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Politics in a Small World 67

states of emergency which have enabled the suspension of the rule of law
to detain terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Belmarsh Prison, and
elsewhere without trial, without access to the evidence against them, and,
for many years, without even the right to legal counsel. Once prisoners
are kept in such conditions, forms of cruel and degrading punishment and
interrogation techniques involving torture are all too common and, as we
now know, they were certainly a feature of detention in Guantanamo Bay
(Johns, 2005 ; Nash, 2009a ). Here we appear to see a form of state sov-
ereignty that remains unchanged since ancient times, all discussions of
state transformation in globalization notwithstanding.
It would be a mistake, however, to understand state sovereignty as
timeless in this way. The ongoing internationalization of the state makes
for a very particular context for these executive enactments of state sov-
ereignty. The rhetoric of the “ war on terror ” certainly did enable the
executive in the US and UK to seize extraordinary powers to disregard
the human rights of terrorist suspects, and to enact legislation, like the
Patriot Act in the US, that encroached on the established civil rights of
citizens by legalizing intrusive forms of surveillance. It is in the context
of measures that increase surveillance, technologies of control like bio-
metrics, and security measures of all kinds, that we have seen the rise of
what some have called “ the security state. ” At the same time, however,
Sassen argues that the power of the judiciary relative to the executive is
increased in current state transformation. She is especially concerned with
judicial review of the executive ’ s regulatory activities where the legislative
mechanisms for oversight are now disregarded. It is notable, however,
that, while the legislative did little to challenge the emergency powers of
the executive in the “ war on terror, ” the Supreme Court did confront the

Bush Administration ’ s definition of its own powers to override fundamen-
tal prisoners ’ rights (Sassen, 2006 : 178). In the UK, the relative power of
the judiciary to challenge the executive was even more striking, especially
as it derived from the European Convention of Human Rights incorpo-
rated into national law. The highest court in the UK, the Law Lords,
required parliament to release detained terrorist suspects where it judged
the government was in breach of European human rights (Nash, 2009a ).
This is not to say that there is now an appropriate balance between secu-
rity and rights, but rather to note that sovereignty is being restructured
in complex ways internally to internationalizing states, with the legislature
losing ground to the executive and the judiciary.
Even more dramatic is the restructuring of state sovereignty externally
in global governance. Interpretations of global governance, in political
sociology and also amongst those who challenge, or who are trying to