Bootstrapping sovereignty: the placeholder dynamics of contested states from identity documents to international courts

The literature on contested states and other sovereignty claimants, from de facto states to governments-in-exile, has explored their predicaments, trajectories, and bids for recognition to grasp whether and how their sovereignty claims stick. In this article, we complement existing research by focusing on actors other than governments and international organizations, including ordinary people, field offices of UN agencies, and international courts, that come to indirectly validate assumptions of sovereignty. Although often for limited purposes, such as requesting and issuing identity documents or delineating jurisdiction in specialized proceedings, these actors presume, bracket, and project states at various scales and sites, with important consequences. Claims to state sovereignty, we argue, have performative effects when picked up in circulating attributions, including unwitting ones. More specifically, functional work-arounds and interim arrangements afford limited placeholder exceptions which tend to be reiterated in other situations, leading to consequential expansions with knock-on effects. Sovereignty is thus bootstrapped as a self-validating status assumption, as we show with examples from Northern Cyprus and Palestine to the Tamil Tigers and Syrian opposition governments. Bootstrapping can also falter, however, when validations are suspended. These placeholder dynamics help explain how attributions of sovereignty simultaneously challenge, mimic, and rearticulate the statist international (dis)order.