovereign `societies' as opposed to states. The case of globalized financial markets is explored as a pointed example of a transboundary form of social sovereignty.

Burgeoning national security programs; thickening borders; Wikileaks and Anonymous; immigrant rights rallies; Occupy movements; student protests; neoliberal austerity; global financial crises – these developments underscore how much the fable of a hope-filled post-cold war globalization has faded. In its place looms the prospect of states and corporations transforming a permanent war on terror into a permanent war on society. How, at this juncture, might policymakers and power-holders in leading states and corporations of the Global North be reframing their pursuit of power and control? What possibilities and limits do activists and communities face for progressive, radical political action to counter this power inside and outside the state? The book, a dialogue, links Gramscian and Benjaminian thought in an in-depth consideration of the prospects for a progressive, radical politics that is situated at the juncture of Socialism and Anarchism and which uses evasion against statist capitalism to create new forms of, what is termed, re-collective passage. (April 2016 Routledge, Interventions series)