Beyond Sovereignty and the State of Nature: Metaphorical Readings of Global Order

Abstract

Amidst increasingly rapid and voluminous flows of people, goods and ideas that traverse the globe, many scholars, activists and policymakers fervently proclaim that the contemporary period of globalization is a moment of profound transformation. Scholars, in particular, declare that these changes portend not so much the end of the state as an institution of everyday politics, but the need to subvert normative frameworks that root political life and authority within the confines of the territorial state. There is a sense that political life has gone ‘global’ and, thus, so must go political theory.