ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the three of sovereignty's familiar guises: degraded sovereignty, resurgent sovereignty and decomposed or recomposed sovereignty. These three poles provide an opening framework for thinking about sovereignty. Alongside these twists on the conventional picture of territorial sovereignty, people might want to embrace the larger thought that sovereignty has somehow been deterritorialised in the process of decomposition or recomposition. A rendering of sovereignty along these lines would take us far, far away from the Montevideo Convention and questions of statehood. Instead, people would find ourselves doing interstitial work between the state and the global, between the private and the public, between politics and economics: on bilateral investment treaties (BITs) perhaps or on European integration or on NAFTA. The sovereign state remains, in theory, a publicly directed political form. After all, neither privately governed, nor globally directed, alternative institutions and enterprises are marked by overwhelming levels of legitimacy.
