This study examines alternative ways of conceptualizing sovereignty through European Union involvement in the issue areas of conflict management, capacity-building, and human rights promotion in four independence-seeking regions: Western Sahara, Somaliland, Abkhazia, and Transdniestria. Document analysis and in-depth key informant interviews were used to develop a theory of European Union involvement in independence-seeking regions.
The theory of European Union involvement proposed in this study rejects state-centric notions of sovereignty as the only mode of understanding sovereignty and holds that independence-seeking regions (ISRs) enact various sovereignties through their existence. Further, the theory formed in this research suggests that state-centric notions of sovereignty are unhelpful in understanding ISRs as a varied phenomenon; and that ultimately, state-centric notions of sovereignty perpetuate instability in the international system due to the isolation of ISRs by nation-states and international organizations, including the European Union. This theory proposes that many exclusive sovereignties coexist, have done in the past, and will do in the future, along a spectrum of sovereign iterations. Such a theory allows us to conceive of a political world(s) that will not always be constructed and ordered as we know it today
