RESEARCH
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Chiefly Leadership in Fiji: Past, Present, and Future
18.08.2026 19:02
researchDisputed Sovereignty in the Falkland Islands: The Argentina-Great Britain Conflict of 1982The Colony of the Falkland Islands and Dependencies lies in the South Atlantic Ocean three hundred miles east of the southern tip of South America. The Falkland Islands themselves consist of East Falkland and West Falkland, separated by the Falkland Sound, and an additional one hundred smaller islands. Although the Falklands are a British crown colony, sovereignty over them is also claimed by Argentina. This comment analyzes and evaluates the competing British and Argentine claims to the Falkland Islands and thereby attempts to determine the legality of actions taken by Argentina and Great Britain in the armed conflict between the two countries which occurred in 1982. When the events upon which a nation bases a claim to sovereignty over territory occurred over three hundred years ago, evidence of an acquisition of sovereignty is often scant. Yet, in the area of international law relating to claims of title to territory, nothing is more important than the history of events upon which each claimant founds its claims. Often, the success of a claim to sovereignty has turned upon the performance of an act which at first might have seemed innocuous. For this reason, the following account of the 1982 conflict and the historical background to the dispute over sovereignty in the South Atlantic are necessarily long and detailed. The dispute between Argentina and Great Britain and their respective claims to territorial sovereignty over the Falkland Islands dates back to the eighteenth century. It appeared to be a "rather abstract quarrel between the two nations, neither of which had a vital national interest at stake." Indeed, it seemed as though it was a dispute which was "neither important enough to resolve, nor unimportant enough to forget." However, this was to change drastically on April 2, 1982.
Self-determination and the Question of Sovereignty over Falkland Islands/MalvinasThe Falkland Islands/Malvinas are situated about 500 km East of the Southern shores of the Argentine Republic. The archipelago includes two main islands: East and West Falkland, and about 200 smaller islands; the total area is about 12 173 square kilometres. The living conditions are rather hard: the windy and cold weather and rocky terrain are not the most welcoming. The economy is based on fishing and sheep farming, but in 2001 reindeer were introduced as part of the farming effort. Tourism is also a source of economic growth, along with deposits of hydrocarbons discovered in the 1990s. The Islands’ economy is self-sufficient, despite the cost of defence. These small and unwelcoming islands are in the centre of a dispute between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Argentine Republic over the sovereignty over this territory that has been raging for about two centuries. In 1982, war broke out over this issue and to this day diplomatic efforts have failed to find an acceptable solution to the dispute. From time to time, the United Nations and the international community cast their focus to issues concerning this small territory, its society and the two States disputing over it incessantly. Sometimes there is hope of changing the status quo, but it usually fades quickly, even though all the participants are aware that the uncertainty in the territorial order is both dangerous and problematic. The aim of the article is to study the possibility of applying the people’s to self-determination to the settlement of this dispute.
Entitled to contraband: citizenship and sovereignty in an Indigenous borderland (Guyana–Venezuela)In Guyanese localities close to the (contested) border with Venezuela, I witnessed in late 2018 numerous Venezuelans smuggling fuel, which they had bought for almost nothing in their country and sold in Guyana for about US$100 per drum, so they could go back with food and manufactured goods. Venezuela had been suffering a deep crisis for several years, characterized by high inflation and shortages of basic products, but fuel was still available at the time. In previous years, the country had also known another widespread form of small-scale illicit trade, the sale of subsidized food on the interior black market, commonly known as bachaqueo (after bachaco, a term for leafcutter ants, which are known for carrying heavy loads). In both cases, trade was illegal because people were not allowed to resell subsidized goods, intended for domestic consumption only, and certainly not at a price set above the official one and therefore deemed ‘speculative’. Venezuelans were not selling goods that were illicit per se (such as drugs), but rather infringing trade regulations: it therefore represents ‘contraband’ in a broad sense, even though only fuel was exported across an international border.
The Incident at the UN Security Council as a Boiling PointOn July 27,
2026, the American delegation defiantly left the meeting room of the UN
Security Council on Ukraine during a speech by the representative of France,
returning only after completing his speech. The formal reason was the vote to
extend the powers of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk: 144
countries, including France, supported his re-election, while 10 states,
including the United States and Russia, opposed it.
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Mobilizing for Techno-Economic War, Part 5: Transforming STEM Research PolicyThe United States has been the world’s dominant techno-economic power for over 125 years. That has induced complacency. As the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has written, China is hungry and determined not only to displace American techno-economic leadership, but to also make America dependent on it.
