Abstract:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>This Afterword argues that Neil Walker’s powerful and expansive “sovereignty frame” renders sovereignty with an air of inevitability that risks misrecognizing justifiable claims against sovereignty itself. The frame wraps sovereignty in constitutionalism in ways that gloss over critical attention to both sovereignty’s coercive element and its groundedness in physical space. I argue that the effect of an expansively constitutionalized sovereignty frame reduces, absorbs, or crowds out articulations of other ways to conceptualize relations among and between people in polities and the places in which they are grounded, most notably those examined in Indigenous legal and political theory. The framing of sovereignty may also serve to foreclose its claiming, so that an apparent surplus of sovereignty masks deep and justifiable incompatibilities, tensions, and genuine contestations that cannot be explained as an excess or surfeit.</jats:p>
