Functional Sovereignty in Contested Territories
Journal: International Studies Quarterly
Year: 2025

Abstract Scholarship on international sovereignty generally adopts a binary conception: territories either have international recognition, or they lack it and remain unrecognized entities within fragmented states. In this article, we challenge this binary frame by introducing the notion of functional sovereignty: contested territories in practice enjoy varying degrees of sovereignty over governance functions that require external acceptance for their operation. To illustrate, we introduce a new