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.”

Just over thirty years ago, François Hartog pondered what it might mean to devote an entire issue of the Annales to ancient history. Such an editorial endeavor, he suggested, was a bold gamble based on the conviction that the study of antiquity should not be confined to the domain of pure erudition, exclusively reserved for specialists. Like other historians, specialists in ancient history could heed Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre’s invitation in the journal’s first issue, calling for historians to “demolish walls so high that they frequently block the view” as they “strive to pay attention to their neighbor’s work.”

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.

It is commonly accepted that the definition of four property classes by Solon in early sixth century-BCE Athens marked a major step in the political construction of the Athenian state. However, as Claude Mossé argued thirty-five years ago, this reconstruction is mainly the result of a fourth-century-BCE historiography that positioned Solon as the founding father of Athenian democracy—casting doubt on the early existence of the so-called Solonian system. Although such an approach has often been considered as “postmodern” or “pessimistic,” I propose to follow Mossé’s path by considering the Solonian telē as occupational groups involved, along with many others, in the construction of the Athenian polis. This analysis results in the definition of an explicitly Archaic citizenship, conceived as a performance linked to specific behaviors and lifestyles.

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.

This paper argues that there were two fundamental conceptions of the “common” in Archaic Greece. This distinction is worth teasing from contemporary practices of distribution, such as the division of bounty between warriors after a military expedition. Within this context we can observe a difference between the “common” that is not distributed—the part that a community sets aside before portioning out individual shares—and the “common” that results from the way in which individual parts are distributed: for instance, a division according to equal measures gives individuals the sense of belonging to a sharing community. Identifying these two forms as “exclusive commons” and “inclusive commons,” the article provides an analysis of their properties. It also outlines the consequences of the fact that the ancient Greeks came to apply this distributive schema to the polis itself and to conceive its political structure as the result of a global distribution of goods and prerogatives. The duality outlined here should thus be understood as one of the core structuring principles of ancient Greek political practice and thought.

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.

Thirty years after Nicole Loraux published her 1986 article in L’Homme, this study revisits the question of political experience in the ancient Greek world. Its aim is to demonstrate the importance of the two definitions of the term “politics” as conceived by the Ancient Greeks. On the one hand, the political was conceived as an ensemble of activities with no specific institutional substance or form, a sphere of action that has no direct equivalent in the modern state, but rather relates to very varied experiences and practices undertaken in the context of conflict. On the other hand, politics was understood not only as organized access to different institutions, but also as the way in which a community structured and defined itself. Taking the Athenian crisis of 404-403 BCE as a case study, in particular the speech of Cleocritus preserved in Xenophon’s Hellenica, this paper proposes a new way of thinking about this dual expression of collective life. Far from the reconciliatory reading of Cleocritus’ speech proposed by Loraux, his appeal for harmony bears witness, in the turmoil and tension of events, to the way that politics (in the institutional sense) was sidelined to the exclusive benefit of the political and the collective practices associated with it. In conclusion, this case study opens up a more general consideration of the meaning of the “event” and its epistemological significance. By considering the crisis of 404-403 BCE at the heart of the “regimes of historicity” that characterized the history of Athens between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, this article aims to provide a clearer articulation of the foundational moments and established functioning of Greek democracy.

Public slavery was an institution common to most Greek cities during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Whether they worked on the city’s major construction sites, performed minor duties in its civic administration or filled the ranks of its police force (the famous Scythian archers of classical Athens), public slaves may be said to have constituted the first public servants known to Greek cities. Studying them from this perspective can shed new light on the long-running debate about the degree to which the polis functioned as a state. Direct democracy, in the Classical Athenian sense, implied that all political prerogatives be held by the citizens themselves, and not by any kind of state apparatus. The decision to delegate administrative tasks to slaves can thus be understood as a “resistance” (as defined by the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres) on the part of the civic society to the development of this apparatus.

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.

This article revisits the notion of citizenship (politeia) in the ancient Greek world, challenging the traditional conception, based principally on the works of Aristotle, that defines citizenship in terms of political participation. It considers the numerous decrees issued during the Hellenistic period bestowing legal privileges upon foreign benefactors (such as the right to own property, to trade, to enter into a legal marriage, to be exempted from certain taxes, and so on). If the Classical period’s tripartite division of status (citizens, resident aliens, and slaves) remained valid during the Hellenistic period and provided the “infrastructure” of civic societies, the system of privileges established by cities to honor deserving foreigners created a “concatenation” of different positions, which, without calling the hierarchy of legal statuses into question, introduced social fluidity into an interconnected world that was far removed from the Platonic and Aristotelian ideals of the autarchic city.

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.