3 - Sovereign Rights

Summary

Chapter 3 develops some of the basic arguments underlying the concept of the sovereignty cartel. It develops the idea of using property rights as a lens through which to study sovereignty and contextualizes that lens in a broader ontology of sovereignty. It builds on the property rights lens to develop the core idea of the book, that sovereignty can usefully be seen as a recognition cartel in which a small group of actors arrogate to themselves, and work communally to protect, a set of exclusive rights to global governance. It also addresses the question of why the sovereignty cartel should be read as a social construction, as the political expression of a set of norms of sovereignty, rather than as a simple interest-based argument. Yes, interests matter and power matters. But both matter in the context of, and can only be understood as expressions of, an ontologically prior set of norms associated with sovereignty.