Hello! Here's an example of the work I write every week for at Oxford as I work towards my MPhil in International Relations. I can't process the readings without writing about them. These pieces are a joy to write and then circulate amongst my peers.
Should the concept of ‘sovereignty’ be central to the study of international relations?
Echoes of a Big Bang: How Westphalia Calls the Centrality of Sovereignty into Question
Max Bessler | Nov 2 2026 Draft – MPhil in International Relations | 1955 Words
Are there really “big bangs”? Creation begins somewhere, sometime. These creations evolve through space and time. Then, concepts emerge to explain them. In the study of international relations, strong concepts emerge from events that often shock the world. After Nagasaki, nuclear deterrence taught the Great Powers to avert wars, not win them. The Holocaust thrust the word “genocide” into conventions and international law. When every crescendo roars through the halls of academia, it leads fans of the music to roll back the tapes and listen for what happened before…
When examining the “when, what, and how” behind the emergence of a concept, scholars weigh the importance of those moments: how do the “big bangs” characterize a concept and establish its centrality in any study of international relations? The millions of Japanese and Jews who were bombed and gassed in World War II maintain the central importance of those concepts, nuclear deterrence and genocide, that fuel papers and policies to this day. But focusing too much on these historical events can also undermine the concept’s power to inform other similar papers and policies across space and time for the study and practice of international relations. States have been mutually deterred by the calamitous prospects of their comparable weaponry long before nuclear weapons, as with poison gas in World War II. And Raphael Lemkin, who coined “genocide” in 1944, himself pointed to the Armenian case of 1915–16 as the crime before it had a name.
Scholars of concepts in international relations can take on different approaches to explaining them today: presentist, genealogical, and historicist (Latham, 494–98). From the outside looking in, the debate between camps appears endless and may lead to an unsatisfying conclusion: no one can agree on whether a central big bang exists, nor even whether one should be conceptualized, to create a common foundation for debate. Still, historical events do happen and begin crystallizing concepts, which advances the field. Events are observed, the words and frameworks are debated, and a contested concept emerges.
There lies the heartbeat of this essay: for any concept in international relations, understanding the debate behind its historical origins helps explain its positioning in the field. That “big bang” may be a central tool for many and a misdiagnosis to others. All the same, tracking the emergence of a concept through the presentist, genealogical, and historicist approaches can show its centrality (its explanatory value) but also expose its marginality for seeing what historical events it seeks to conceptualize.
Focusing on today’s question, the concept of sovereignty certainly assists the study of international relations. No one benefits if the field outright disregards such a popular concept that seeks to explain how states organize themselves. By observing its emergence through the presentist, genealogical, and historicist approaches, with what’s lost, the unsatisfying conclusion emerges: the concept of sovereignty’s centrality should be questioned without abandoning it. Scholars of international relations need the concept—the question is how central it is for them.
This essay shows how the three approaches converge in treating the Peace of Westphalia as a “big bang” that is distinctly European; anchored by Westphalia, the concept of sovereignty is European and struggles to explain the history of states organizing themselves outside the continent—thereby undermining its centrality in the field.
Here’s the structure: first, the essay begins with Westphalia and takes it up as the big bang which marked the study of sovereignty as a concept. Entering the debate with a centralizing landmark offers a familiar starting point to introduce the different approaches that assess its emergence. Each approach—presentist, genealogical, and historicist—offers different answers to how Westphalia should be thought of in the strength of its centralizing force for sovereignty in the study of international relations. With three conclusions in hand, no definitive approach wins—that’s the point: the concept of sovereignty’s strength lies in its staying power; the concept will survive through the camps of scholars that investigate it.
What does it mean to ask about the centrality of sovereignty? More specifically, the question asks: how does the concept of sovereignty shape relations in and among states and thus how has it emerged as a necessary principle for scholars to understand? And what does a concept of sovereignty mean? It’s necessary to spend a few minutes defining it today for common understanding, but it’s an undertaking that demands a lifetime of scholarship. Grovogui ambitiously notes, “there has never been a uniform international system of sovereignty across space and time” (316).1 Beyond Grovogui, and for scholars everywhere who don’t want to pour words into a “Forum” debating its emergence, Westphalia serves as an effective founding myth to share a story and move on.
