Against the "Degrees of Sovereignty" Thesis

• In Event: Zones of Sovereignty? Territoriality and Spatial Governance

Abstract

One of the key arguments that many scholars of Indigenous studies, political theory, and international relations have advanced on behalf of decolonizing sovereignty has been the idea that sovereignty is not absolute but a matter of degree. By affirming sovereignty as contingent, partial, porous, and incomplete, scholars have asserted the ways that Indigenous peoples have carved out space for novel and creative expressions of their own sovereignty and self-determination-- even in unlikely circumstances. In this paper, I challenge the claim that there can be such a thing as divided sovereignty, overlapping sovereignty, or relational sovereignty, all claims about transforming sovereignty from an absolute into a relative and shared form. Instead, I argue that sovereignty retains a structurally intractable colonial core in key respects. In fact, attempts to name such a thing as "relational sovereignty" are better understood as efforts to move beyond the institutions, logics, and imaginaries of sovereignty altogether. Instead, I suggest that it is worth making sharper distinctions between more relational forms of self- determination that do not replicate the sovereign form and sovereignty itself rather than seeking to reinvent the wheel of sovereignty.

Author

• David Temin, University of Michigan