My thanks to Joel Ng for his excellent engagement with Hybrid Sovereignty in World Politics. As Ng notes, the book is motivated by reconciling the realities of enmeshed public/private relations in global governance with the stylized representations of separate state and nonstate realms in International Relations. The book presents sovereignty as a hybridization of two modalities: Idealized Sovereignty, where sovereign authority is represented exclusively in “the state” per the doctrine of indivisibility developed by early modern theorists, and Lived Sovereignty, where achieving sovereign competence involves divisible practices of state and nonstate actors in a variety of social relations. In hybrid sovereignty, public/private hybridity is both integral to sovereign power and a challenge to sovereign authority.
For Ng, there is some under-specification in the book’s definition of sovereign functions. I agree, and this is actually an important methodological choice. Rather than begin with a universal definition of what is sovereign, I look for sovereign competence in the organization of three realms: violence, markets, and rights. Within these realms, I argue that sovereign competence takes on many forms such that there are no singly agreed upon ways to exercise violence, organize markets, or protect rights, making the study of sovereignty less deterministic. Indeed, as Ng himself writes, “what powers a sovereign ought to wield are a matter of debate.”
Across the sovereign realms of violence, markets, and rights, the book’s empirical scope concerns transnational organizations since they raise especially thorny questions for global sovereign politics. Ng suggests privileging the territorial aspect of sovereignty and selecting cases “where a state contracted a non-state entity” domestically. While Hybrid Sovereignty flags important work in this area, such as on rebel governance or the private provision of public goods, my focus on organizations that operate transnationally, like Blackwater, the International Chamber of Commerce, and Amnesty International, is to leverage the ambiguities of converting sovereign power into sovereign authority outside the standard territorial claims and legitimation debates of domestic politics.
Moreover, the contemporary cases each represent one of three ideal-types of public/private hybridity. Contractual hybridity (seen through Blackwater) features formal, publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated in public/private contractual exchanges. Institutional hybridity (explored through the International Chamber of Commerce) features informal, partly publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated through public/private institutional linkages. Shadow hybridity (as revealed in Amnesty International) features informal, non-publicized performances where sovereign power is negotiated in public/private shadowy bargains. The typology was inductively derived from a hundred-year analysis of the English East India Company. The contribution of the ideal-types is to underscore that not all public/private relations in Lived Sovereignty are the same (thus, going beyond contracting), nor do they implicate Idealized Sovereignty in singularly positive or negative ways.
Finally, I concur wholeheartedly that the book prompts questions about what treating sovereignty as hybrid means for the future evolution of sovereign governance. I hope that other researchers join me in exploring the conditions under which hybrid sovereignty thrives and when changes in Lived Sovereignty generate fundamentally new kinds of Idealized Sovereignty.
