Onus Orbis Terrarum: About a Possible Shift in the Definition of Sovereignty

Starting with an insight from Peter Sloterdijk about the enduring notion of Empire in the European idea of sovereignty, this article explores a problem common to the discipline of International Relations, and more generally, geopolitics as well as social theory: the very origin of the notion of an entity endowed with some sort of autonomy over a territory. It is argued that the notion of a bounded entity triggers many artifacts that explains, in part, the failure and denial of world politics, especially over the question of climate change.