The Variety of Sovereignty

Abstract

This chapter seeks to engage simultaneously with three related sets of challenges to sovereignty in contemporary understandings and with three questions of sovereignty’s “relocation” that issue from these challenges. First, and at the highest level of abstraction, “relocating” conveys the search for something that has been lost. It suggests that for whatever reason or combination of reasons, the conceptual relevance of sovereignty is no longer apparent—because either it is simply redundant or it has become such a protean concept as to be meaningless—and that active efforts have to be made to rediscover this sense of relevance. Second, by “relocating” sovereignty we may have in mind a less definitive but still fundamental theoretical project, for even if, as the present chapter urges, we resist the idea that sovereignty is in mortal conceptual danger, we should avoid the opposite mistake of its conceptual reification. We should instead acknowledge that it may require to be repositioned and reordered within our conceptual cartography—that the role of sovereignty in the mental map through which we make sense of our legal, social, and political world(s) has to be readdressed. Third, and final, “relocating” carries a more basic spatial connotation.