ABSTRACT
Normative debates about how states should orient themselves to the international order dominate international legal scholarship. These debates typically presuppose a tension between the normative aspirations of state sovereignty and binding international obligation. This chapter proposes the ways in which global social constraints empower actors, including states; and the ways in which institutions—including the bundle of rules and legitimated identities associated with state "sovereignty"—constrain actors. It introduces a sociological model of sovereignty that illuminates and introduces these ideas by outlining the conceptual framework of the approach, identifying several foundational propositions of the theory, and summarizing existing empirical research supporting these views. The chapter describes the building blocks of a sociological theory of the state, and distills from these general propositions several concrete characteristics of the "state" and "international society". Finally, it summarizes the substantial body of empirical work supporting these claims.
