Of Irish Blood and Irish Soil? Sovereign Substitution and Northern Ireland

This paper develops sovereign substitution: a transfer of sovereignty between existing states that creates no new polity. Unlike secession, it shifts attention from state creation to comparison between established alternatives. Applying a framework of managed sovereignty to Northern Ireland after Brexit, the paper explains how supranational institutions recast potential security crisis as governance negotiation, while cultural identity, economic evaluation, and institutional architecture shape constitutional preferences. The framework generates falsifiable predictions and specifies its scope conditions. Available evidence is consistent with those predictions but remains inconclusive against the rival account that non-aligned voters have deprioritised, rather than reorganised, their constitutional preferences.