Sovereignty After Empire: Comparing the Middle East and Central Asia.

• Author: Ozcan, Gul Berna
• Position: Book review

Sovereignty After Empire: Comparing the Middle East and Central Asia

Edited by Sally Cummings and Raymond Hinnebusch

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, 408 pages, ISBN 9780748668557.

The demise of empires left a powerful and perplexing legacy for successor states in the Middle East and Central Asia. Sally Cummings and Raymond Hinnebusch set the scene for this fascinating collection of essays in the introduction, where they address the limits of the Westphalian state system and frame the sovereignty question in relation to the imported character of the state in former colonies. Empires were amorphous, whether as contiguous landforms or maritime empires. In contrast to modern nation-states with clearly demarcated boundaries as prerequisites for legitimacy, empires could devolve variable autonomies from the center without breaking up. Empires may adapt to nationalism and local challenges, but the nation-states that emerge are fragile. What is especially interesting about this volume is that the authors seek to explore continuities, ruptures and divergences. In stark contrast to those who suggest that the legacy of imperialism is no longer relevant, these essays focus on the understanding that comes from analyses of the imperial and colonial past.

Sovereignty comprises a range of attributes that include a territory, population, effective domestic hierarchy of control, de jure constitutional independence, de facto absence of external authority, international recognition and the ability to regulate trans-border flows. However, these attributes are contested and challenged internally, as well as externally. The editors draw a useful distinction between realist and constructivist understandings of sovereignty: "For neorealism and neoliberalism, sovereign states are the basic ontological given: the actors in international politics are unitary, territorial, autonomous entities; they are sovereign states" (p. 7). Constructivists, however, view sovereignty as a product of interactions among state elites and international institutions. For them, this explains the absence of stateness in most post-colonial countries. Nevertheless, international norms of sovereignty and the delegitimization of empires have not created autonomy for statebuilders in peripheral countries. For the postcolonial Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, sovereignty was mostly imposed from outside and entrusted to tribal groups or privileged elites.

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