Research Project
Global Power Transition and the Legitimation of the Sovereign-Territorial State
This project examines how global power transition reshapes the legitimation of political authority across time and space, with a central focus on the persistence of the sovereign-territorial state. As power disperses beyond the Euro-Atlantic world and US–China rivalry intensifies, it asks how this state form is legitimated and reproduced as the dominant normative template despite persistent unevenness and contestation in how authority is organised. Drawing on the systemic theory of state formation developed in my doctoral dissertation, the project conceptualises global power transition as the primary systemic driver of spatial transformation through which historically contingent state forms emerge and diffuse across time and space. Systemic pressures generated by shifts in the system-wide distribution of power are mediated through international process, with great powers as principal actors whose ordering strategies translate these pressures into uneven spatial transformations across regions. These transformations unfold through three interrelated mechanisms of spatial ordering: material, institutional, and ideational. During the fellowship, the project focuses particularly on the ideational mechanism, examining how legitimation narratives, classificatory schemes, and recognition practices define and stabilise political boundaries and help reproduce the sovereign-territorial state. Empirically, it uses evolving debates over how China understands and describes its surrounding region, often termed its ‘periphery’ in official discourse, as a focal arena for examining how these mechanisms interact under contemporary conditions of global power transition.
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Biografische Angaben
Husnain Iqbal completed his PhD in Political Science at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research focuses on systemic theorising in International Relations, hegemonic ordering, state formation, and historical international systems, with a regional focus on the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean. As part of Zeitenwenden. Normative Ordnungen im Umbruch? , he examines how contemporary global power transition shapes the legitimation and persistence of the sovereign-territorial state. Alongside this work, he is developing his doctoral dissertation on the systemic theory of state formation into a monograph. He is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives at the University of Victoria.