Krasner offers one way to define the concept of sovereignty, but his attempt quickly shows its inconsistencies when tested against history. Krasner says the concept of sovereignty is composed of four elements: territoriality, autonomy, mutual recognition, and control (18). Satisfying all four completes a full concept of sovereignty, but “there has never been some golden age for sovereignty” and thus states violate the model all the time (17). Krasner is not the only scholar to rely upon historical observations to note sovereignty’s flexibility.2
Observing historical events guides how central any concept is to its field. Beyond Krasner, few would deny that the corpus of Week 4’s Core Readings, at the very least, comprises an attack on the ostensible fortress that “sovereignty” emerged from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This speaks to its fluid nature in the study of international relations, neither central nor to be discarded. Costa Lopez et al. host a forum to rescue sovereignty’s historical emergence from the “Westphalian straightjacket” (490), which helps answer the big question today about sovereignty’s centrality. Recent scholarship is “seeking to abandon the ‘big bang’ account of Westphalia” (491). Questions of its evolution have been “curtailed by the all-encompassing myth of the Peace of Westphalia—a myth that IR scholars have swallowed hook, line, and sinker” (490). Removing the Westphalian anchor, but understanding its significance, allows each approach to take up the question of how central the concept of sovereignty ought to be.
Latham offers three main ways scholars critique Westphalia’s centrality in articulating the emergence of a concept of sovereignty. His case rests upon whether notions of sovereignty apply to the medieval European world, even before the word formally emerged.
The presentist approach largely abandons the Peace of Westphalia to centralize the concept of sovereignty in their field today. Their approach treats sovereignty as the distinctly modern mode of differentiating states in the international world order and resembles the closest form of organizing supreme authorities over a territory after 1648 (495). While presentists “disagree profoundly in all sorts of ways,” they share the view that “a radical rupture separated the medieval and modern eras—a rupture both registered and induced by the invention of the institution or constitutive of sovereignty sometime between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries” (496). The idea may have existed before, but the institution and norms are an artifact of Westphalia (495).
The genealogical approach will not go as far as invoking the Peace of Westphalia as a presentist big-bang “radical rupture” truth. This approach traces the concept’s emergence as a smoother continuation from a longer medieval political-theological tradition. By discounting the value of Westphalia as the definitive historical starting point, the historical weights that mark its centrality distribute evenly. Still, the concept’s centrality suffers because it remains distinctly European, needing to trace evidence to Westphalia.
The historicist approach still weights unique moments in history but sees their notions across orders. In the case of Westphalia, they view sovereignty emerging as an institution arising in early modern Europe but concede that its norms of supreme authority may have existed earlier (496). Among the three, a historicist centralizes the concept of sovereignty in international relations by showing, over time and regardless of whether they are European or not, the concept of sovereignty will “bear a strong family resemblance” (497).
All three approaches confront Westphalia but acknowledge its centrality to conceptualize sovereignty. As a result, the concept maintains its European flavor and marginalizes its ability to stay central to the study of international relations when other continents and scholars exist. For brevity today, consider how the concept of sovereignty—having emerged differently around Westphalia—struggles all the same in organizing China and Africa.
Why did Westphalia happen? Understanding why matters when comparing the following failures to assess its centrality. Can the concept explain how China and Africa organize? On why it happened, Krasner explains: the Peace ended the Thirty Years War by dividing territory, settling the practice of religion, and reworking the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire. The war wrecked central Europe (35).3 Westphalia needed the Holy Roman Empire to satisfy France and Sweden and deal with future religious disorders undermining regimes across the continent. The Peace reflected the short-term interests of those involved and not the shock to the international system that scholars have come to view it as (38).
China has pursued a “quest for sovereignty” in the international system, but it looks markedly different from a Westphalian transition that marked kingdoms organizing themselves into states. Carrai characterizes China’s claim to sovereignty as likewise pragmatic, but evolving from its own “haunted” imperial and colonial past, and complicated by Western colonial history (1, 9).
Africa similarly pursues sovereignty, deeply complicated by its own history of imperial invasion. Grovogui attacks the “Westphalian commonsense” (315): deviations from its concepts, as in the case of Africa, are treated as failures of the state, not the concept itself. In the case of Africa, the concept of sovereignty is practically a weapon, allowing for the transfer of power and wealth from the Congo to collaborating Great and Middle powers in Europe, including Belgium and Switzerland (317). As a result, these notions of sovereignty, deeply violated, cannot be central to a study of international relations that incorporates understanding how African entities organize themselves—for even calling them “states” invokes a Westphalian starting point that muddies debate.
Big bangs in history create new centers of gravity—new concepts to a field. But as time passes, those concepts end up explaining new events to maintain the explanatory value that powers their centrality. The concepts of nuclear deterrence and genocide look a lot different than they did in the 1950s—and so does sovereignty since Bodin turned it into a political term in the 1576 Les six livres de la République (Latham, 496; de Carvalho, 503). Following Westphalia, the two quick cases of China and Africa demonstrate that its centrality cannot explain every organizing goal it seeks to achieve for entities. Krasner addresses the theoretical failures but finds an optimistic escape that the Forum addresses. Sovereignty as a word will never leave the study of international relations—nor should it.