Introduction

Political theorists have critiqued the concept of sovereignty since Jean Bodin first articulated it. Over the last 130 years, political theorists’ interest in the concept of sovereignty has come in four waves: in the 1890s, in the 1930s, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and from the 1990s to the present. The latest wave of interest is the most sustained of the four, lasting more than eighteen years, and it has produced more publications. WorldCat lists more than twenty publications for every year in the twenty-first century, whereas the high-mark prior to 1991 was four publications in 1978 and 1931. The proliferation of interest in sovereignty is significant. The most recent wave of sovereignty scholarship has focused on two issues.