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Frustrated sovereigns: the agency that makes the world go around

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Charlotte Epstein
Affiliation:
The University of Sydney
Thomas Lindemann
Affiliation:
L'École polytechnique, Université Paris-Saclay
Ole Jacob Sending*
Affiliation:
Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)
*
*Corresponding author. Email: ojs@nupi.no

Abstract

In this article, the introduction to this Special Issue, we underline the importance of the dynamics of misrecognition for the study of world politics. We make the case for shifting the focus from ‘recognition’, where it has long been cast in social, political and, more recently, International Relations theory, to misrecognition. We do so by returning to the original theorisation of misrecognition, Hegel’s dialectic of the master and servant. Our point of departure is not only that the desire for recognition is key social dynamic, but that the failure to obtain this recognition is built into this very desire. It is a crucial factor for understanding how international actors behave, including, but not only, states.

Thus understood, the desire for recognition is not simply a desire for social goods, for status or for statehood, but for more agency – more capacity to act. We explore the logic of misrecognition and show how the international system is a symbolic structure that is ordained by an unrealisable ideal of what we call ‘sovereign agency’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2018 

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References

1 Markell, Patchen, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

2 Our argument tracks close to Cynthia Weber and others’ discussion of subjectivity and state performance as an ongoing effort that is never complete and stable. Our focus on agency differs by highlighting that subjectivity, like identity, follows from and is a result of (frustrated) efforts at achieving agency. See Weber, Cynthia, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange, Vol. 37 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar . See also Butler, Judith, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar .

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3 This does not mean, however, that the dynamic is limited to states, as we discuss below.

4 The category of the negative is explained and developed in Charlotte Epstein’s contribution to this volume: Epstein, Charlotte, ‘The productive force of the negative and the desire for recognition: Lessons from Hegel and Lacan’, Review of International Studies, 44:5 (2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar , this Special Issue.

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14 Wendt, ‘Anarchy is what states make of it’, p. 412.

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16 Ibid, p. 411.

17 Ibid, p. 412.

18 Ibid, p. 411.

19 Ibid.

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43 Others have recently deployed a similar critique of the conceptualisation of how the ‘social’ or ‘culture’ is treated as a constituting and causal factor in international politics, focused on the conceptualisation of ‘culture’ as a bounded, homogenous entity that acts on actors in specific ways. See Reus-Smit, Christian, ‘Cultural diversity and international order’, International Organization, 71:4 (2017), pp. 851885 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

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54 Ibid, p. 11.

55 Ibid, p. 12.

56 Ibid, p. 12.

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60 Indeed, our point here is that while our focus is on states, and on sovereign agency, the logic we identify is one that we also think hold for other actors in the international system, whose operations are also marked by a desire for sovereign agency.

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94 In which we include economic systems; see Waltz, Theory.

95 Ibid.

96 Holm and Sending, ‘States before relations’.

97 Ayşe Zarakol, ‘Sovereign equality as misrecognition’, Review of International Studies, 44:5 (2018), this Special Issue.