Over the course of the last twenty years, two historiographical movements have challenged the notion of sovereignty, particularly that of the “natural” anchoring of an absolute, statal form of sovereignty in a uniform territory as its perfected model. On the one hand, the experience of globalization that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall—and which fed talk of the “end of nation-states”—led to a new examination of the political organization of the contemporary world, which in part “deterritorialized” the issue of political control. On the other hand, the extraordinary rise in studies of colonial empires has established that sovereignty, far from being the homogeneous block of the jurist’s refined concept, could be exercised in varying degrees and even be conceived as multiple and “layered.”

This article focuses on the modes of territorial appropriation that characterized the transition from the old to the new colonial regime, when Europeans built their empires in Africa. It analyzes the juridical construction of colonial territorialities based on a corpus of treaties concluded between agents of the French colonial authority and African chiefs, an instrument of legal appropriation that has to date been little explored by historians of international law. Studying the terminology used in these treaties reveals the instability of these categories and the uncertainty of European negotiators regarding the meaning of the legal frameworks they sought to impose on African chiefs. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the protectorate emerged as the most common legal arrangement for regulating the sharing or transfer of sovereignty, based on a distinction between its external and internal dimensions. The consent of African chiefs to such arrangements therefore hung on whether they considered their territorial sovereignty to be divisible or indivisible.

This article considers the different political forms that emerged after the former viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (which would eventually become Argentina) became independent. Based on the case of the Republic of Córdoba in the 1820s, it analyzes the territorial and institutional construction of an original political entity, the sovereign province. At the end of the eighteenth century, the reforms put in place under the Spanish Monarchy reinforced and politicized the territorial bodies that made up its empire, a process that continued after the revolution of independence. This created a tension between the sovereignty of these territorial bodies and the sovereignty of the “nation,” which operated according to different territorial constructions and brought different conceptions of sovereignty into play. While the Republic of Córdoba consolidated its internal sovereignty, it was also working toward integration into a larger political entity, envisaged as a confederation.

Focusing on the European margins of the former Russian Empire as it was reinvented by the Soviets and drawing on the central and local archives of the former Soviet Union, this article uncovers a particular construction of territorial sovereignty that emerged from interactions between countries that were both new and ideologically hostile to one another. It shows that although Soviet authorities adapted to the rules of negotiation necessary for the “co-construction” of a frontier, they gradually managed to affirm an exclusive sovereignty over the territory. The thick border that evolved between mutually suspicious neighbors, especially through the creation of buffer zones, was subsequently institutionalized and appropriated by the Soviets in order to control interactions and border crossings. This analysis of everyday life in these border zones offers new perspectives for a transnational history of the state.

Drawing on studies that envisage the local as a site where nation-state building and the affirmation of sovereignty are produced rather than simply reproduced, this article proposes to shift the focus to the local level. By exploring the case of school policies in interwar Albania, at the very heart of the assertion of the new state’s sovereignty, it studies the control of local space as the locus of these processes. More specifically, it focuses on the power relations surrounding the role of religion in school space, state appropriation of school buildings structuring religious spaces, and the effect of the inscription of actors involved in these negotiations—be they agents of these policies or not—into social spaces.

With its victory in the Civil War, the Union affirmed the primacy of the national sovereignty of the United States. After the conflict, the country was absorbed by the consequences of this momentous event. Yet, even in this context, the monetary policies of the government became contentious and led to the eventual redefinition of sovereignty. This article explores how the American institutional structure and political system allowed the money question to become a spatial issue, opposing the great sections of the country. In turn, this sectionalism triggered a confrontation between alternative understandings of what sovereignty entailed in terms of both political legitimacy and spatial scales. By the end of the century, the scope of sovereign power would be redefined, and currency abandoned as one of its instruments.

In 2010, Senegal was gripped by a strange rumor known as the “death offering”: a mysterious individual driving a 4×4 was said to be distributing alms that killed all who accepted them. The story made the headlines, and several individuals accused of making deadly offerings were beaten by crowds. In this article, we show that the rumor destabilizes the everyday routines of charity and the religious solidarity that underpins them. In the context of Senegalese Islam, the rumor thus exposes the ambiguities inherent in the moral economy of alms (or sarax in Wolof). This paradigmatic case of the poisoned gift reveals a grey area between religion, magic, and sorcery. It also anxiously questions the relation between gift and sacrifice, two classic concepts in anthropology since Marcel Mauss.