Sovereignty is the claim to supreme authority within a defined territory — the power to make, enforce, and adjudicate law without answering to a higher authority. In its classical formulation (Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes), sovereignty is indivisible and absolute: there must be a final decision-maker whose authority is not subject to review. In practice, sovereignty is distributed, contested, and layered.
The Westphalian model (1648) established territorial sovereignty as the organizing principle of the international order: each state has exclusive authority within its borders, and other states are obligated to respect that exclusion. This model persists as the formal framework of international law, but its adequacy has been challenged from multiple directions — by international human rights law, by supranational institutions like the European Union, by the practical power of transnational corporations, and by indigenous peoples who assert sovereignty predating and independent of the states that claim to contain them.
Carl Schmitt’s definition — “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” — shifts the analysis from legal authority to political power. For Schmitt, sovereignty isn’t about who makes rules but about who can suspend them. The state of exception (martial law, emergency powers, executive orders) reveals where sovereign power actually resides, because it shows who can act outside the legal order while still claiming authority. Giorgio Agamben extended this analysis to argue that the exception has become the norm: modern states routinely govern through emergency powers, producing zones (refugee camps, detention facilities, border regions) where law is suspended indefinitely.
For indigenous peoples, sovereignty has a different genealogy entirely. Indigenous sovereignty doesn’t derive from Westphalian recognition or constitutional delegation — it derives from the ongoing relationship between a people and their territory, governance systems, and lifeways. Settler states’ claims to sovereignty over indigenous lands are, from this perspective, assertions of power that lack the legitimacy they claim.
Related terms
- Rule of law — the principle that sovereign power should be exercised through law
- Jurisdiction — the spatial and subject-matter boundaries of sovereign authority
- Legitimacy — the social acceptance that distinguishes sovereignty from domination
- The state — the institutional form through which sovereignty is typically exercised