From states to polities: Reconceptualizing sovereignty through Inuit governance

Abstract

This article engages the ongoing theoretical debates in IR through a re-examination of sovereignty as traditionally understood. Despite a growing theoretical turn in IR towards more general investigations of institutions, much uncertainty and ambiguity as to how to best incorporate new issues and actors which transcend traditional state-centred politics remains. How can IR theory sufficiently take into account ‘other’ political actors which are neither NGOs nor states and cannot easily be categorized according to traditional dichotomies? Rather than concluding that sovereignty is in a state of demise, this political inquiry deconstructs and abstracts sovereignty from its Westphalian limitations. Instead, sovereignty is relocated from bounded state territories to the process of collective political identity and institution construction. Throughout this process, the power or importance of physical territory does not disappear but rather becomes subsumed under ongoing political contestation over the symbolic meanings of physical space more generally.