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Abstract
Debates about the politics of state creation and recognition and about the supposed crisis of the "liberal international order" intersect where new state creations are regarded as challenges to the (liberal) international order. Cases in point are the secessionist bids of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine and their recognition, support, and incorporation by Russia, as well as the even more widely rejected claim of the self-declared Islamic State, or Da'esh, to establish a transnational caliphate across Iraq and Syria. Yet this contribution argues that the claims and contestations articulated in these extreme cases point to ongoing (liberal) international order-ing, rather than its demise. For one, the broadly liberal international law of state creation based on rights and rules has always been inherently contradictory, drawing boundaries to state-making "out of bounds" contingently. For another, the challengers themselves take an ambiguous position vis-à-vis the liberal and international orders that they defy. Russia has justified its recognition of Ukrainian separatists in terms of self-determination under international law, and Da'esh has emulated the modern territorial state that it set out to abolish. The contribution thus shows how contested state creations "out of bounds" also invoke, mimic, and animate the (liberal) international order that they challenge.

Ontological security studies (OSS) in International Relations (IR) emphasize the role of identity, anxiety, and a sense of self in world politics. Yet suggesting that states act in certain ways because of 'who they are' also assumes that they are in fact states. In this article, I problematize the presupposition of state subjects in the context of separatist conflicts in which claims to statehood compete and overlap. Where unrecognized de facto states are pitted against their unyielding parent states, the two threaten each other's very state personhood, thereby presenting a more radical challenge to their existence than traditional 'physical' and 'ontological' security threats. Separatist conflicts thus reveal a widely overlooked dimension of fundamental ontological security, provided by the constitution and recognition of states as such. Moreover, because of the exclusiveness of state subjects in the modern international order, any third parties attempting to resolve such conflicts inevitably face a meta-security dilemma whereby reassuring one side by confirming its claim to statehood simultaneously renders the other side radically insecure. Thus, rather than regarding particular state subjects as merely the starting point of quests for ontological security in international relations, they should also be understood as already their result.

Ontological security studies (OSS) in International Relations (IR) emphasize the role of identity, anxiety, and a sense of self in world politics. Yet suggesting that states act in certain ways because of 'who they are' also assumes that they are in fact states. In this article, I problematize the presupposition of state subjects in the context of separatist conflicts in which claims to statehood compete and overlap. Where unrecognized de facto states are pitted against their unyielding parent states, the two threaten each other's very state personhood, thereby presenting a more radical challenge to their existence than traditional 'physical' and 'ontological' security threats. Separatist conflicts thus reveal a widely overlooked dimension of fundamental ontological security, provided by the constitution and recognition of states as such. Moreover, because of the exclusiveness of state subjects in the modern international order, any third parties attempting to resolve such conflicts inevitably face a meta-security dilemma whereby reassuring one side by confirming its claim to statehood simultaneously renders the other side radically insecure. Thus, rather than regarding particular state subjects as merely the starting point of quests for ontological security in international relations, they should also be understood as already their result.

At the height of the Syrian civil war, many observers argued that the Syrian state was collapsing, fragmenting, or dissolving. Yet, it never actually vanished. Revisiting the rising challenges to the Syrian state since 2011 – from internal collapse through external fragmentation to its looming dissolution by the 'Islamic State' – provides a rare opportunity to investigate the re-enactment of both statehood and international order in crisis. Indeed, what distinguishes the challenges posed to Syria, and Iraq, from others in the region and beyond is that their potential dissolution was regarded as a threat not merely to a – despised – dictatorial regime, or a particular state, but to the state-based international order itself. Regimes fall and states 'collapse' internally or are replaced by new states, but the international order is fundamentally questioned only where the territorially delineated state form is contested by an alternative. The article argues that the Syrian state survived not simply due to its legal sovereignty or foreign regime support, but also because states that backed the rebellion, fearing the vanishing of the Syrian nation-state in a transnational jihadist 'caliphate', came to prefer its persistence under Assad. The re-enactment of states and of the international order are thus ultimately linked.

