Sovereignty in the current geopolitical context. New meanings and dimensions

IntroductionThe issue of sovereignty is one of great debate and interests to researchers of International Relations and not exclusively. Over time, the discourse changed and the central issue of this article was analyzed and debated from various perspectives. Although throughout history the context shifted several times, the relationship between sovereignty and nation state remained unchanged. This until nowadays, when new approaches emerged and transformed the way in which state's sovereignty is addressed. Its complex and multidimensional nature places it at the heart of the geopolitical system and, as such, any changes of the regional or international context, that alter its fundamental construction, stimulate a conceptual rethinking of it.This article addresses the contemporary issues and challenges of the international environment, from the perspective of geopolitics, and focuses on understanding how all these elements affect the states' sovereignty. Thereby, the two main research questions are the following: How the geopolitical context changed after the end of the Cold War? and What are the new meanings and dimensions of sovereignty within the international system?. We considered analyzing the geopolitical context after the Cold War being given the fact that the aforementioned moment was the last one that changed profoundly the international structure. Also, we assume that the nature of state sovereignty has altered in the post-Cold War period in order to reflect new trends of a changing global society.In order to provide accurate answers for the research questions mentioned above this article will contain three sections: the first one focused on the notion of state sovereignty as it stood over history; the second one concerned with presenting the new geopolitical landscape, mostly on behalf of the last decade and the third one designed to analyze sovereignty in the current geopolitical context by identifying new meanings and dimensions.Sovereignty - an evolutionary and conceptual approachIn the history of International Relations is almost impossible to identify a less mentioned and less referred historic event as the Thirty Years War and the peace that followed. The bloody conflagration that marked the history of the European continent of unparalleled destructions in the world history until World War II, the Thirty Years War was the culmination of a religious-based confrontation that tore Europe apart, a conflict that has its origins in the Reformation and extended long after the of Westphalia (Parker, 1997, p. 192). Even if the event mentioned above is the one considered as being the first step taken in a profound change process related to interstates relations, the massive procedural shift that emerged is also directly related to the religious of Augsburg, 1555 (Blaney, 2000, p. 35). Then, the principle cuius region eius religio was introduced in the daily practice of international interactions, shaping the historical context in which the concept of sovereignty came into widespread use.Like this, in those times, sovereignty was put into practice by restoring properties to many existing feudal entities within their territories (Jackson, 2003, p. 786). It is hard to surmise from those practices any general principle governing the concept of sovereignty, but as the Peace Treaty Between the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France and Their Respective Allies demonstrates it represented the passing of a certain amount of power from the emperor with his claim of holy pre-dominance, to many kings and lords who treasured their own local supremacy. Later, a significant amount of literature deals with the issue and identified some secondary concepts to which it might refer. For example Historically, sovereignty has been associated with four main characteristics: First, a sovereign state is one that enjoys supreme political authority and monopoly over the legitimate use of force within its territory. …