CFP: Chiasma Journal Volume 11: The Question of Sovereignty

Theme and Scope:

Sovereignty, often imagined as the fixed and self-contained authority of the modern state is historically inseparable from colonization, which transforms it into a technology of conquest that divided populations into those protected by law and those rendered exploitable outside it. Citizenship for the metropole, subjugation for the colony exposed sovereignty as a project of territorial expansion rather than a universal political form. A dynamic that persisted after formal decolonization through economic dependency, Cold War geopolitics, and the global financial institutions that disciplined postcolonial states.

With the rise of neoliberalism, sovereignty was further hollowed out as states ceded power to markets, transnational capital, and technocratic bodies, transforming governments from sites of popular will into managers of competitiveness, debt, and austerity. Today, we can say that the nation-sate faces a crisis in which borders tighten as neoliberal sovereignty disperses across supply chains, privatization, and supranational agreements, producing a paradoxical condition: some states amplify coercion and nationalist rhetoric invoking “the people” or the “popular”, while the populations invoked experience sovereignty less as a democratic self-rule than as a fragmented apparatus of exclusion.

In this conjuncture, the governed are left behind; they are excluded from decision-making centers. Fed up with this logic, some of them become ready to exclude others to simulate their inclusion within the state. Even educational institutions are affected, becoming a battleground—a terrain to be conquered by different sides of the current political spectrum. This opened different questions that can need to be addressed: Is there a way to understand sovereignty as a universal right to self-determination? Can we, as citizens, propose a practice to exercise autonomy in individual and communal spheres? What has happened to the common or communal identity constitution in our present paradox? Can we still think of cultural phenomena such as folklore, rituals, religion, traditions, and forms of discourse as forms of cohesion, common forms of governmentality, or governance?

To address these questions, we propose Canada as an occasion and a site for theorizing sovereignty and challenging established genealogies. Its historical-political positioning toward the U.S. empire, its colonial history, and its Indigenous theory that seeks to build alternative epistemes in the face of colonialism and neoliberalism, together with its struggle for sovereignty, can be extremely useful for grounding our theoretical thought. That is why we invite different disciplines (but not limited to) like philosophy, cultural studies, indigenous theory, political science, marxism, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, sociology, anarchism and anti-anarchism, to think with us the role of sovereignty in our current historical bloc.

Submission Guidelines:

Chiasma accepts any and all manuscripts related to the topic at hand. That being said, submissions should be theoretically rigorous and diverse, in keeping with the trans-disciplinary nature of the journal. We ask for complete papers between 6,000–10,000 words that conform to a slightly modified version of the Chicago Manual of Style with footnotes and no bibliography (see our Style Guidelines). If there are original works of art that you think might fit within the theme, please get in contact via the email below. When submitting your manuscript, please include two documents:

1. the complete text of your manuscript with any identifying information removed (for help, see here), and
2. a title page that includes your full name, email address, institutional affiliation, short biography (no more than 100 words), and an abstract (no more than 300 words)

Please submit your manuscript via our submission page here. The deadline for submissions is April 20th, 2026.

Should you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at [email protected]