Pluralized Sovereignties: Autochthonous Lawmaking on the Settler Colonial Frontier in Palestine

Abstract

This essay seeks to analyse the play of plural sovereignties in settler colonial frontier societies to explore the various means through which settlers invade, occupy, and appropriate native lifeworlds. This essay will break down the concept of sovereignty into a number of distinct but interconnected registers. This plurality of overlapping sovereignties, operating in unison and discretely, has played a formative role historically in settler colonial structural invasion. After identifying these various regimes of sovereignty and their intimate relation to the post-Enlightenment concept of self-determination, I will chart their course through the destruction of native societies on the frontier. This essay will be broadly comparative in nature: after touching on the case of pre- and post-revolutionary America I will finally focus on the case study of contemporary Palestine/Israel as an example of the institutionalization of what has been in the past an ad hoc and chaotic process. I will show how the state of Israel and its settlers in the Occupied Territories utilize the radical decentralization of state sovereignty as a technology of structural invasion through which they strangle, unsettle, and ultimately seek to end Palestinian social reproduction on the land.

• indigeneity
• law
• Palestine/Israel
• settler colonialism
• sovereignty
• structural invasion