Unbounded territoriality

Territorial control, settler colonialism, and Israel/Palestine

Bibliographic Data

ID18947408
AuthorsSara Salazar Hughes (University of California, Los Angeles), Sara N S Hughes (0000-0001-8554-7379, University of California, Los Angeles, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume10
Issue2
Pages216-233
Publication date2020-04-02
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSettler Colonial Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1838-0743 • E-ISSN: 2201-473X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/2201473x.2020.1741763
OpenAlexW3013456067
LanguageEN
Citations received22

Settler colonialism is premised on the replacement of an indigenous population with an exogenous one on the land. Therefore, territoriality, or territorial control, is its irreducible element.11 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999). As it is traditionally conceived, the exercise of territoriality requires that the territorial extent of control be clearly bounded and communicated. But in settler colonial contexts the frontier is a mobile index of expansion – though not yet fully inhabited or annexed, it would eventually and inevitably be part of the settler polity. Therefore, the form of territorial control operating in the frontier of settler colonial formations is unbounded territoriality, a strategy of territorial control best exercised by not delimiting boundaries, by not making clear the extent of sovereign authority. Because settlers are ‘founders’ of political orders who carry their sovereignty with them into the frontier,22 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). the territorial limits of settler sovereignty are liminal – indeterminate, ambiguous, and pending – at least until the frontier is closed and final borders are established. Israel, though, has been unable to close the frontier and delimit final territorial borders, which has resulted in the indefinite character of the ‘occupation’ and the continued exercise of unbounded territoriality, particularly in the West Bank

Colonialism · Element (criminal law) · Frontier · Indigenous · Liminality · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Population · Sociology · Sovereignty · Territoriality · Anthropology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Demography · Ecology · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society

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