From Spatial Control to Existential Production: Rethinking Sovereignty Beyond the Ecological Turn (December 9, 2025, 15:00 GMT)

One aspect in which the trend toward deglobalization manifests itself today is the rapid advancement of the concept of sovereignty to the forefront of political discourse. The recent ecological turn in sovereignty studies has undoubtedly enriched our understanding of how authority operates through more-than-human dimensions, revealing the role of natural resources, waste, infrastructures, and environmental conditions in the exercise of power. Yet this approach, despite its commitment to heterogeneity, risks reproducing a homogenizing logic by anchoring itself in spatial materialities and territorial configurations. Furthermore, it has primarily addressed the environmental dimension, with some attention to social relations, but has largely neglected what Felix Guattari calls "mental ecology". Should we shift analysis from the question of who controls material resources to how existential territories are produced, maintained, and transformed? This suggests analyzing sovereignty not through stable spatial configurations but through dynamic processes of existential production. Might contemporary sovereignty struggles be as well understood not as contests over pre-existing territories or resources, but as competitions between different assemblages of enunciation that produce distinct existential territories? How it corresponds to the homogenizing trends of Integrated World Capitalism?

During this roundtable discussion, we propose to address inquiries such as:

• How can we think through sovereignty struggles that operate simultaneously across environmental, social, and mental ecological registers without reducing them to a unified spatial logic?
• If sovereignty is not a unified spatial logic but operates through heterogeneous ecological registers, how do we conceptualize the transversal connections between these registers without reinstating hierarchical causality?
• Can we characterize contemporary sovereignty conflicts as fundamentally concerned with defending or producing existential territories rather than conventional territorial or resource claims? 

Scheduled talks will be delivered by Dr. Jean-Sébastien Laberge (Montreal, Canada), Prof. Domenico Hur (Goiás, Brazil), Mr. Gabriel Mart (Angers, France).

If you wish to participate in the event online, please send an e-mail to [email protected] to receive your Zoom link or fill in the form.

This event is a part of a series of round-table discussions “Thinking Globally in an Age of Competing Sovereignties” hosted by the International Burke Institute.