ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book sets out to better understand and explores governance practices in a cross-regional context, taking Risse's work on Areas of Limited Statehood as a point of departure. To the extent that the sovereignty paradigm requires external recognition as conditio sine qua non, the authors argue in light of the empirical illustrations of this volume, that recognition is also a key feature of domestic dimensions of sovereignty, i.e. statehood. They starts by positing that sovereignty and statehood suffer from three paradoxes. The paradox concerns the tenability of the Weberian statehood paradigm, when claims to a monopoly of legitimate violence are successfully challenged and/or violence is exerted by several categories of actors, many of them non-state, as we have seen in several contributions.
