Rosa Luxemburg and imperialism as statecraft: US jurisdictional accumulation on the Philippines frontier

Abstract This article considers the internationalisation of American police power in the early 20th century alongside Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism as a form of statecraft. I examine colonial land reform policies in the US-occupied Philippines as an early example of imperial nation-building premised on the development of legal mechanisms to both promote and police property ownership. In particular, I look at the implementation of the 1903 Public Land Act (PLA), an effort to redistribute previously Spanish-held land to Filipino cultivators with the dual goal of pacificying local insurgency and facilitating democratic state-building to prepare the Philippines for independence. I argue that colonial land reform functioned by reproducing relations of legal unevenness, a term that describes the jurisdictional development of legal and political spaces outside the sanction of American rule of law. Liberal land reform schemes like the PLA held the Philippines in a chokehold, preventing the development of meaningful political institutions and economic self-sufficiency, while leveraging the failure of stabilization efforts as a means to prolong US rule.