The Conclusion recaps the book’s contributions and complements Chapter 5’s account of anti-imperial popular sovereignty by theorizing solidarity among the multiple positionalities covered in the book (Indigenous, settler, slave, forced refugee, diaspora settler, migrant settler, and other statuses). These statuses do not make the constitution of a people impossible but make the interrelations between these subjects the core of the “whole” we conceptualize. These interrelations include linkages with nature, which popular sovereignty leaves outside of its purview. An “ecological popular sovereignty” corrects this by recognizing the essential dependence of communities on nature, requiring relations of reciprocity and care toward nature. Joining anti-imperial and ecological as modifiers of popular sovereignty allows for its theorization without actively obscuring its material underpinnings. In particular, this way of theorizing popular sovereignty shifts the meaning of settler from an identity to a way of relating to other humans and to land, and provides parameters for evaluating political action for their (in)justice implications. This recasting presupposes a radical critique of private ownership of land, because capitalism’s right to charge humans for the right to occupy the earth sacrifices constructive relations with land and the attendant social relationalities.

In this chapter, James Tully takes us deep into the phenomenology of the kind of dialogue across traditions that is capable of disrupting the unjust power structures that currently connect diverse traditions in the modern global order. He contrasts “genuine dialogue,” in which traditions have equal status as forms of human understanding, with the many kinds of “false dialogue” that are likely to emerge under circumstances of unequal power and power-knowledge. As beings that make sense of the world through our received traditions, we tend to project onto others the terms that make the world meaningful to us. Deparochializing our political thought must begin by “reparochializing” it, recognizing that the truths we hold to be self-evident have arisen within a sociohistorically specific context. The “deep listening” required for genuine dialogue requires practices of the self that must be cultivated over time before dialogue can generate reciprocal elucidation and transformation. When we succeed, participants in this dialogue can achieve not only mutual understanding but also the possibility of bringing to light ways of “thinking, judging, deliberating, and acting together in response to the situation they share that were unimaginable and unthinkable prior to the dialogue.”