Introduction: Rethinking Sovereignty, Colonial Empires, and Nation-States in South Asia and Beyond

The Future and Past of Sovereignty and Empire

Once again, sovereignty is everywhere. Prominent in legal and political discussions during the era of modern colonialism and decolonization from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, claims to sovereign rights have reemerged as key political currency in the global public sphere during the early twenty-first century. Demanding sovereignty serves as a direct and unequivocal means of asserting control on behalf of existing or aspiring national or provincial states against real or imagined transgressions and imperial domination. Sovereignty is now invoked by nation-states to stake claims against global governance organizations (United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, World Bank, International Criminal Court, World Health Organization), regional federations and economic alliances (African Union, Arab League, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Commonwealth of Independent States, European Union, Mercosur, North American Free Trade Agreement, South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation), or perceived violations of territorial domains by other nation-states (China's Belt and Road Initiative, US military imperialism, Russian annexation attempts). In addition to being cast as impediments to the legitimate exercise of political sovereignty, many of these entities, in addition to other configurations (the Non-Aligned Movement, Organization of Islamic States, Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), often serve as instruments for advancing claims to territorial sovereignty or jurisdiction. Even as these claims often reflect maneuvers of new or resurgent aspirants to empire from the US to Western European powers to BRICS countries, sovereignty is now central to political assertions on every scale and in every world region.

Popular movements and legal referendums for national independence across the world invoke the language of political sovereignty and self-determination. A range of varied historical, cultural, and political justifications forms a flexible lexicon for sovereign assertion. These idioms are then deployed to make claims to territorial authority worldwide, at times resulting in sovereign autonomy, such as the new twenty-first-century states of Kosovo, South Sudan, and Timor Leste. While political assertions in these contexts culminated in the achievement of stateness in the international sense, sovereignty claims proliferate across a broad spectrum of forms, providing the basis of repeated demands and negotiations, popular and legislative mobilization, and insurgency and counterinsurgency dynamics. To cite just a few of the myriad examples, the omnipresence of sovereignty demands in recent global politics is visible across Asia (Hong Kong, Tibet, East Turkestan; Arakan, Kashmir, Balochistan; Abkhazia, Kurdistan, Palestine), Africa (Biafra, Darfur, Anglophone Cameroon), Europe (Catalonia, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Transnistria), and the Americas (Puerto Rico, Chiapas, Quebec, Hawaii, Malvinas/Falklands). While many movements for independence or political rights in these and other regions are of long standing, in recent years they have increasingly been voiced in the language of territorial sovereignty and autonomy. Sovereignty claims result in a range of outcomes, from rare cases of realization of national sovereignty, to more common decentralization or regional devolution of power within the framework of existing nation-states (new provincial states in India and Pakistan; regional autonomy arrangements in Russia, China, and Spain; and numerous native or first nation polities in US or Canadian territory, whose recognition is often grounded in long-standing treaties). Territorial political sovereignty claims also often open out to more abstract or nonterritorial claims or idioms that function on many levels, from food sovereignty, economic sovereignty, digital sovereignty, or religious sovereignty (such as ecclesiastical), to autonomy for groups defined by status (indigeneity, language, ethnicity, gender, sexuality).

Assertions of sovereignty in the twenty-first century almost invariably refer to the post–World War II principle of the unitary nation-state, generalized and institutionalized worldwide by the United Nations since its foundation in 1945. But many of these claims arise from ambiguities left behind by erstwhile imperial projects, where political sovereignty was characteristically bundled and disaggregated, parceled out in a limited fashion, encroached without being formally assumed, and layered and fragmented. The afterlives of the innumerable ambiguous forms of sovereignty in the age of global imperialism cast long shadows, and these afterlives shape contemporary articulations.

Claims to sovereignty today often invoke historical or contemporary imperialism and older structures and...