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Knowledge production in the Anglosphere depends on the erasure of non-Western ways of knowing – especially ways of knowing oneself, the lands and waters, and the relationships between these entities. In settler-colonial states those in power seldom question this erasure, despite the ongoing presence and power of Indigenous nations.
In this groundbreaking work, Liam Midzain-Gobin illuminates how the logic of improvement animates this epistemological ignorance, both historically and currently. By creating a new world based on settler views, the settler state augments its own power. This way of thinking drives government actions and even influences how settlers and the state imagine what is possible. Examining knowledge production through governance processes, Settler-Colonial Sovereignty studies three policy areas: First Nations reserve policy, land and resource monitoring frameworks, and the Indigenous Peoples Survey. Throughout, Midzain-Gobin shows how state sovereignty is never stable but continually being reaffirmed.
Inspired by the interaction of Indigenous knowledge with cosmological assumptions to provide different understandings of our place in the world, Settler-Colonial Sovereignty imagines how we might move past improvement as a basis for Indigenous-settler relations.
“An insightful and lucid account of settler colonial governance and the epistemic work continuously required to legitimate it and mystify its violences. The language of ‘improvement’ remains embedded in contemporary political projects of dispossession, making this book an urgent read.” Meera Sabaratnam, author of Decolonising Intervention: International Statebuilding in Mozambique
“A groundbreaking work. Skilfully weaving theory and history, Midzain-Gobin problematizes the domestic-international divide at the heart of the Western-led international system by recognizing Indigenous nations as international actors.” David B. MacDonald, author of The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation
“Settler Colonial Sovereignty documents the arrogance, banality, and racism of government efforts to domesticate the sovereignty of Indigenous nations through claims of science, improvement, and culture. Midzain-Gobin skilfully exposes the colonial violence undergirding notions of Canadian sovereignty.” Ajay Parasram, author of Pluriversal Sovereignty and the State: Imperial Encounters in Sri Lanka
"An excellent book. Midzain-Gobin has produced a meticulous and wide-ranging piece of scholarship that adds to various important conversations across multiple fields: international studies, policy studies, and settler colonial studies. I do not know of many works quite like it." David Myer Temin, author of Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought
“What, [Midzain-Gobin] asks, would decolonial knowledge pro-duction look like? How might we seek freedom outside of the racialized logic of improvement? As the book makes clear, the answers to these questions are both obvious – based in centeringIndigenous self-determination – and kept perennially out of reach by the very logic that Midzain-Gobin articulates so clearly. Anyone who has worked in this field in any part of the Anglo settler world knows this frustration all too well.” Ethnic and Racial Studies
“Settler Colonial Sovereignty's most valuable analytical offering may indeed lie in an appraisal of the two logics’ sequential and concomitant operation: improvement by elimination in a primary or originary “frontier” moment, and elimination by improvement in successive, more settled, and much “improved” eras.” International Journal