ABSTRACT
Introduction In international relations (IR) as well as in political discourse in general, state, power, and sovereignty have come to assume fundamental importance. Seen as primordial concepts, which define and determine the conceptual framework of the current debates, they figure as conditions of the possibility for the life form of local and global politics as we know it, thus exerting a quasi-fundamentalist exigency on the theoretical context that defines the playing field of IR, or so it seems. If the cold war did not prove it, critics maintain that the post-Soviet world demonstrates that the state has become by now the only show in town. To be a state, to be recognized as sovereign, is what all constituencies seek to aspire to, or so the argument goes.1 Consequently, power is in this context conceived as force, be it military, economic, or in any of its kinder versions such as diplomacy or discursive persuasion. But to view the political world this way is a relatively new phenomenon that has been contingent on a vision of modernity that claims a universal outlook, which, however, upon closer examination turns out to have only a limited purchase. Deployed as constitutive for the discourse of IR, the normative claim of these concepts, even in their weakest forms, seems to pre-empt any critical examination that would delimit their universal hold.
