Shifting Sovereignties: A Global History of a Concept in Practice

Join Dr Moritz Mihatsch for the launch of his new book Shifting Sovereignties, which explores practical manifestations of sovereignty from antiquity to the Anthropocene.

Dr Mihatsch (University of Cambridge) will discuss the book in conversation with Prof Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University and University of Cambridge).

After the discussion, Dr Mihatsch would be delighted to welcome all attendees to a drinks reception celebrating the book's launch.

About Shifting Sovereignties

Taking a global-history perspective and centring Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, Shifting Sovereignties, destabilises overly neat theoretical notions of sovereignty. It shows that, in practice, sovereignty is far from absolute, perpetual, indivisible, or supreme; rather it is fuzzy, compromised, fragmented, and layered.

Rather than understanding sovereignty as a characteristic of individual states, Mihatsch and co-author Michael Mulligan propose the notion of “sovereignty regimes”: frameworks of legitimation enforced through mutual recognition. These regimes are created and managed by more or less institutionalised structures which embody what the authors call “system sovereignty.” Sovereignty regimes and system sovereignty are, like sovereignty itself, continuously changing and contingent. This process of change forms the core of the book.

Shifting Sovereignties thus contributes a practical, historical perspective on a concept which is foundational in political science, international relations, and international law.

*Copies of the book will be available to purchase at the event for £40 each. Cash only, please!* 

About the speakers

Moritz A. Mihatsch is a global historian interested in nationalism, self-determination, and sovereignty. He has taught for many years at a variety of universities in the Middle East and North Africa. At Cambridge, he is a member of the World History group, where he is teaching and supervising on a variety of old and new tripos papers. He wrote his D.Phil. dissertation at the University of Oxford on political parties and the concept of nation in Sudan in the 1950s and 1960s. His latest research focuses on decolonisation and epistemologies of global history at UNESCO. He is an Assistant Professor in World History at the University of Cambridge and a Bye-Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge.

Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus of History at Princeton University and the Director of the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge, which is based at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and the Humanities (CRASSH). He is the author and editor of over a dozen books, most recently Earth Hunger: Global Integration and the Need for Strangers (Princeton University Press) and edited with Andreas Eckert, A World of Narratives: Nations, Empires, and Other World Products (Bloomsbury). His Global History Lab is committed to teaching world history in global emergencies. It has enrolled over 200,000 students since it began in 2012, partnering with institutions in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe to extend learning opportunities to refugees and to fractured communities. Adelman is conducting research on a global history of the civil war in El Salvador (1970s-1990s) and a history of human security.

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