In this article, we analyze the concept of sovereignty embodied in the four most-cited authors of the first generation of International Relations (IR) in Brazil, namely: Amado Cervo, Hélio Jaguaribe, José Flávio Sombra Saraiva and Maria Regina Soares de Lima. We evaluate the concept of sovereignty from the perspective of the Brazilian authors mentioned in contrapuntal to the view of this concept in the works of the American author Stephen Krasner. This study is developed in dialogue with the Global International Relations (Global IR) research agenda, which explores new perspectives in the IR discipline, encouraging its diversification. It is essential to explain that, to carry out this analysis, we adopted as a theoretical-methodological framework the concepts of mimicry and ambivalence, both theorized by Homi Bhabha as well as Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading. This way, we seek to establish bridges between different knowledge and discuss the Brazilian view of a fundamental IR concept: sovereignty. We verify that a national thought in IR approaching sovereignty is relatively different from what we observed in Krasner, whose work mostly represents the discipline’s mainstream. We conclude that this difference results from how national ideas of development and autonomy are articulated together with the concept of sovereignty.