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The State's Imperial Shadows

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2021

Abstract

This essay seeks to consider Anna Stilz's Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration in light of settler and nonsettler colonialism and their contemporary legacies. In particular, it examines the intergenerational claims of Indigenous communities and the extraterritorial claims of colonial and neocolonial subjects. The broad aim of this effort is to consider how centering the imperial roots of our contemporary nation-state system transforms our understanding and justifications of territorial sovereignty.

Type
Book Symposium: Territorial Sovereignty
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

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References

NOTES

1 Stilz, Anna, Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All parenthetical page references to Stilz in this essay refer to this book.

2 Stilz, Anna, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For this argument, see Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019), ch. 3.

4 For a recent version of this argument, see Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020).

5 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The African Roots of War” (1915), in W. E. B. Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois's International Writings, ed. Adom Getachew and Jennifer Pitts (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

6 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Worlds of Color” (1925), in ibid.

7 James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, vol. 2, Imperialism and Civic Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Jennifer Pitts, “Intervention and Sovereign Equality: Legacies of Vattel,” in Stefano Recchia and Jennifer M. Welsh, eds., Just and Unjust Military Intervention: European Thinkers from Vitoria to Mill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 134–35.

8 Ndongo Samba Sylla, “The CFA Franc: French Monetary Imperialism in Africa,” Review of African Political Economy, May 18, 2017, oape.net/2017/05/18/cfa-franc-french-monetary-imperialism-africa/.

9 James Tully, “The Imperial Roles of Modern Constitutional Democracy,” ch. 7, Public Philosophy in New Key, p. 216.

10 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006), pp. 387–409; and Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 19.

11 Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020).

12 Annie Sneed, “What Conservation Efforts Can Learn from Indigenous Communities,” Scientific American, May 29, 2019, www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-conservation-efforts-can-learn-from-indigenous-communities/.

13 Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, p. 11.

14 E. Tendayi Achiume, “Migration as Decolonization,” Stanford Law Review 71, no. 6 (June 2019), pp. 1509–74, at p. 1520.

15 Ibid., pp. 1534, 1548; Lea Ypi, “What's Wrong with Colonialism,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 41, no. 2 (Spring 2013), pp. 158–91; and Arash Abizadeh, “Closed Borders, Human Rights, and Democratic Legitimation,” in Driven from Home: Protecting the Rights of Forced Migrants, ed. David Hollenbach (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010), pp. 147–68.

16 Achiume, “Migration as Decolonization,” p. 1553.

17 Achiume suggests that her proposal is “primarily remedial rather than fully reparatory.” Ibid., p. 1553.

18 Cooper, Frederick, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; and Wilder, Gary, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.