ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical outlook of existing debates on state recognition and proposed future research directions. It argues that existing knowledge on state recognition and the dominant discourses, norms and practices needs to be problematised and freed from power-driven, conservative, positivist and legal interpretations and reoriented in new directions in order to generate more critical, contextual and emancipatory knowledge. The chapter proposes three major areas for future research on state recognition, which should: (i) expose the politics of knowledge and positionality in state recognition studies; as well as seek epistemic justice and decolonisation of the discipline; (ii) study more thorough the recognitionality regimes encompassing of competing discourses, performances and agential assemblages; and (iii) explore the normative grounds for regulating the recognition of states in international system and promote the duty to recognise new states.
