The Concept of Sovereignty Revisited

This essay, in discussing some recent contributions to the contemporary debate on sovereignty, focuses on what is at stake in this debate. While most authors today agree that the meaning of the concept of sovereignty is open to change across time and space, students of international law and international relations disagree about the causes and consequences of this conceptual change. While some scholars take such changes to be indicative of a corresponding transformation of global institutions, others regard them as evidence of the remarkable endurance of the Westphalian order. In this essay, I argue that this disagreement depends less on divergent accounts of the world, and more on the ontological status implicitly accorded to concepts by these authors. I conclude by pointing out that the very emphasis on the changing meaning of sovereignty makes normative problems intrinsically hard to settle, and that dealing with this impasse will be a major challenge to legal and political theory in the years to come.