Sovereignty is the capacity of a person or community to end a form and begin again without asking permission from the very structures that failed them.
Form here means any organized way of being: a contract, an institution, a story, a livelihood, a political arrangement, even a personal identity.
Ending a form means retaining the right to dissolve it cleanly—without forfeiting one’s right to exist.
Beginning again means re-constituting life, order, and meaning on new terms chosen from within, not issued from above.
The structures that failed them are the authorities, systems, or narratives that proved incapable of protecting, enabling, or telling the truth about that life.
Thus, sovereignty is present when the power to terminate and re-originate persists inside the person or community; it is absent when that power sits outside and must be requested.