This edited book explores diverse contestations and transformations of sovereignty around the world. Sovereignty plays a central role in modern political thought and practice, but it also remains fundamentally contested. Depending on the context and perspective, it seems either omnipresent or elusive, liberating or oppressive, fading or resilient. Indeed, if in recent decades sovereignty has been expected to wane, today it is back on the agenda; not as the solid bedrock of modern – international – politics, which it never was, but as variations on a concept and institution that are ever contested and, as a result, constantly transforming. Bringing together perspectives from various disciplines, including International Relations (IR), political theory, geography, law, and anthropology, this volume: • goes beyond debates over the resilience or decline of sovereignty to instead emphasize how precisely the inherent ambiguities, tensions, and contestations in scholarship and practice spark sovereignty’s manifold transformations; • offers three theoretical chapters that examine the illusions, contradictions, transformation, and lasting appeal of sovereignty and the nation-state; • explores sovereignty from various disciplinary perspectives in 11 empirical chapters that highlight its role in different contexts around the world, from the European Union (EU) to the South China Sea, to Western Sahara and Palestine; • problematizes the interplay between theory and practice of statehood and sovereignty, as in the perception of Northern Cyprus as a ‘fake state’, scholars’ promotion of Kurdish ‘statehood’ in Iraq, and studies affirming the ‘Islamic State’. This book will be of much interest to students of statehood, sovereignty, conflict studies and International Relations. Chapters 8 of this book are available for free in Open Access at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Why do political actors willingly give up sovereignty to another state, or choose to resist, sometimes to the point of violence? Jesse Dillon Savage demonstrates the role that domestic politics plays in the formation of international hierarchies, and shows that when there are high levels of rent-seeking and political competition within the subordinate state, elites within this state become more prepared to accept hierarchy. In such an environment, members of society at large are also more likely to support the surrender of sovereignty. Empirically rich, the book adopts a comparative historical approach with an emphasis on Russian attempts to establish hierarchy in post-Soviet space, particularly in Georgia and Ukraine. This emphasis on post-Soviet hierarchy is complemented by a cross-national statistical study of hierarchy in the post WWII era, and three historical case studies examining European informal empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

State sovereignty is an inherently social construct. The modern state system is not based on some timeless principle of sovereignty, but on the production of a normative conception that links authority, territory, population, and recognition in a unique way, and in a particular place (the state). The unique contribution of this book is to describe and illustrate the practices that have produced various sovereign ideals and resistances to them. The contributors analyze how the components of state sovereignty are socially constructed and combined in specific historical contexts.

This book is a critical inquiry into sovereignty and argues that the meaning and functions performed by this concept have changed significantly during the past decades, with profound implications for the ontological status of the state and the modus operandi of the international system as a whole. Although we have grown accustomed to regarding sovereignty as a defining characteristic of the modern state and as a constitutive principle of the international system, Sovereignty as Symbolic Form argues that recent changes indicate that sovereignty has been turned into something granted, contingent upon its responsible exercise in accordance with the norms and values of an imagined international community. Hence we need a new understanding of sovereignty in order to clarify the logic of its current usage in theory and practice alike, and its connection to broader concerns of social ontology: what kind of world do we inhabit, and of what kind of entities is this world composed? This book will be of interest to students of International Relations, Critical Security and International Politics.

Sovereignty, originally the figure of 'sovereign', then the state, today meets new challenges of globalization and privatization of power.

The political make-up of the contemporary world changes with such rapidity that few attempts have been made to consider with adequate care, the nature and value of the concept of sovereignty. What exactly is meant when one speaks about the acquisition, preservation, infringement or loss of sovereignty? This book revisits the assumptions underlying the applications of this fundamental category, as well as studying the political discourses in which it has been embedded. Bringing together historians, constitutional lawyers, political philosophers and experts in international relations, Sovereignty in Fragments seeks to dispel the illusion that there is a unitary concept of sovereignty of which one could offer a clear definition. This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of international relations, international law and the history of political thought.

This collection of essays focusses on the following concepts: sovereignty (the unique, intangible and yet essential characteristic of states), statehood (what it means to be a state, and the process of acquiring or losing statehood) and state responsibility (the legal component of what being a state entails). The unifying theme is that they have always been and will in the future continue to form a crucial part of the foundations of public international law. While many publications focus on new actors in international law such as international organisations, individuals, companies, NGOs and even humanity as a whole, this book offers a timely, thought-provoking and innovative reappraisal of the core actors on the international stage: states. It includes reflections on the interactions between states and non-state actors and on how increasing participation by and recognition of the latter within international law has impacted upon the role and attributes of statehood.