Abstract Theories of sovereignty in the twentieth century are generally based on a teleological “out-of-Europe” narrative where the modern, centralized nation-state form gradually spread across the world to be the foundation of the international order. In this article, the author reflects on how the conceptualization of sovereignty may change if one begins a global account of modern sovereignty not from the heart of Western Europe but from the complex arrangements of “distributed sovereignty” that emerged in the Indian Ocean and other colonized territories from the eighteenth century onward. These arrangements were organized as multiple layers of dependency and provisional domination, captured well by Eric Beverley's term minor sovereignty. Thinking through sovereignty in a minor key allows us to see sovereignty less as a foundation of states and societies and more as a performative category, emerging in a dialectic between promises of order, prosperity, and law, and the realities of violent domination and occupation.

中文翻译：

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小钥匙中的主权

摘要 20世纪的主权理论普遍建立在目的论的“欧洲之外”叙事之上，现代中央集权的民族国家形式逐渐蔓延到世界各地，成为国际秩序的基础。在本文中，作者反思了如果一个人不是从西欧的心脏而是从印度洋和其他殖民地出现的“分布式主权”的复杂安排开始对现代主权进行全球描述，那么主权的概念化可能会发生怎样的变化。十八世纪以后的领土。这些安排被组织为多层依赖和临时统治，埃里克贝弗利的术语“次要主权”很好地捕捉到了这些安排。