The state captures politics and political theory. We think in terms of states, and we expect politics to occur in well-defined territories and populations. So, groups lacking well-defined borders, or those who organize in polities different from the sovereign territorial state —such as indigenous people, migrants and their diasporic communities, or racial and ethnic minorities within the state—are often seen as a problem by mainstream politicians and publics. This paper argues that the grip the state has on normative theory stems partly from a confusion of two different notions of “the state.” The modern sovereign territorial nation state is often seen as the only ideal standard of political organization, while other political forms such as nomadic groups, empires, city-states, villages, and regional federations have been considered marginal if not barbaric. Contrasting versions of 17th century political thought (Hobbes’s De Cive, the justification of the early modern Habsburg empire, and the pre-Hispanic Nahua Altepeme) the paper argues that the modern sovereign state is in fact less dominant and stable than contemporary political thought presumes, and that polities that political theory has historically considered “barbaric” are in fact civilized, common and well-established. The sovereign state is only one option among many. “Ideal” political thought need not be state-centered, and “realistic” approaches should consider other existing alternatives.
Paulina Ochoa Espejo is The John L. Nau III Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy in the department of Politics at the University of Virginia (USA). She is a political theorist who works at the intersection of democratic theory and the history of political thought, focusing on popular sovereignty and borders. She has written about populism, the boundaries of the demos, migration and the right to exclude, the relation between democracy and territorial rights, and borders’ moral relevance. She also works on Latin American political thought. She is the author of On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy and the Rights of Place (Oxford University Press, 2020), The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State (Penn State University Press, 2011); she co-authored Political Theory: A Global and Comparative Introduction (SAGE, 2025) and co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Populism (Oxford University Press, 2017). She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellow at UPenn. Before joining UVA, she was the William Penn Foundation Professor at Haverford College, an Assistant Professor at Yale University, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. She has also been a visiting professor at CIDE in Mexico City. At present, she is working on a monograph: Rights of Place: Territory, Property, and Jurisdiction in the Americas.
The DynamiTE seminars are a part of the project 'Dynamic Territory'. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 948964).
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