Forum: In the Beginning There was No Word (for it): Terms, Concepts, and Early Sovereignty

Abstract

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Reaching for allies? The dialectics and overlaps between international relations and area studies in the study of politics, security and conflicts

“…As it will be discussed by several of the articles of this Special Issue , the Eurocentric vision of international politics leads to embrace several assumptions, such as the ‘myth of Westphalian’ and the ‘myth of 1919’ (Bell 2009; De Carvalho et al , 2011; Costa Lopez et al ., 2018).…”

State recognition and dynamic sovereignty

“…In his earlier seminal work, Bartelson (1995) reflects on how sovereignty and knowledge have been co-produced historically. Following works debated the emergence of sovereignty, with many questioning the link of the concept to the Peace of Westphalia (see Osiander, 2001 for an overview), and more recent debates build on these works to explore further the starting points of sovereignty and whether the concept can be applied to a period (De Carvalho, 2018; Lathan, 2018, in Costa Lopez et al, 2018) or place when/where the term did not exist as such (see Seth, 2013; Zarakol, 2018, in Costa Lopez et al, 2018, for challenges to sovereignty’s eurocentricity). Furthermore, there are more specific historical accounts that highlight change in relation to sovereignty.…”

“…Similarly, Krasner (1999) finds that, at the very minimum, recognition is extended to those with territory and formal juridical autonomy, but that there have also been additional criteria that have varied over time and included the ability to defend and protect a defined territory, the existence of an established government and the presence of a population. Zarakol (in Costa Lopez et al, 2018) elaborates on how recognition developed from being related to internal sovereignty to being related to external sovereignty. In this context, Barkin and Cronin (1994: 109) have argued that the way in which sovereignty is historically constructed means that who is considered to be sovereign changes over time.…”

“…Bartelson (2014) highlights that defining sovereignty prevents us from observing changes; this seems to refer to changes in the construction of sovereignty in the theory and practice of international relations. Indeed, my approach to sovereignty acknowledges this and rests on ideas advanced by, for example, Holm (in Costa Lopez et al, 2018), who argues that practices (here, of denoting a recognition stance) constitute an identifiable phenomenon (the way and extent to which a statehood claim is recognised) and that such practices produce, reform and redefine sovereignty and its constitutive elements (Biersteker and Weber, 1996: 9). By doing so, we avoid what Werner and De Wilde (2001: 283) describe as a ‘descriptive fallacy’, that is, the erroneous assumption that the discourse of sovereignty means (rather than is correlated to, as argued by this study) an empirical reality.…”

Racial sovereignty

“…This question should not be unfamiliar to International Relations (IR) scholars. Despite important interventions from critical perspectives, orthodox conceptions of sovereignty as the foundational grammar of ‘the international’ remain resilient (Costa Lopez et al, 2018: 491). Here too, sovereignty is typically defined as ‘authority over a territory occupied by a relatively fixed population, supposedly necessary to protect that territory and its citizens from external [and internal] threats’ (Leigh and Weber, 2018).…”