Sovereignty has been a perennial topic in international relations (IR) scholarship for the past thirty years, and rightly so: as a constitutive feature of the international, IR scholars ignore it at their peril. Whether this presence in the literature has more to do with changes in world politics unique to the contemporary period or the availability of institutional and constructivist theoretical perspectives better suited to tracing its characteristics, the continuing empirical and conceptual investigation of this central yet elusive factor is of great value. In the recent history of IR scholars' efforts to wrestle with sovereignty and its implications, Swati Srivastava's Hybrid Sovereignty in World Politics represents a real contribution that helps to clarify some of the perennial confusion around sovereignty.

Srivastava's book makes two important moves that allow us to better understand the stakes of the practice and politics of sovereignty. The first is to define the concepts of idealized sovereignty and lived sovereignty. Idealized sovereignty is “the classic conception of indivisible, public, supreme sovereign authority” (6) with historical roots in the work of early modern European political theorists. By contrast, lived sovereignty is “the divisible performance of sovereign competence through publ