Sovereignty is one of the most important concepts in international relations theory and political studies more generally, but its history is poorly understood and often assumed to be an uncontroversial part of being a state or country (Brighenti, 2010; Agnew, 1994, 2010). Part of the problem with sovereign claims in the contemporary sense is that they take current state/country borders as a given, rather than social and political constructions that have history (Tayler 1994, Agnew 1994; Parasram 2014).

The most common story told about sovereignty comes from Europe, and it has been largely assumed to be true everywhere, even though every part of the world has its own history of sovereignty. The European story is connected to the Peace Treaties at Westphalia in the year1648, situating it as a culmination point where developing European states came to decisions about borders, principles of non-interference in the affairs of other sovereign states—building on centuries of European philosophical development (Elden, 2013; Onuf, 1991; Maratain, 1969;Walker and Medelovitz, 1990). This is not a consensus position in the discipline, and others have convincingly argued that interpreting the Treaties at Westphalia as the “beginning” of the mod-ern state exaggerates the significance of the moment for modern sovereignty, in large part be-cause state sovereignty and the international system arises through imperial politics, or the colonial relationship between European states and much of the rest of the world in the last few hundred years (Osiander, 2001; Kayaoglu, 2010). The modern state system, and with it, the idea  of state sovereignty in the European and imperial way of understanding it—a state with borders that has total authority within its borders, whose authority is recognized by similar states out-side of its borders—is fundamentally related to Europe’s attempt to colonize and control the world (Bhambra, 2015; Parasram 2014; Anghie, 2005; Rojas, 2016). In other words, the formation of colonial empires introduced a new need from the perspective of Europe to order the world based on imperial state sovereignty, which in turn created a set of rules for white countries and different rules for Brown and Black countries (Grovogui, 2002; Branch, 2011; Anderson 1983).