The Issue of Defining of the Concept of “State Sovereignty” in Russian and Foreign Historiography

The concept of state sovereignty is one of the most controversial in Russian and foreign science due to the large number of approaches to its definition, which is determined by the cross-subject nature of the subject under study. Therefore, the aim of the study is to analyze how the concept of “state sovereignty” is defined in domestic and foreign science, and on this basis to propose a clarifying definition of the concept under consider-ation. To achieve this goal, descriptive, systematic, comparative and institutional methods were used. The article focuses on how various researchers determined the source of state sovereignty, which directly influenced the way it was determined. According to the results of the analysis, it was found that due to the lack of a unified way of interpreting the concept of state sovereignty, the scientific debate on this issue is reduced to a discourse on the dualism of this concept expressed in the relationship between state and government, as well as in its relationship to the regulatory and legal sphere and the people. Based on a large sample of different definitions of the above concept, we have proposed our own, clarifying definition of state sovereignty, which can claim a greater degree of universality, since it unites government and states as structural elements of state sovereignty, dependent on each other, and the people are introduced as the primary source of state sovereignty.