Decolonial Conceptions of Territory, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination

Torsten Menge (Northwestern University Qatar); Jonathan Kwan (New York University Abu Dhabi)

Humanities Bridgeford Street Building: Room G.7

Debates in political philosophy about territorial sovereignty, political community, and self- determination are often implicitly indexed to liberal democratic Western nation-states. These debates usually treat the nation-state as their normative starting point and often do not extensively address the ongoing legacies of colonialism and imperialism, even though most contemporary state boundaries were established through conquest, settler colonialism, imperialist fiat, and forced migration.  

The goal of this workshop is to explore how theories that center the experiences of postcolonial societies and Indigenous peoples can contribute to and reshape these debates. For example, Adom Getachew has argued that anticolonial nationalists from the Global South did not pursue an expansion of the Westphalian regime of sovereignty but instead “reinvented” an internationalist understanding of self-determination that inspired visions of regional and postcolonial federations and the internationalization of welfarism. Nandita Sharma and others have argued that the nationalization of state sovereignty has played a key role in perpetuating the exploitative and extractive practices of racial capitalism. Similarly, theorists of Indigenous self-determination routinely problematize and challenge dominant paradigms of sovereignty and territoriality. Glen Coulthard and others have criticized contemporary politics of recognition for reinscribing rather than rectifying settler colonial relationships between host states and Indigenous nations. Kyle Whyte’s notion of “collective continuance” and Jeff Corntassel’s concept of “sustainable self- determination” both represent alternative conceptualizations of Indigenous sovereignty that interweave—in different ways—political, cultural, ecological, and intergenerational relationships and responsibilities. 

In this workshop, we want to explore the implications of these various strands of political thought for discussions of territory, peoplehood, political community, and self-determination. How does fore-fronting the ecological and environmental dimensions of territory, and as well as the global struggles against colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism alter our theories of peoplehood, sovereignty, and self-determination? We are also hoping to bring these challenges into conversation with recent defenses of territorial rights (by Anna Stilz, Margaret Moore, Cara Nine, etc.). 

Additional possible questions include: 

• How should we think about the concept of “the people” in the context of postcolonial states, which often inherited colonial borders that interrupted precolonial forms of movement and governance and created new problems of ethnic and religious heterogeneity and domination? How does centering the experiences of Indigenous nations rather than modern nation-states alter the concept of “the people”? 
• What are the continuities and discontinuities between the idea of territorial nationalities and racial categories? What role do nation-building projects and the delineation of natives from migrants play in the reproduction of racial capitalism? 
• How does attention to the colonial and imperial histories of actual nation-states impact debates on immigration? 
• What territorial forms should reparations for colonial injustices take? Or have these injustices been superseded? 
• How does methodological nationalism shape or distort debates about territory, peoplehood, political community, and self-determination? What alternative forms of political community—beyond the nation-state or the people—need more attention? 
• How can theories of territory meet the challenges raised by the current ecological crises of the Anthropocene that are themselves bound up with colonial injustices? Are recent “watershed” or “river” models of territory by Paulina Ochoa Espejo and Cara Nine, for example, up to the task?