ABSTRACT
Of the several claimants to the holy grail of International Relations (IR), perhaps the most serious and least rivaled contender is the idea of Westphalian sovereignty. Treated often as part of the collective unconscious of the discipline, the concept informs most theorizing about world politics. This remains at least partially true even of approaches that seek to retain a certain degree of distance by treating sovereign statehood as an object of critique. More often than not, a tendency to insufficiently problematize the key referent in the field of IR—sovereign states—remains. While there is increasing skepticism about the notion of a unitary state, there is less disagreement in IR about the supposed European lineage of sovereign statehood. Thomas Biersteker (2006: 157) suggests that
[o]ne of the most important analytical challenges for scholars of international relations is to identify different meanings of state, sovereignty and territory, and to understand their origins, comprehend their changes of meaning, and analyze their interrelationships, and characterize their transformation.
Biesteker’s question of “origins” requires us to systematically historicize processes of state formation in diverse settings.