ABSTRACT
The chapter introduces the conceptual framework for the study of Chinese social constructions of sovereignty in the context of the East China Sea conflict, 2008–2018. Building upon holistic Constructivism, it develops a domestic agency-focused framework to analyse state sovereignty. It starts with critiquing dominant IR approaches—including Realism, Neorealism, Neoliberalism, Cosmopolitanism and the English School—for their embrace of a ‘Westphalian problématique’, namely, the notion of sovereignty as absolute, timeless and exogenous to a state. It contrasts Rationalist approaches with Constructivism, which considers sovereignty—rather than being fixed—as an ongoing artefact of state practice, hence, fluid and endogenous to states. Moving beyond Wendtian systemic Constructivism, it argues that the state’s understanding of sovereignty is simultaneously derived from the domestic discursive production of state identity and international structures of shared expectations that enable and mediate states’ agency. Thus, in order to understand how norms regarding sovereignty arise and how they evolve over time, the chapter considers it insufficient to look merely at how international society shapes identities of various territorial entities. It postulates that we must also explore the role domestic actors—their ideas, objectives and strategies—play in such entities’ variable productions of sovereignty.
