Citizenship beyond Verbing

If citizenship is not a possession of discrete individuals but a relational field continually enacted between them, then sovereignty itself must be reconceptualised. Modern political theory treats sovereignty as something individuals have—a form of self-governance grounded in personal autonomy, choice, and rights. But this presumes the very fiction your argument displaces: the idea of an ontologically self-contained individual who precedes relation.

Once we understand citizenship as beyond verbing, as a continuous relational practice of co-becoming, then sovereignty cannot be located in the isolated individual. It cannot be a property of the private self, nor can it be grounded in an interior will imagined as separate from others. The sovereignty that matters—civic sovereignty—is not the sovereignty of individuals but the sovereignty of people in relation. It is not the authority of atomised subjects but the emergent authority of a relational field.

In this sense, sovereignty is not primarily a matter of individual self-determination but of collective relational determination: the capacity of people to shape their shared world through practices of recognition, mutual responsibility, and co-created meaning. It is the sovereignty of beings acting in relation, not beings acting alone. Sovereignty becomes less about “my will” or “your will” and more about the shared will that arises when partial beings meet one another in generative, ennobling relation.

This is a profound shift. It means that sovereignty is not an attribute but an emergent property. It arises at the scale of relational citizenship, not individual autonomy. When people enter into deep reciprocal relation—recognising one another’s partiality, engaging with each other’s perspectives, and co-authoring shared understandings—they generate a form of sovereignty that no individual could produce alone. The authority to act, decide, and shape collective life emerges from the relational field itself. Sovereignty becomes co-sovereignty.

Thus, the locus of sovereignty is re-situated. It is not the self-sufficient person but the relational constellation in which persons enact citizenship. Sovereignty becomes a function of shared becoming rather than private independence. It expresses itself through relational practices—dialogue, mutual recognition, collective sense-making, shared commitments—rather than through the isolated will of the individual.

This yields a new understanding of political self-determination. A society is sovereign not because it aggregates the wills of individuals, but because it cultivates and sustains the relational infrastructures through which people can enact citizenship together. Sovereignty rests in the quality of relational life, not in the intensity of individual autonomy. It is a lived property of the relational field, expressed in the collective capacity to generate meaning, navigate plurality, and build shared worlds.

In this framework, the “sovereign people” is not a rhetorical abstraction but an ontological claim: sovereignty arises in the people as a relational process, not as a sum of discrete actors. It is the sovereignty of citizenship-as-beyond-verb—sovereignty as relational becoming.

This reframing fundamentally shifts the terrain of political ontology. It reveals that the deepest source of agency, legitimacy, and collective power does not lie in the isolated individual but in the relational fabric where citizenship is enacted. Sovereignty, therefore, is not the triumph of the individual over the collective but the emergence of a collective through the relational practices of citizens. It is in citizenship, not individuality, that sovereignty finds its true ground.