Chapter 9 addresses the “So what?” question: what do we learn from studying sovereignty through a property rights lens? One key upshot of the argument is that changes in international patterns of economic regulation and use of force are not necessarily indicative of either the strength of or the content of claims of sovereign right. Sovereignty maintains its centrality in the international system not only (arguably not even primarily) through the practice of governance, but also through collusion to reinforce a normative structure of sovereign right. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about the “So what?” question for international relations theorists. For theorists of foreign policy the sovereignty cartel helps to explain deference by bigger states to the sovereign rights claims of smaller states when national interest would argue against such deference. For globalization theorists the cartel shows that globalization and sovereignty do not vary inversely on a unidimensional spectrum. For theorists of the social structure of the international system it highlights the often-overlooked agentive processes needed to maintain existing social structures rather than just agentive mechanisms for changing structures.

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the sovereignty cartel, the idea that states do not just compete with each other to maximize the national interest or cooperate with each other to provide global public goods, but also collude with each other to reinforce the centrality of the sovereign state as a category of actor in international relations. It reviews the existing international relations literature on state sovereignty and locates the idea of the sovereignty cartel within that literature. It develops the metaphor of the cartel and gives an overview of how this metaphor is developed throughout the book. It looks at different understandings of property rights underlying the idea of the sovereignty cartel and introduces the possibility that these understandings are not mutually compatible. Finally, the chapter provides a plan of the book and an overview of the chapter structure.