The concept of territorial sovereignty, of the authority to govern a recognized swath of the physical environment, is a fundamental pillar of contemporary international relations. It was not always so. As Lauren Benton has demonstrated, sovereign authority depended on certain practices of political dominion and a defining of the physical environment through such techniques as cartography or narratives of exploration.

This workshop engages with recent historical approaches examining how nonhuman factors influenced governance and understandings of sovereignty. The workshop will also consider methods for displacing dominant narratives about sovereignty and the environment, whereby contemporary models are anachronistically projected into the past.