Response to Swati Srivastava’s Review of Contesting Sovereignty: Power and Practice in Africa and Southeast Asia

Abstract

and sovereignty “understood as freedom to act” (pp. 1-6). Stephen Krasner famously introduced four types of sovereignty (international legal, Westphalian, domestic, and interdependence) that differ on internal/external control as well as legitimation. My book, also featured in this critical dialogue, catalogues over twenty definitions in IR theory that focus on different aspects related to “supreme authority.” The lack of conceptual clarity (or discussion of the impossibility of such clarity) are important because the empirics are structured around different contestations of sovereignty norms. However, in the numerous mentions of proposing or opposing norm circles defending sovereignty claims, Ng only includes two explicit mentions of sovereignty by a state leader (p. 86, p. 216). For example, when discussing how South Africa and Nigeria dealt with Gaddafi’s United States of Africa proposal, the book does not use the archival material to reveal particular sovereignty concerns, instead choosing only to emphasize that such opposition existed (pp. 89-90, 92-93, 95). Thus, while Ng remarks that “African states could be united in such negotiations without ceding sovereignty” (p. 97), we have little insight on how the leaders thought about the meaning of sovereignty and what kind of sovereignty contests were at play with Gaddafi’s proposal. The story recurs in the successful Conference on Security, Stability, Development, and Cooperation in Africa (CSSDCA), which introduced ideas of collective responsibility. CSSDCA is interesting because it features within-case variation: the proposal by Nigerian leader Olusegun Obasanjo in 1991 was initially rejected before a version was later adopted in 1999. Here, Ng calls attention to the OAU Charter’s principle of noninterference as the sovereignty norm at stake in 1991 (p. 112). However, while mentioning that states like Libya and Sudan were vocally opposed (p. 116), Ng does not present those objections in charter terms or otherwise. In the historical background, Ng refers to the “OAU’s first open debate about the nature of sovereignty” (p. 119), but the selected passage does not invoke sovereignty directly or indirectly. Crucially, the one aspect that changed between the 1991 and 1999 proposals was that CSSDCA’s challenge to sovereignty was “less directly stated” (p. 127). This is an important aspect of what I call “Idealized Sovereignty,” where state leaders maintain the convenient fiction of indivisible supreme authority even when they proceed to divide and delegate sovereign functions. Elsewhere, in the ASEAN chapters, Ng sometimes uses language of “national interests” to substitute for sovereignty (pp. 179, 188), but this is also not substantiated by diplomatic discourse. There is sometimes a sense that the meaning of sovereignty norms in regional organizations is ambiguous outside of practice (p. 183), but this point could be more clearly stated, especially given its affinity with international practice theory. The practices themselves still rarely highlight the variety of contests over meanings of sovereignty. Second, the book’s unique contribution to norm contestation derives from promoting a theoretical argument that foregrounds “utility” beyond a foundationalist approach that conceives of norms as moral (p. 23). For Ng, the foundationalist view misses that norm following also occurs for instrumental reasons (p. 26). Instead, Ng adopts the idea of utility, which means that “norms that are more beneficial or serve a greater utility than their counterparts are likely to spread and embed themselves” (p. 28). Even though this framing largely overlooks work on the instrumentalization of norms (e.g., see Ian Hurd, How to Do Things with International Law, 2017), the more acute concern is disregarding the feedback loop between power and utility and divorcing the creation of “greater utility” from normative force.While Ng touches upon this briefly in a footnote (p. 43), the issue is surely deserving of greater engagement, especially if the utility model claims to not treat preferences as exogenous (p. 44). Ng also positions his contribution to norm contestation by opposing realist and constructivist foils (p. 36). International Relations scholars have (gradually) moved past arguments that exclusively present realism as material power and constructivism as ideas or norms. Indeed, the variety of social construction projects in IR over the past two decades would be totally compatible with Ng’s embrace of “power in practice” and the strategic use of norms. While Ng situates his work well within practice theory, there are missed opportunities to include IR theorists who have recently worked to reconceptualize norms (e.g., Michelle Jurkovich, “What Isn’t a Norm?”, International Studies Review 22[3], 2020), especially from a processual view (see Simon Frankel Pratt, “From Norms to Normative Configurations,” International Theory 12 [1], 2020), and study the practices of procedural rules (see Mark Raymond, Social Practices of Rule-Making in World Politics, 2019). These works are similarly advancing practice theory and norm contestation beyond singular logics, but without reifying the material/ideational divide. These conceptual issues notwithstanding, Contesting Sovereignty is an important book that sheds light on multiple histories of wrestling with sovereignty in regional integration outside the Global North. It deserves to be read widely and have its argument engaged, through dialogues like this.