From Internal/External to Post-States and Other Actors: Political Theory, International Relations, and International Relations Theory

Abstract

This chapter is the first of four addressing contemporary debates about the meaning and utility of the concept of sovereignty, and building up a conception of sovereignty in relational terms. The aim in these chapters is to draw upon some of the continuities and discontinuities with the plurality of previous ideas and discourses about sovereignty (see Prokhovnik 2008 forthcoming), and to demonstrate that sovereignty remains a salient concept in politics and political theory. These chapters, but this one in particular does not attempt to represent the literature exhaustively but to use some contemporary arguments in the literature to advance the case developed here.