Các nhiệm vụ xác định 'chủ quyền' và xác định "chủ quyền" liên quan đến nhiệm vụ đặt ra một số vấn đề phức tạp cho các luật gia. Nhiệm vụ liên quan đến sovereigns phân biệt thích hợp từ các tổ chức khác - chẳng hạn như tên cướp biển, không nước châu Âu và những người du mục - mà dường như cũng có các thuộc tính của chủ quyền. | colonialism in nineteenth-century international law 57 arrive at such a conclusion but given the positivist preoccupation with consistency and coherence it had to do so in a manner consistent with the broad complex of ideas and systems of thinking which constituted sovereignty doctrine and positivist jurisprudence. The task of identifying the sovereign and defining sovereignty were inter-related tasks which posed a number of complex problems for jurists. The task involved distinguishing sovereigns proper from other entities -- such as pirates non-European states and nomads -- which also seemed to possess the attributes of sovereignty. How could it be claimed within this jurisprudence that the barbarian nations a wandering tribe with no fixed territory to call its own a race of savages and a band of pirates 75 were not sovereign This question posed a dilemma to nineteenth-century jurists whose understanding of positivism was ineluctably affected by Austin simply these entities satisfied the essential Austinian criteria of sovereignty. As Lawrence acknowledges even the wandering tribe might obey implicitly a chief who took no commands from other rulers 76 pirates similarly might be temporarily under the sway of a chief with unrestricted power .77 The general answer was that sovereignty implied control over territory. For positivists sovereignty could be most clearly defined as control over territory. Thus Lawrence states International Law regards states as political units possessed of proprietary rights over definite portions of the earth s surface. So entirely is its conception of a state bound up with the notion of territorial possession that it would be impossible for a nomadic tribe even if highly organised and civilized to come under its Whatever the extent to which an entity may have satisfied the other criteria of statehood then a failure to occupy territory would preclude that entity from being treated as sovereign. The primacy of territory is .
