Epilogue

This epilogue suggests that the desire for sovereign agency and recognition are by no means innocent aspirations, since the quest for sovereign agency often tends to circumscribe the autonomy of other actors thereby making it difficult to sustain equality among them. Indeed, the desire for sovereign agency and corresponding quest for recognition are not only prone to backfire on their own terms but also run the risk of perpetuating the same practices of misrecognition and forms of domination that they were designated to escape in the first place. This paradox has recently gained traction among students of international relations, who have argued that world politics is based on a desire for sovereign agency that is bound to produce misrecognition precisely out of the many frustrated attempts to attain international recognition. Those actors who want to assert their sovereign agency are faced with the challenge of navigating the narrow space between nonrecognition and misrecognition in order to preserve a modicum of autonomy in the midst of rival claims to sovereign agency. The chapter then considers how this dilemma plays itself out in the different international and domestic contexts described by the contributors to this book.