Lecture | Book presentation
Book presentation: Shifting sovereignties — Manifestations of sovereignty from a global historical perspective
- Date
- Thursday 8 May 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- 2.60
Abstract
Sovereignty is once again at the forefront of international debate, as a result of conflict in Ukraine, the Middle East, but also due to the re-election of Donald Trump. However, as a concept it is badly understood and often invoked as an empty signifier. Traditional conceptions of sovereignty are both ahistorical, in the sense that they do not incorporate an understanding of historical change, and impractical, in the sense that actual manifestations of sovereignty are in contradiction to these conceptions. That makes the concept unwieldy for historians. The talk proposes an approach to sovereignty which starts from these practical manifestations and incorporates change. Taking a global-history perspective and centring Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, it destabilises overly neat theoretical notions of the concept. It shows that, in practice, sovereignty is far from absolute, perpetual, indivisible, or supreme; rather it is fuzzy, compromised, fragmented, and layered. Moreover, the talk suggests that sovereignty should not be understood as a characteristic of individual states, but embedded in “sovereignty regimes,” meaning frameworks of legitimation enforced through mutual recognition. These regimes are created and managed by more or less institutionalised structures which embody “system sovereignty.” Sovereignty regimes and system sovereignty are, like sovereignty itself, continuously changing and contingent.
Speaker
Moritz A. Mihatsch is a global historian interested in nationalism, self-determination and sovereignty. He is Lecturer in World History at the University of Cambridge. He wrote his doctorate at the University of Oxford on political parties and the concept of nation in Sudan in the 1950s and 1960s. He has recently published a global history of sovereignty with De Gruyter. His latest research focuses on decolonisation and epistemologies of global history at UNESCO.