The literature on de facto states challenges the conventional identification of states by legal recognition, proposing to identify states based on their effectiveness instead. Yet, as I argue in this paper, rather than turning the tables on recognition, the de facto state challenge ultimately reveals all state identification in International Relations and international law to be essentially indeterminate. This lacuna, I suggest, is not an accidental omission, but an expression of the foundational paradox of modern political order that is rooted in the intertwined ontology of the state system and the individual states constituting it, with each presupposing the other. As a result, the opposition between empirical facts, political decisions, and legal norms invoked in attempts to identify states cannot but remain irresolvable. This should not be regarded as a problem to be overcome, however, but as a source of social order. Although states cannot be substantively identified, any effort to do so in practice naturalizes the state as the very form through which we articulate and shape political claims, conflicts, and settlements. In performatively enacting states precisely at the contested margins, state identification thus both invokes and (re-)produces the statist international as the central imaginary of modern political order.

Introduction : variations on sovereignty / Janis Grzybowski and Hannes Černy -- The making and remaking of state sovereignty in IR theory : from fantasy to nightmare / Moran Mandelbaum -- States of sovereignty and the making of the world of our making / Zoran Oklopcic -- Ontological security and the emotional significance of sovereignty / Nina C. Krickel-Choi -- The aporetic state : on de facto paradoxes and sovereign agency / Rebecca Bryant -- How the Iraqi Kurdistan independence debate came to die : Western IR scholars as coprotagonists of the nationalist conflicts they set out to describe / Hannes Černy -- "Was the 'Islamic State' a state?" : claiming, contesting, and creating jihadist statehood / Maj Grasten and Janis Grzybowski -- Practicing and performing sovereignty abroad : alternative diplomacy / Giulia Prelz Oltramonti -- Spectacular fishing : embodying sovereignty in the post-Brexit Channel Islands and the South China Sea / Edyta Roszko -- Self-determination denied and contested : Palestine and Western Sahara / Randa Farah -- EU citizenship as catalyst for new sovereignty practices / Sandra Mantu -- Open pit of ontological (in)security : Poland's territorial sovereignism and the Turów lignite mine quagmire / Dominik Sipinski -- Russia and Ukraine : conflicting time perspectives in recognition policies and the use of force / Bruno Coppieters -- "Doing sovereignty" : Sardinian independentism and the limits of state sovereignty / Daniela Morgan -- Indigenous sovereignty as the in-between space : what is and what is possible / Matthew Wildcat and Justin de Leon.

"This edited book explores diverse contestations and transformations of sovereignty around the world. Sovereignty plays a central role in modern political thought and practice, but it also remains fundamentally contested. Depending on the context and perspective, it seems either omnipresent or elusive, liberating or oppressive, fading or resilient. Indeed, if in recent decades sovereignty has been expected to wane, today it is back on the agenda; not as the solid bedrock of modern - international - politics, which it never was, but as variations on a concept and institution that are ever contested and, as a result, constantly transforming. Bringing together perspectives from various disciplines, including International Relations (IR), political theory, geography, law, and anthropology, this volume: - goes beyond debates over the resilience or decline of sovereignty to instead emphasize how precisely the inherent ambiguities, tensions, and contestations in scholarship and practice spark sovereignty's manifold transformations; - offers three theoretical chapters that examine the illusions, contradictions, transformation, and lasting appeal of sovereignty and the nation-state; - explores sovereignty from various disciplinary perspectives in 11 empirical chapters that highlight its role in different contexts around the world, from the European Union (EU) to the South China Sea, to Western Sahara and Palestine; - problematizes the interplay between theory and practice of statehood and sovereignty, as in the perception of Northern Cyprus as a 'fake state', scholars' promotion of Kurdish 'statehood' in Iraq, and studies affirming the 'Islamic State'. This book will be of much interest to students of statehood, sovereignty, conflict studies and International Relations"--

