It is difficult to overstate the importance of the concept sovereignty for international relations (IR). And yet, understanding the historical emergence of sovereignty in international relations has long been curtailed by the all-encompassing myth of the Peace of Westphalia. While criticism of this myth has opened space for further historical inquiry in recent years, it has also raised important questions of historical interpretation and methodology relevant to IR, as applying our current conceptual framework to distant historical cases is far from unproblematic. Central among these questions is the when, what, and how of sovereignty: from when can we use "sovereignty" to analyze international politics and for which polities? Can sovereignty be used when the actors themselves did not have recourse to the terminology? And what about polities that do not have recourse to the term at all? What are the theoretical implications of applying the concept of sovereignty to early polities? From different theoretical and methodological perspectives, the contributions in this forum shed light on these questions of sovereignty and how to treat the concept analytically when applied to a period or place when/where the term did not exist as such. In doing so, this forum makes the case for a sensitivity to the historical dimension of our arguments about sovereignty-and, by extension, international relations past and present-as this holds the key to the types of claims we can make about the polities of the world and their relations.

中文翻译：

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论坛：一开始没有词（为它）：术语、概念和早期主权

主权概念对国际关系（IR）的重要性怎么强调都不为过。然而，对主权在国际关系中的历史性出现的理解长期以来一直被威斯特伐利亚和约的包罗万象的神话所削弱。虽然近年来对这一神话的批评为进一步的历史研究开辟了空间，但它也提出了与 IR 相关的历史解释和方法论的重要问题，因为将我们当前的概念框架应用于遥远的历史案例远非没有问题。这些问题的核心是主权的时间、内容和方式：从什么时候开始我们可以使用“主权” 分析国际政治，为哪些政体？当行为者本身无法使用术语时，是否可以使用主权？那些根本不使用这个词的政体呢？将主权概念应用于早期政体的理论含义是什么？从不同的理论和方法论角度，本论坛的贡献阐明了这些主权问题，以及如何在应用于该术语不存在的时期或地点时分析性地对待该概念。在这样做的过程中，这个论坛证明了我们对主权论点的历史维度的敏感性——并且，推而广之，