Description
Historical treatments of sovereignty tend to concentrate on its ‘conceptual history’ and less attention has been paid to how conditions associated to sovereignty, like territorial control or diplomatic recognition, change within a unit and over time (Kyris 2022). This dynamism of sovereignty becomes apparent in critical junctures whereby we see a significant change in the extent of one’s diplomatic recognition of statehood. Aside from dynamic, the study of state recognition also shows that sovereignty often remains partial, with statehood claimants like Palestine, Kosovo or the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic enjoying a certain degree of, but still not universal, recognition. These instances of partial and dynamic sovereignty also suggest that the borders of the community of states and of international relations are not as rigid or clear-cut as they might look at first glance.
This paper, then, explores a set of such critical events to investigate what were the processes, and the important actors and their activity within them, through which changes in recognition and sovereignty were produced. I draw data from secondary and original sources and use historical analysis to explore these questions in three such historical moments: the 2001 collective recognition of Timor Leste as an independent state through its entry to the UN, and oppositely, the collective de-recognition of the Republic of China (RoC) in Taiwan through its expulsion from the UN in 1971; and, finally, Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence, which was partially recognised.
In this way, a history first, theory then approach seeks to foreground the context (Green 2022) within which these changes took place and, then, generalise from rather than to the particular (Gaddis, 1996) about the ways in which recognition, the membership of the international community of states, and, therefore, international relations change. This allows us to unpack the historicisity of sovereignty and a better conceptualisation (De Carvalho et al. 2021) of its dynamic character. This conceptualisation is a timely contribution to historical treatments of sovereignty, including important recent interventions (Costa Lopez et al. 2018), that concentrate more on changes in the concept of sovereignty, rather than empirical manifestations related to it. More broadly, this study draws our attention to instances in which recognition was taken away (e.g. RoC) or was withheld (e.g. Kosovo), and, consequently, to moments of contraction of international relations or areas of liminality.
