New Worlds, New Sovereignties conference

New Worlds, New Sovereignties

A cross-community interdisciplinary international conference

Which human groups are recognised as possessed of sovereignty and who are excluded? Should nation-states refuse to interfere in each other’s affairs regardless of the treatment of non-national minorities? Can different sovereignties overlap and coexist or is sovereignty monolithic and exclusive? Are settler democracy and Native sovereignty compatible?

Questions such as these have been debated since the sixteenth century. In the contemporary global era, ecological factors such as disease and global warming are impervious to national boundaries. The same may be said of the ‘war on terror’. Does the tendency to supranational aggregation, whether for economic, ecological or military reasons, pose a threat to national sovereignties or is globalisation encouraging new but equally vibrant forms of contemporary statehood? Do these new concepts of sovereignty offer hopeful possibilities for Indigenous peoples in complex modern societies?

Our conference will address questions such as these with a view to bringing history to bear on the problems of the present. The conference’s standpoint will be from below. We will be focusing on sovereignty’s consequences for those whom the current order excludes or diminishes, exploring opportunities for redress and restoration. The conference will bring together distinguished international scholars, policy-makers and community organizations in an exchange of information that will make the fruits of contemporary scholarship available to those responsible for delivering practical outcomes at the local level. At the same time, it will alert academics to the practical experiences and problems that should be informing our scholarship.