7 - Denaturalising the Concept of Territory in International Law

Summary

Can territory be decolonised? In one crucial sense, the answer is yes. In a moment when the ‘threat of recolonisation haunts the third world’, the battles fought by the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century for official recognition of political independence should not be disremembered, or their gains underestimated. But can the concept of territory be decolonised? Building on TWAIL, Indigenous and decolonial scholarly interventions, this chapter revisits the international law of territory to argue that there are two senses in which the question must be answered in the negative. The concept of territory is a Eurocentric construction of the rightful relationship between community, authority, and place. Not only does that construction rely on the ontological rupture between human subject and natural object that characterises European Enlightenment philosophy; it erases the physical Earth itself, replacing it with an abstract object over which sovereignty is exercised or space within which jurisdiction is asserted. The concept of territory in international law thereby presumes the objectification of ‘nature’ necessary for the propertisation and commodification of Earth.