While celebrated for bringing peace and prosperity to the region, European integration has been recently challenged by various internal and external crises that call the progressivist narrative of ever closer—and larger—union into question. Torn between regional community and global society, particularism and cosmopolitanism, and politics and technocracy, the European Union appears beset by fundamental tensions. In search of a different theoretical perspective on "the crisis," some commentators have drawn on Carl Schmitt's political theory to emphasize key issues concerning political decisions, identities, and boundaries in Europe. Yet, Schmitt comes with his own blind spots. For the purpose of a critical engagement with Schmitt's potential insights and their limits, this article contrasts his approach with that of his contemporary Alexandre Kojève, who envisioned the integration of world society through economy, law, technology, and administration, a perspective not unfamiliar to the original story of European integration. In reconsidering the dialectic between Schmitt's and Kojève's positions, this article goes beyond their apparent contradictions and discusses attempts by both authors to reconcile the opposition, from Kojève's move to Empires to Schmitt's theory of the union, thereby illuminating deep-seated dilemmas of contemporary European politics which fundamentally condition its trajectory between contestation and re-constitution.

AbstractThe Russian invasion of Ukraine has widely been seen as a failure of the international legal order, which could neither stop Russia from launching a war of aggression, nor prevent the perpetration of international crimes. In such a reading, great power politics have (once again) trumped international law. We argue instead that international law plays a crucial part in the conflict by providing a semantic infrastructure, which the opposing parties use to justify their actions, try to re-draw limits of permissible action and negotiate changing 'red lines' with the enemy. Drawing on the notion of lawfare, we show how the pragmatic (mis-)use of international law flexibly delineates boundaries and stabilizes expectations between adversaries even as they are contested in the current war. We focus on claims about self-determination and self-defence to justify the use of force; categorizations of combatants; and weapons transfers and the status of third states. That international law can be violated or reinterpreted to breaking point does not make it irrelevant. To the contrary, it recalls its important role as a language of conflict and compromise, beyond strictly legalist as well as dismissive realist views.

AbstractIn the debate on the (de-)judicialisation of international affairs and the International Criminal Court (ICC) specifically, the distinctions between legality and politics and between state sovereignty and the international remain contested. While realist and legalist approaches discuss the transformation of international politics by international criminal law, sociological and critical-legal perspectives instead highlight the politics of international criminal law. In this contribution, we focus on how the distinctions between (international) law and politics matter, not as substantively opposed spheres, but as boundaries that the ICC itself contingently and flexibly draws when considering particular situations. These meta-politics of invoking and reproducing key boundaries in seemingly technical elaborations of the interest of justice, the scope of its jurisdiction, or the application of complementarity reflect the Court's particular authority but also its predicament of pushing for an international criminal law serving humanity, rather than states, while reproducing the distinctions between (international) law and politics. We illustrate the Court's meta-politics by revisiting three recent decisions of the ICC to (not) investigate alleged international crimes committed by British forces in Iraq, by the Taliban, governmental, and US forces in Afghanistan, and by Israeli authorities and Palestinian groups in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

Interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of international law (IL) and International Relations (IR) has illuminated the roles of politics in law, of law in politics, and of the shifting boundary between the two in various areas of international affairs. The boundary itself, however, has proven resilient. While critical approaches investigating the politics of international law have come to insist on the lasting significance of legality proper, IR approaches to legalization have returned to politics.Although the apparent limits to challenging the boundary between legality and politics are not new, we suggest that they are intimately related to another great divide, i.e., that between the state and the international. Together, these two crosscutting lines have shaped the possibilities and constraints of articulating substantive positions 'in' (international) law and politics at least since the Interwar period. Reading these distinctions as intertwined 'nested oppositions', this article reconstructs the stylized but paradigmatic debates between Max Weber and Hans Kelsen over the nature of the state and between Hans Morgenthau and Hersch Lauterpacht over the nature of the international.We further illustrate how the same conceptual oppositions still enable and constrain current debates in IL and IR, discussing as examples the creation of states and the justiciability of international crimes. Crossing and contesting the boundaries ultimately reaffirms them as the matrix in which conflicts over states and the international are articulated as legal and political.