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INTRODUCTION: SOVEREIGNTY, IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION
Most governments of sovereign states regard it as a sufficient challenge to work with private actors to represent the identity of the state and its people to outsiders in such a way as to attract investment, trade and tourism. Some countries do a better job of this than others. Sovereignty is generally viewed as a key prerequisite for a state's public diplomacy, place branding and investment promotion efforts. But need a lack of sovereignty be considered a liability in every sense? To what extent can governments of places or regions with ambiguous or contested sovereignty status use public diplomacy, place branding and investment promotion strategies in cooperation with the private sector and other civil society actors to improve external perceptions of the identity of the place, and by doing so to facilitate economic growth and development? Ambiguous sovereignty situations cover a range of cases, including but not limited to:
self-governing territories that for various reasons are not recognized as fully sovereign by the international community (for example, Associated States, such as Monaco, Andorra, Puerto Rico, Palau and the Cook Islands (CI));
nation-states that have been divided by conflict into two or more regions of governance, with the final status of the relationship between the regions yet to be resolved by negotiation (for example, Cyprus and Moldova);
'breakaway' regions of states that are recognized by some members of the international community as sovereign, but unrecognized by others (for example, Kosovo and South Ossetia).
In each situation, the government and non-governmental actors in the region are faced with the challenge of creating and projecting an identity for the place that outsiders can understand and view in a positive enough light that they will consider investing in, trading with and visiting the place. It seems evident that in a number of cases these challenges are more significant than those faced by states fully recognized as sovereign. This research forms the beginning of a broader project that seeks to discover to what extent this is so. Not intended to be a theoretical investigation of sovereignty and its attributes, this study rather is intended to have a practical application: to understand the challenges faced by places of ambiguous sovereignty, to gather, analyse and share...