"Popular wisdom, international relations scholarship, and much of rising powers' foreign policy rhetoric contends that such powers comprise a conservative coalition united by the desire to protect the principle of national sovereignty against its erosion. However, the empirical analysis of three democratic rising and regional powers' understandings and practices of political sovereignty suggests otherwise. On the basis of empirical research in Brazil, India, and South Africa, this book presents a descriptive analysis of the transformation of sovereignty in non-western contexts since the end of the Cold War. The book argues that the processes of change are most accurately captured by a novel ideal-type of 'soft sovereignty'. Soft sovereignty takes into account today's complex multi-polar order in a post-western world. Such a plural, embedded, and moderate cosmopolitanism is situated between globalism's demand for a world state and statism's defence of the status quo"--