How Western Sovereignty Occludes Indigenous Governance: the Guarani and Kaiowa Peoples in BrazilRecent international relations (IR) scholarship has developed a growing awareness of this discipline’s colonial roots, prompting a search for decolonising approaches. This article is about indigenous sovereignties and how they have been occluded in the currently globalised European system of states. The method employed is a case study of two of the most impoverished and brutalised Indigenous Peoples in Brazil: the Guarani and the Kaiowa. In an attempt to transit between the world of Westphalia and non-European worlds, it starts by engaging in a conversation with Guarani and Kaiowa knowledge. Then, through a long-term historical analysis, it examines the main colonial processes that caused the occlusion of Guarani and Kaiowa sovereignty. Finally, it provides a broader perspective on how the diffusion of the European model of sovereignty, confronted with Indigenous resistance, has led to the social exclusion of Indigenous Peoples worldwide.
Land sovereignty in depressed and contested agro-territories: The cases of Portugal and BrazilThis article offers an exploratory operationalisation of the concept of land sovereignty applied to land politics in 2 agro-territories from different countries and continents sharing a common language and deeply linked histories: Portugal and Brazil. These display a similar model of agricultural development, representing a contradiction between the promise of profit based on aggressive exploitation of the territory and the marginalised condition of its population. How this agricultural model took hold in each country and manifested the agrarian question differs according to key socio-historical factors, such as the role of each in the colonial history that links them. Today, however, these agro-territories face similar challenges: human rights abuses, environmental destruction, lack of sound territorial management and fair policies, coupled with the dilapidation of socio-economic infrastructures. This makes them especially vulnerable to climate change, unemployment and poverty, while also caught in a clash between development models: a hegemonic hyper-intensive production model and the peasant-based model that has been resisting the advances of the former. This double jeopardy has prompted us to speak of ‘depressed and contested agro-territories’. Our study shows how, in the case of Brazil, despite physical violence and threats to life, social movements are propelling land reform, linking it to the concept of the social function of land. In Portugal, in contrast, the country’s alignment with neoliberal development has civil society divided about how to contest land use. Our analysis indicates that in both cases: (i) today’s land politics are heavily biased towards a neoliberal, export-based, hyper-intensive agriculture controlled by large corporations, with weak legislation in place to defend both social and environmental rights; (ii) land reform based on land sovereignty and the social function of land is deemed crucial to assist agro-territories in regaining socio-ecological balance and to attain democratisation of land politics by regaining control over land, natural resources and local markets.
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The Limits of Sovereignty and Post-War Okinawan Migrants in BoliviaThis paper examines the legal implications for Okinawan migrants of Article 3 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty (hereafter SFPT), signed between Japan and most of the Allied Powers in 1951. Particularly, it analyses the case of post-war Okinawan migrants in Bolivia, showing how the legal conditions in the Ryukyu Islands were extended to the Andean country. The Japanese defeat in the Asia-Pacific War (August 1945) was followed by the occupation of the country by the United States. The peace treaty, signed six years later, originated during the early years of the Cold War and was fraught with geopolitical implications. The SFPT allowed the U.S. military to retain control of Okinawa prefecture without formally severing it from Japan. In other words, the treaty-makers allocated de jure sovereignty over Okinawa to Japan while the U.S. enjoyed de facto sovereignty. This distinction gave rise to a legal conundrum concerning the future of the islands and the legal situation of the Okinawan people onshore and abroad. Building on Japanese and English primary sources I examine the reaction of American and Japanese jurists to Article 3 and the approach of both governments toward offshore Okinawan migrants.
Venezuela: Popular Sovereignty Versus Liberal DemocracyIn order to evaluate accurately the state of democratic governance during the first years of the Chávez presidency, one must sharpen the distinction between democracy narrowly defined as popular sovereignty versus the more conventional notion of liberal democracy. Venezuela was no longer a liberal democracy in every respect. Instead, it became an extreme case of delegative democracy. The president enjoyed widespread popular support for almost everything he and his followers did, and this fact qualified his government as “democratic” in the narrow sense of popular sovereignty. But the systematic elimination of constraints on presidential action after 1998 increased the risk that Venezuela would cease to be a democracy by any definition in the future. Governability also suffered because the new formulas regulating relations between government and opposition, among branches of government, and between state and civil society were both unstable and far from mutually acceptable. Chávez and his supporters saw themselves as agents of a deliberate and self-conscious revolutionary process and believed that expediency and unilateral impositions of new rules were justified by the need for a radical break with the past. Needless to say, this attitude also condoned a cavalier disregard for the rule of law, extending even to the constitution.
