ABSTRACT
The sovereignty discourse, as traditionally understood, implies first and foremost a way of defining and exercising politico-legal authority within clearly demarcated boundaries. It is only by virtue of this critically important first step that it becomes possible to conceive of sovereignty as a way of partitioning the world, of allocating resources and organising exchanges between states and national economies, of distinguishing groups, cultures and nations. Such partitioning, and the insider or outsider dualism which it reflects, seems, however, increasingly out of step with the intensifying interconnectedness of political spaces and human destinies. If sovereignty discourse was a highly specific intellectual response to a highly specific set of circumstances obtaining in certain parts of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe, then it follows that any discussion of sovereignty in the contemporary world must first engage in a detailed assessment of the evolutionary trajectory of the last three hundred or more years.
