What R.B.J. Walker wrote about the uncontested meaning of sovereignty applies equally to the intervention literature. Intervention is an essentially uncontested concept. The uncontestedness of intervention has to do with its coupling with sovereignty. This coupling of sovereignty and its transgressor continues to define the gambit of imaginable research programs for intervention scholars. It is not the mere linking of the concepts sovereignty and intervention that presents an obstacle to offering unique contributions about intervention. Rather, similar to Walker's remarks on the sovereignty debates, I argue that the particular understandings of sovereignty/intervention circulating in international relations literatures effect a silence. This silence is on potentially dynamic understandings of statehood. As Richard Little concluded in his review of the intervention literature, “For specialists in international relations to contribute to this debate about intervention, they will require a much more sophisticated conception of the state than the one usually relied upon” (Little, 1987:54). I suggest that understandings of sovereignty/intervention currently employed by international relations theorists inhibit creative reconceptualizations of statehood. Yet if we as theorists think about sovereign statehood in terms of authority relations which are worked out in practice and that the sovereignty/intervention boundary is an important locale where authority relations are contested, then examining the intersections of discourses of sovereignty and intervention takes us a long way toward giving an account of how sovereign states are constituted in practice. Accordingly, my analytical point of departure for a “more sophisticated conception of the state” is a re-examination of the sovereignty/intervention boundary.