Dr. Ajay Parasram is Associate Professor in the Department of International Development Studies and Department of History at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.
Sovereignty has been the pillar of international theorizing in the last two hundred years, yet the ontological assumptions upon which the modern, territorial, nation-state we take for granted today makes the erroneous assumption that what might be true of European history ought to be universally applicable to territories around the world. In this lecture, I problematize the assumption of Eurocentric, uni-versal, sovereignty and make a case for pluriversal sovereignty with reference to examples from South Asia and Turtle Island that speak to the to radically different ontological starting points for thinking about political territory, with implications for the modern territorial state.
The series is supported by the Department of History, the Mershon Center, the South Asian Studies Initiative, the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, and the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