Sovereign Democratic Transformation in Ecuador (2007-2016)Between 1981 and 2007, Ecuador experienced neoliberal reforms coupled with an elite form of democracy. These led to slow growth, upwards redistribution, and political and economic instability. Since then, Ecuador adopted a Citizens’ Revolution to counteract these economic and political forms of domination. This paper advances a few elements of the theoretical understanding of democratic justice inspired by the constitutional vision of Buen Vivir, and their policy applications in reconfiguring the political institutions that shape the state and its international relations. The application in the Citizens’ Revolution movement and historical phase has helped advance the democratization of the Constitution, the Executive, the Legislative, the Judicial system, political rights, the right to life, freedom of expression, national natural resources and investments, external public debt, as well as social rights and the welfare state.
Sovereignty against extractivism. Re-centring decolonisation on Indigenous territorial struggles in BoliviaSince the political crisis that accompanied the presidential elections in October– November 2019, Bolivia has been once again at the centre of debates over the achievements and shortcomings of reforms initiated under the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party (Valdivia Rivero, 2021). The electoral victory of October 2020 by MAS candidate and former Ministry of Finances Luis Arce represented a decided popular rejection of the reactionary Áñez government, which had been characterised by corruption, violence, repression and a nefarious handling of the Covid- 19 crisis (McNelly, 2021). While this was rightly celebrated by many as the reassertion of a democratically elected mandate, some of the structural contradictions that led to the October 2019 crisis remain. These relate to deep social and political divisions, not only between elites and popular classes, but cutting through popular classes themselves. In this chapter we focus specifically on the tensions and divergences between the two main subaltern political projects articulated in Bolivia in the last decades, and their respective visions with regard to territory and extractivism: the “state- campesino” project put forward primarily by the main rural worker or campesino unions, out of which the MAS emerged; and the “communitarian- Indigenous” project, advanced by Indigenous (indígena and originario) organisations in the country – as well as campesino communities not aligned with unions – today largely opposed to the MAS (Chávez, 2016).
Critical Perspectives on Guyana’s Sovereign Wealth FundGuyana has discovered significant quantities of commercially viable oil offshore the coast of Guyana. In anticipation of this, the Government of Guyana has sought to implement a Sovereign Wealth Fund, which is intended to capture revenues from the oil and gas sector. This Fund, known in Guyana as the Natural Resources Fund, also intends to have, deposited into it, revenues from other extractive industries in Guyana. A number of issues must be examined within the context of Guyana’s macroeconomic stability and the public financial management framework in Guyana. This paper seeks to address these matters. It is divided into three (3) sections: 1. An overview of Sovereign Wealth Funds and Guyana’s proposed Fund; 2. The Fiscal Rule and the Management of the Fund; 3. Critical Perspectives of the Fund. This paper is based on the widely circulated ‘Green Paper’ published by the Ministry of Finance, Government of Guyana.
Kiribati vs San Marino: Sovereignty as a Balance Between Form and ContentKiribati and San Marino are two States in which the contradiction between formal sovereignty and its real content reaches maximum analytical clarity. Kiribati has full international recognition, its own government, flag, and seat at the United Nations, but it is unable to independently confront the main threat to its existence, since it is governed not from Tarawa, but from Beijing, Washington, Brussels and New Delhi.
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A Most Dangerous Game: OPEC+, Saudi Arabia and the UAE
01.05.2026 17:34
researchSovereignty, Power Politics and International Law: An Analysis of the United States' Arrest of Venezuela’s President and Its Implications for Nigeria and AfricaBackground of Study: The principles of state sovereignty, non-intervention, and head-of-state immunity are foundational to the international legal framework. These principles, enshrined in the United Nations Charter and customary international law, are increasingly challenged by the unilateral actions of powerful states. The 2026 arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by the United States serves as a significant case that tests these principles.
Narratives on Indigenous victimhood. Challenges of Indigenous Data Sovereignty in Colombia’s transitional settingThe Indigenous communities of Colombia have borne the brunt of the country’s violent history. Since colonial times, the Indigenous communities of Colombia have endured different forms of violence that have caused systematic dispossession of their lands, displacement and the loss of their cultural identity.