This chapter concludes by addressing how this book’s analysis reconsiders sovereign power in IR and speculates on a structural model of responsibility that takes hybrid sovereignty seriously.

This chapter concretizes this book’s theoretical and analytical arguments by analyzing two transformations in the political history of the English East India Company (EIC). First, I show that key to the EIC’s success were public/private hybrid relations ranging from contractual, institutional, and shadow configurations. Contractual hybridity was visible through formal and frequent charter negotiations and public exchange of forced loans and other fiscal extractions. Institutional hybridity was evident through the EIC benefiting from insider rules and the rise of MP-Directors as well as more sophisticated informal lobbying. Shadow hybridity materialized through side payments and the presence of back channels through the Secret Committee. Second, the EIC’s self-understanding of sovereign authority shifted from a privilege understood within Idealized Sovereignty to a self-possessed right from extensive enactments of Lived Sovereignty. Meanwhile, the EIC’s sovereign awakening revealed problems with mutually inclusive and nonhierarchical early modern sovereignty that were thus far ignored.

This chapter introduces the main argument of this book that global sovereign power is constituted by public/private hybridity in Lived Sovereignty, while sovereign authority is recognized as indivisibly public in Idealized Sovereignty. Public/private hybridity takes on different characteristics of contractual, institutional, and shadow forms based on the formalization and publicization of relations. In relation to hybrid sovereignty, the lived realities of different types of public/private hybridity are in tension with the idealized imperatives of determining what is public versus private.

This chapter theorizes that sovereignty is the interplay of two contrasting modalities. In Idealized Sovereignty, sovereign authority is represented exclusively in “the state” per the doctrine of indivisibility developed by early modern theorists and reified in IR theory. In Lived Sovereignty, achieving sovereign competence involves divisible practices of state and nonstate actors in a variety of social relations. We would do a disservice to sovereignty’s complexity if only one of the two modes persevered in analyses of sovereignty. Instead, the chapter intervenes in major IR debates to argue that sovereignty should be hybridized. This overarching framework guides the ideal-types of public/private hybridity developed in the next chapter and the empirical analyses in the remainder of this book, where hybrid sovereignty is necessary to build a global empire, go to war, regulate global markets, and protect rights.

This chapter illustrates the forms and dynamics of contractual hybridity in American wars using the case of Blackwater. Blackwater’s contractual hybridity was visible in its formal contracts with public funding. Contractual relations created power payoffs by deploying a contractor force for American wars and raised Weberian legitimacy dilemmas from limited contractor oversight and distributed accountability. Security contractors also disturb civilmilitary relations by posing as “civilian combatants” or “unlawful combatants,” depending on the preferred definition under international law. The chapter also follows bureaucratic debates on defining "inherently governmental functions" given contracting, which reveal the effort it takes to balance Idealized and Lived Sovereignty. By being attentive to formalized and publicized hybrid relations, the chapter thus wrestles with unique problems in sovereign governance that challenge the legitimacy of a sovereign authority that contracts itself.

This chapter argues that Amnesty International’s chief sovereign accomplishment in Lived Sovereignty is organizing a global human rights polity from disparate transnational publics. However, shadow relations between Amnesty and governments related to funding, country access, and negotiating reforms in its first two decades threatened to derail the moral purity that undergirds the protection of human rights in Idealized Sovereignty. Successfully navigating shadow hybridity has thus been a central yet understudied feature of Amnesty. The historical analysis contextualizes the difficult choices Amnesty made to become the world’s leading INGO. Amnesty thus helps us see that hybrid relations endure even when the stakes are very high, exemplifying the pervasiveness of hybrid sovereignty in global politics.

This chapter develops the analytical dynamics of public/private hybridity in Lived Sovereignty. It first situates public/private hybridity in the global governance literature and then introduces three ideal-types. Contractual hybridity features formal and publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated in public/private contractual exchanges. Institutional hybridity features informal and partly publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated through public/private institutional linkages. Shadow hybridity features nonformalized and nonpublicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated in public/private shadowy bargains. Finally, the chapter presents a Weberian-inspired research design to show off the three ideal-types in the empirics that follow.

This chapter examines institutional hybridity in the International Chamber of Commerce’s (ICC) regulatory prowess as the primary organized business interlocutor for intergovernmental bodies in global commerce. The empirics follow various ways in which the ICC embeds itself in global institutions through issue-definition, agenda-setting, and rulemaking. Institutional linkages allow the ICC to organize international markets while boosting the privilege of global corporate elites to reap the benefits of trade and investment at the expense of others. Balancing the legitimacy blowbacks to this elitism is at the core of the politics of institutionalizing rules for global commerce. Moreover, the study of the ICC helps us see that “transnational private authority” need not necessitate a retreat of the state, but rather a recomposition of what it means to regulate across borders. The ICC’s Lived Sovereignty relies fundamentally on the Idealized Sovereignty of governments to keep its institutional status.