Soft Borders: Rethinking Sovereignty and Democracy [Paperback]

While sovereignty is increasingly contested within academic circles, most recent military conflicts have been over issues of sovereignty in some form. Focusing on Yugoslavia in the 1990s, this book explores the issues surrounding 'sovereignty' and calls for a radical rethinking of the notion and the institutions and practices that it grounds.Globalization and Fragmentation Locations and Boundaries of Sovereignty Democracy, Ethnocracy, and Sovereignty Soft Borders and Sovereignty Reconstructing the Polity

Julie Mostov s book Soft Borders: Rethinking Sovereignty and Democracy encourages us to look at the key problems of the twenty first century from a novel perspective that is not only inspiring and theoretically interesting but also practically possible. This work is based on her extensive knowledge of ethnic conflicts in Southeastern Europe and the problems of citizens who find themselves trapped within the hard borders of ethnocratic states, as well as on her understanding of current trends in the West to build new fortresses against labor migration. Mostov does not offer easy solutions or call for the end of the state, but in the context of global integration, fragmentation, and new possibilities of communication she shows us a way to rethink the concepts of democracy, sovereignty, and citizenship and offers an innovative notion of multi-layered cooperation among transnational citizens in fluid and multiple soft border polities. - Vesna Pe ic , senior scientific associate of the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade University, human rights and peace activist, and Member of Serbian Parliament

In Soft Borders, JulieMostovweaves apolitical theory of borders around their operative contingency andpervasive injustice in the world of globalization.Explaining why hard borders foster a violent, exclusionary, and repressive politics of ethnocracyby fixing and naturalizing difference and creating vulnerable others inside and olC¶