Representation and Recognition: State Sovereignty as Performative

Abstract

What is the relationship between a state’s sovereignty and the recognition of its sovereignty by other states? This article argues that in critical circumstances, the recognition of state sovereignty is performative: recognition helps to bring sovereignty about, paradoxically because it appears merely to reflect it. I outline a performative mechanism of sovereignty, identifying the class of cases that it best explains and the social conditions under which it obtains. Sovereignty is particularly performative for independence movements and revolutionary regimes. And performative claims to sovereignty tend to be recognized when its performers are socially aligned with their audience. This requires a sociology of the agents that represent sovereignty externally, its diplomats, and the wider relations in which they are embedded. I illustrate this argument by analyzing the diplomacy of a revolutionary state, England between 1688 and 1713, in relation to a critical audience, France. Performative sovereignty has implications for the study of state formation and world politics, for theories of revolutionary and postcolonial states, and for the concept of performativity itself.