Sovereignty is often treated by international relations theorists as a foundational concept. Investigations of the state more and more frequently critically analyze the foundational status of sovereignty. Such analyses require more than just making the claim that sovereignty is a variable concept. They entail shifting through the various ways in which this seemingly foundational concept has been reconfigured in diplomatic practice. To do this effectively, the concept of sovereignty ought not to be examined in isolation either from history or from related theoretical terms. Additionally, attention must be directed to the ways in which various meanings of sovereignty, as they shift and are reformed, have been configured.

I investigate the relationship between sovereignty and its supposed conceptual opposite – intervention – because, as I argue, the sovereignty/intervention boundary is the very location of the state. I present a number of theoretical arguments to support this assertion. Then I turn to historical analyses of intervention practices by the Concert of Europe, the Wilson administration, and the Reagan–Bush administrations in which I trace the constitution and interpretation of community standards for legitimate intervention practices and their corresponding effects upon collective understandings of state sovereignty.

I weave critical international relations theory (informed by the works of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard) into foreign policy discourses of intervention to accomplish two theoretical tasks. First, rather than redefining state sovereignty, this analysis “un”-defines (and therefore radically deconstructs) state sovereignty by questioning the historical foundations of sovereign authority. Secondly, this analysis provides a critique of representation generally and of the representation of the sovereign state in particular.