Chapter 2 makes the case for looking at state sovereignty as a social construction rather than as a definitional absolute. In other words, it argues that “sovereignty” does not have a specific meaning, defined by law or concept and static over time. Rather, it is a practice, and the content of sovereignty as a practice changes over time. The chapter reviews various ways in which sovereignty is understood in international relations, and the analytical utility and limitations of using the concept in these ways. It discusses the Peace of Westphalia in this context, since “Westphalian sovereignty” is a sufficiently common trope in international relations theory that it cannot be ignored (this discussion reappears in various places throughout the book), and argues that the Peace actually has fairly little to do with the contemporary practice of state soveriegnty. It also briefly discusses methodology, and how understanding sovereignty as a social construct can address questions of both power in and change of sovereignty in ways that conceptualizing sovereignty as a definitional absolute cannot.

Chapter 7 looks into the interstices of the contemporary sovereign states system. One of the key practical effects of the normative tensions between the different understandings of property informing the practice of the sovereignty cartel is a governance gap between autonomy and multilateralism into which a variety of illicit activities falls. The chapter argues that the tensions not only create spaces in the system in which illicit activity can find a home but actually force some activity there by definition. This often involves non-sovereign actors engaged in economic pursuits, either finding the interstices of sovereignty to arbitrage regulatory gaps or forced into the interstices by those gaps. It also often involves sovereign actors taking advantage of the market value of their sovereign property rights to enrich either their states or themselves. These gaps in governance in the sovereign states system introduce places where sovereign right can be challenged. This is why a sovereignty cartel is necessary to maintain these rights. The cartel is the mechanism by which the sovereign states system polices its interstices and keeps them from undermining the prerogatives of its members.

Chapter 4 unpacks and illustrates the idea of the sovereignty cartel. It looks at some of the individual-level practices through which the sovereignty cartel is reconstituted in the daily conduct of international politics. The chapter makes the connection between sovereignty as an abstract concept and the actual people who act on the international stage in the name of that concept. It complicates the idea of property rights by discussing the responsibilities that are often part and parcel of rights. These property rights include responsibilities to other sovereigns, but also include responsibilities to the citizenries in whose name states rule. In addition, the chapter provides examples of the sovereignty cartel in action, drawn from a variety of issues, including multilateral participation, human rights, and the governance of the global commons. These all show ways in which sovereign right involves specific and historically contingent claims by states, and requires of those states specific behaviors, rather than being a generic claim that can be understood and studied out of context.

Chapter 6 circles back to the question of what we understand property rights to mean, earlier chapters having made a general case for property rights as a lens through which to study sovereignty and having addressed the question of who is the sovereign who holds those rights. The chapter looks at the roots of different aspects of contemporary sovereign rights in both Roman law and English contract law. It looks at what these different traditions of property have to say about sovereignty with respect to both domestic politics and international relations, and how they interact with other ideas that legitimate the modern state such as popular sovereignty and nationalism. It connects the Roman tradition with a national interest in autonomy, and the English tradition with a national interest in multilateralism. It highlights the conceptual tensions between these traditions as practiced in contemporary international relations.

Chapter 5 delves into the relationship between sovereignty and the sovereign, and between the sovereign and the state. Who decides who is sovereign, which is to say who controls the property rights associated with state sovereignty? The chapter addresses this question, arguing that the rules about who gets to be sovereign are, at least in part, both imposed and enforced by the cartel. Which is to say that the sovereign is a member of the cartel because she is recognized as sovereign by the other members of the cartel. The norms underlying this recognition change over time, and the chapter notes four different major changes in these norms since the Westphalian settlement, from feudal to monarchical to national to territorial to citizenship legitimation. But these norms are sticky, and new ones often do not fully displace earlier ones. Sovereignty disputes are therefore often messy; not only are the norms that govern what sovereign property is mutually contradictory, but the norms governing whose property it is are mutually contradictory as well.

Chapter 3 develops some of the basic arguments underlying the concept of the sovereignty cartel. It develops the idea of using property rights as a lens through which to study sovereignty and contextualizes that lens in a broader ontology of sovereignty. It builds on the property rights lens to develop the core idea of the book, that sovereignty can usefully be seen as a recognition cartel in which a small group of actors arrogate to themselves, and work communally to protect, a set of exclusive rights to global governance. It also addresses the question of why the sovereignty cartel should be read as a social construction, as the political expression of a set of norms of sovereignty, rather than as a simple interest-based argument. Yes, interests matter and power matters. But both matter in the context of, and can only be understood as expressions of, an ontologically prior set of norms associated with sovereignty.

Chapter 9 addresses the “So what?” question: what do we learn from studying sovereignty through a property rights lens? One key upshot of the argument is that changes in international patterns of economic regulation and use of force are not necessarily indicative of either the strength of or the content of claims of sovereign right. Sovereignty maintains its centrality in the international system not only (arguably not even primarily) through the practice of governance, but also through collusion to reinforce a normative structure of sovereign right. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about the “So what?” question for international relations theorists. For theorists of foreign policy the sovereignty cartel helps to explain deference by bigger states to the sovereign rights claims of smaller states when national interest would argue against such deference. For globalization theorists the cartel shows that globalization and sovereignty do not vary inversely on a unidimensional spectrum. For theorists of the social structure of the international system it highlights the often-overlooked agentive processes needed to maintain existing social structures rather than just agentive mechanisms for changing structures.

Chapter 8 fills in the last piece of the theoretical story of this book. It looks at the various normative tensions and governance gaps in contemporary state sovereignty and asks how sovereignty can be maintained as a set of broadly recognized norms, rather than simply as rights claims, in the face of those tensions. It introduces the idea of normative dissonance and connects this idea to arguments from political psychology about the cognitive mechanisms people use to navigate dissonant information and beliefs. It runs the idea past normative tensions in questions both of what sovereign property rights are and of who should hold those rights. This introduction of political psychology into the story of the sovereignty cartel provides a mechanism for thinking about state sovereignty as a system that cannot be reduced to a rational set of rules or to a simple discussion of interests, but that reconstitutes itself nonetheless. It is in this sense like any other social system; it does not make coherent sense, but it functions, so we make what sense of it that we can.

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the sovereignty cartel, the idea that states do not just compete with each other to maximize the national interest or cooperate with each other to provide global public goods, but also collude with each other to reinforce the centrality of the sovereign state as a category of actor in international relations. It reviews the existing international relations literature on state sovereignty and locates the idea of the sovereignty cartel within that literature. It develops the metaphor of the cartel and gives an overview of how this metaphor is developed throughout the book. It looks at different understandings of property rights underlying the idea of the sovereignty cartel and introduces the possibility that these understandings are not mutually compatible. Finally, the chapter provides a plan of the book and an overview of the chapter structure.