Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility

Unparalleled in its breadth and scope, Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility brings together some of the freshest and most original writing on sovereignty being done today. Sovereignty’s many dimensions are approached from multiple perspectives and experiences. It is viewed globally as an international question; locally as an issue contested between Natives and settlers; and individually as survival in everyday life. Through all this diversity and across the many different national contexts from which the contributors write, the chapters in this collection address each other, staging a running conversation that truly internationalizes this most fundamental of political issues.

In the contemporary world, the age-old question of sovereignty remains a key terrain of political and intellectual contestation, for those whose freedom it promotes as well as for those whose freedom it limits or denies. The law is by no means the only language in which to think through, imagine, and enact other ways of living justly together. Working both within and beyond the confines of the law at once recognizes and challenges its thrall, opening up pathways to alternative possibilities, to other ways of determining and self-determining our collective futures. The contributors, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, converse across disciplinary boundaries, responding to critical developments within history, politics, anthropology, philosophy, and law. The ability of disciplines to connect with each other—and with experiences lived outside the halls of scholarship—is essential to understanding the past and how it enables and fetters the pursuit of justice in the present. Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility offers a reinvigorated politics that understands the power of sovereignty, explores strategies for resisting its lived effects, and imagines other ways of governing our inescapably coexistent communities.

Contributors: Antony Anghie, Larissa Behrendt, John Docker, Peter Fitzpatrick, Kent McNeil, Richard Pennell, Alexander Reilly, Ben Silverstein, Nin Tomas, Davina B. Woods.

• Julie Evans, Editor

• Ann Genovese, Editor

• Alexander Reilly, Editor

• Patrick Wolfe, Editor

• The strength of the collection is in its contribution to the ongoing—and much-needed—reexamination of sovereignty in international relations and international law. The particular focus on settlers and indigenous peoples reveals that, contrary to the traditional narratives of many states, the sovereignty of settler-created states is far from complete, and indigenous sovereignty endures, both as a possibility to be ‘reignited’ and as an existing structure for reclaiming indigenous rights.
  —Jordan Branch, Settler Colonial Studies, 4:1 (2014)