This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Winner of the 2015 David Easton Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association (APSA) Global forces are eroding the ability of states to exert sovereign control over their populations, territories, and borders. Yet when dominated subjects across the world dream of freedom, they continue to conceive of it in sovereign terms. Sovereign freedom haunts the imagination of oppressed ethnic minorities, popular masses ruled by foreign powers or homegrown tyrants, indigenous peoples, and individuals chafing under customary or governmental restrictions. On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions draws on political theory and on two case studies - the encounter between Anglo-American settlers and Native American tribes, and the search for Jewish sovereignty in Palestine - to probe the allure of the idea of sovereign freedom and its self-defeating logic. It concludes by shifting its sights from political to economic sovereign power and by pursuing intimations of non-sovereign freedom in the contemporary age.

The Oppositional Imagination draws together elements from Marxism, analytical philosophy, post-structuralism, and post-colonial criticism to analyse the elusive interplay of culture and power. It focuses its attention on cultural domination, opposition and evasion in the realm of sex and gender.

Joan Cocks reflects on questions crucial to both political theorists and feminists: the relationship between political theory and practical life; the possibility of bringing together a philosophical and a literary language to comprehend and evoke concrete experience; and the reconciliation of radical political commitment with an appreciation of shades of grey in the social world. She explores the variety of ways in which power and eroticism intersect; the liberating and tyrannical impulses of marginal cultures; and the place of the loyalist, the eccentric, the critic, the traitor, and the rebel in the sexual struggle.

The Oppositional Imagination reaffirms the centrality of political theory and feminist practice while at the same time challenging certain of their key principles in thought-provoking ways.

"Is it possible to foster enough unity to cope with pressing social issues without succumbing to the exclusions of nationalism? Do those who criticize the ugliness of nationalism too often fail to compensate in other ways for the loss of its positive virtues? Joan Cocks pursues such questions in a sensitive way, putting herself into the hearts and souls of engaged intellectuals who have found themselves plagued by them. This is not only a timely and provocative book, it is written in the limpid prose we have come to expect from Cocks."--William E. Connolly, author of "Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed"

"Cocks is admirably well-read, writes engagingly, and goes at intellectual problems with a real passion. Nationalism is a hot topic, and Joan Cocks opens up interesting dimensions of theoretical reflection on this essential aspect of contemporary politics."--Ronald Beiner, University of Toronto

"Joan Cocks has written a gloriously old-fashioned book of political philosophy and intellectual history. There is nothing like it in a field that's replete with philosophical writings. From the beginning, it is clear that we are in the company of an accomplished and confident writer, a late-at-night quill-driver comfortable with presenting her political feelings for all to see. I constantly learned things, but more than that I enjoyed getting inside the mind of a thinker whose sensibility of engaged writing is refreshingly synthetic in a world of jostling excesses."--Paul James, Monash University, Australia

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Winner of the 2015 David Easton Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association (APSA) Global forces are eroding the ability of states to exert sovereign control over their populations, territories, and borders. Yet when dominated subjects across the world dream of freedom, they continue to conceive of it in sovereign terms. Sovereign freedom haunts the imagination of oppressed ethnic minorities, popular masses ruled by foreign powers or homegrown tyrants, indigenous peoples, and individuals chafing under customary or governmental restrictions. On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions draws on political theory and on two case studies - the encounter between Anglo-American settlers and Native American tribes, and the search for Jewish sovereignty in Palestine - to probe the allure of the idea of sovereign freedom and its self-defeating logic. It concludes by shifting its sights from political to economic sovereign power and by pursuing intimations of non-sovereign freedom in the contemporary age.