Kaitie Jourdeuil

This article defends grounded normative theory (GNT) as a more appropriate methodology to tackle questions of territorial justice in settler states over the dominant approach in territorial rights theory. I contrast the central aims and methodological commitments of territory theories and GNT: the former are engaged in an ideal, conceptual project primarily directed at other liberals, while the latter is oriented towards addressing injustices through deep engagement with the narratives and power relations that normalize them. I then outline three limitations of the territorial rehabilitation project undertaken by territory theorists that result from their failure to engage the robust critical and empirical literatures on settler colonialism. Finally, I sketch how GNT can reorient the territorial rehabilitation project towards decolonization.

This paper challenges the dominant paradigm that territorial justice in settler-colonial states like Canada is a matter of distributive justice. Instead, it argues that theorists should embrace the dominant paradigm in Indigenous political thought and the critical theory that territorial justice is a matter of structural justice. This is because the structural paradigm focuses on how Indigenous and settler jurisdictions are constructed in relation to each other, and the conditions required to change this relationship. To make this argument, I highlight three worries for the distributive paradigm in settler-colonial states and show how a structural paradigm can address them. The first concerns the feasibility of implementing just distributions in contexts of structural injustice. The second concerns the distributive paradigm’s ability to describe how Indigenous and settler jurisdictions relate to each other. The third concerns how it justifies jurisdictional rights. I conclude by considering the new directions for territorial rights theory that the structural paradigm proposes.