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Graínne De Búrca
The intersection of constitutional ideas and international law has been the subject of a significant wave of scholarship in recent years. This monograph, written not by a lawyer but by a political theorist at Columbia University, addresses these themes in an engaging and rigorous way. And although it is a deeply scholarly work, it is also very much a politically engaged book, grappling with many fundamental questions of international law and governance today while trying to argue for "realistic-utopian" reform.
While the book is not always an easy read, it is nonetheless a rich and rewarding one which does many things at once. It illuminates and critically analyses several bodies of literature from distinct though related fields - political theory, legal theory, constitutional law, and international law. Unusually in a cross-disciplinary book of this kind, Jean Cohen manages to do justice to each of these bodies of work, presenting the arguments fairly and meticulously before proceeding to critique them in a deft and nuanced way. She highlights points of agreement and disagreement, weaving specific strands of analysis from different bodies of scholarship into her own distinctive and powerful argument as the book proceeds.
It is a work that is both descriptive and prescriptive: the author argues for a particular understanding of the system of global governance today (presenting it in terms of what she calls a "dualistic sovereignty" regime), and at the same time sets forth a normative political project of reconceptualization and reform. Cohen argues in particular for an understanding and a reconstruction of the international legal and political system along "constitutional pluralist" lines.
The core of the book is an attempt to explain and reconcile the continuing existence and resilience of sovereign states on the one hand with a strong layer of global governance - an international legal �
