By What Jurisdiction? Law, Settler Colonialism, and the Geographical Assumptions of IR Theory

Abstract In this article, I consider critical writings on territory in International Relations, focusing on recent work on U.S. practices of extraterritorial jurisdiction. I suggest that, while such work has importantly traced the multiple ways in which U.S. authority often exceeds the supposed territorial boundaries of the United States, it has nonetheless failed to reckon with the contested and uneven nature of U.S. authority within such supposed boundaries. In particular, IR scholarship has failed to engage with the ways in which U.S. authority has been, and continued to be, contested by Indigenous people and nations. This failure is the product of an assumption that lies at the heart of the discipline—the assumption that Indigenous people are internal to colonizing or settler states. I suggest that the internalization of Indigenous people and Indigenous political organization that is at play in much IR scholarship is not simply a product of a generalized “state-centrism” or a product of histories of settler colonialism, writ large. Rather, at the heart of the territorial assignations and allotments of IR scholarship are assumptions about legal authority or jurisdiction—about who has jurisdiction to define and assign land, about who does not, and what law means at all. Critiquing these assumptions and their political implications, I show the importance of asking: “by what jurisdiction”? That is, what is the legal authority that we implicitly accept and assert when we designate territory in particular ways? The question insists that there are multiple laws (including multiple international laws) at play in global politics and opens up space for critical and postcolonial IR scholars to better take responsibility for their (often implicit) choices between multiple laws.