Territory Authority Rights or Torture

Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages

Author: Saskia Sassen

Where does the nation-state end and globalization begin? In Territory, Authority, Rights, one of the world's leading authorities on globalization shows how the national state made today's global era possible. Saskia Sassen argues that even while globalization is best understood as "denationalization," it continues to be shaped, channeled, and enabled by institutions and networks originally developed with nations in mind, such as the rule of law and respect for private authority. This process of state making produced some of the capabilities enabling the global era. The difference is that these capabilities have become part of new organizing logics: actors other than nation-states deploy them for new purposes. Sassen builds her case by examining how three components of any society in any age--territory, authority, and rights--have changed in themselves and in their interrelationships across three major historical "assemblages": the medieval, the national, and the global.

The book consists of three parts. The first, "Assembling the National," traces the emergence of territoriality in the Middle Ages and considers monarchical divinity as a precursor to sovereign secular authority. The second part, "Disassembling the National," analyzes economic, legal, technological, and political conditions and projects that are shaping new organizing logics. The third part, "Assemblages of a Global Digital Age," examines particular intersections of the new digital technologies with territory, authority, and rights.

Sweeping in scope, rich in detail, and highly readable, Territory, Authority, Rights is a definitive new statement on globalization that will resonatethroughout the social sciences.

Table of Contents:

1	Introduction	1
2	Territory, authority, and rights in the framing of the national	31
3	Assembling national political economies centered on imperial geographies	74
4	The tipping point : toward new organizing logics	148
5	Denationalized state agendas and privatize norm-making	222
6	Foundational subjects for political membership : today's changed relation to the national state	277
7	Digital networks, state authority, and politics	328
8	Assembling mixed spatial and temporal orders : elements for a theorization	378
9	Conclusion	401

Book review: UNIX Network Programming or Digital Filmmaking Handbook

Torture

Author: Edward Peters

"Torture has ceased to exist," Victor Hugo claimed, with some justification, in 1874. Yet more than a century later, torture is used routinely in one out of every three countries. This book is about torture in Western society from earliest times to the present.

A landmark study since its original publication a decade ago, Torture is now available in an expanded and updated paperback edition. Included for the first time is a broad and disturbing selection of documents charting the historical practice of torture from the ancient Romans to the Khmer Rouge.

"Torture goes beyond the solemn declaration of evil's banality. It offers an explanation of how institutional characteristics--even more strongly than personal ones like sadism or psychosis--produce that evil. It contributes to our understanding--if we dare call it that--of how creatures who begin by crying for their mothers can graduate to bashing in heads."
--Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer

"A masterful analytical history of torture's emergence in Roman law, its insertion into the medieval law of proof, its gradual abolition after 1750, and its dreadful recrudescence in modern times. The book is an exemplary application of historical scholarship to an issue where emotions tend to run ahead of reason."
--Michael Ignatieff, Times Literary Supplement

Edward Peters is Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include The Shadow King, The Magician, the Witch, and the Law, Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe, Inquisition, and, with Alan C. Kors, Witchcraft in Europe, 1100-1700: A Documentary History, all available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.