Description:

Please join the International Relations Speaker Series as they host Emma Davis, Ph.D candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University, for a presentation titled, "Politics Out of Place: Diaspora and Political Organization in International Relations."

Abstract: International Relations (IR) scholarship has long recognized the historical contingency of territorial sovereignty, yet it continues to treat the nation-state as the default horizon of political authority and self-determination. This article contributes to efforts to rethink these assumptions by recovering early-twentieth-century historian and activist Simon Dubnow’s theory of Jewish diasporic autonomy. Reading Dubnow as a political theorist, the article shows how his account conceptualizes diaspora as a durable form of political organization capable of sustaining collective self-rule without territorial sovereignty or population concentration. Dubnow theorizes political authority as layered and non-exclusive, grounded in institutionalized practices of governance, representation, and communal decision-making rather than territorial control. By foregrounding a historically rooted theory of non-sovereign self-determination, the article contributes to broader debates about political authority, diversity regimes, and alternative forms of political order beyond the territorial state.

Emma Davis is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. Davis’ research grapples with questions in international relations theory and practice by drawing from Jewish history and thought, religious studies, and critical theory. Davis’ dissertation, "International Relations and the Jewish Question: Reconsidering Self-Determination," spotlights Jewish political movements that imagined self-determination outside of the nation-state system and considers their implications for debates about territory, sovereignty, and world order.