Territorial justice as structural justice: settler colonialism and territorial rights theory

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.