Agonistic reconciliation: inclusion, decolonisation and the need for radical innovation

Abstract

In settler colonial societies like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, Indigenous–state relations are defined by ongoing conflict over unresolved questions of sovereignty, self-determination, and land. These conflicts have remained intractable regardless of the policy approaches engineered by the state. This article outlines an analytical approach to agonistic reconciliation by mapping the polar ends of a spectrum of responses to conflict in Indigenous–settler relations, with inclusion at one end of this spectrum and decolonisation at the other. Agonistic inclusion seeks to engage reconciliatory relations within colonial democratic institutions, while agonistic decolonisation rejects the legitimacy of these institutions and seeks radical innovation in their place. The article concludes by arguing that scholars must be alert to the seductive pull of inclusion and push instead towards the radical innovation that decolonisation demands.

Keywords:

• Agonism
• reconciliation
• decolonisation
• Indigenous–settler relations
• settler colonialism
• Indigenous people

Introduction

In settler colonial societies like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States (sometimes referred to as the CANZUS nations), Indigenous–state relations are defined by their foundational and ongoing conflict. These conflicts centre on unresolved questions of sovereignty, self-determination and land, creating a ‘uniquely tangled politics’ (Brigg 2016, 342). What Gerald Horne (2018) describes as the ‘apocalypse’ of settler colonialism has produced deep, sustained and seemingly intractable conflictual entanglements. Indeed, despite several centuries of political contestation, Indigenous–settler relations have remained profoundly colonial, driven by the ‘logic of elimination’ that is constitutive of settler colonial societies (Wolfe 2016, 35–36). As Patrick Wolfe most famously argued, invasion is a structure, not an event (1999, 2); the violence of invasion is today structured into all aspects of Indigenous–state relations. Settler colonial societies, then, are not peaceful societies, but societies that simultaneously perpetuate and deny ongoing structural and carceral violence towards Indigenous peoples (Little and McMillan 2017).

Intrinsic to the conflict of Indigenous–settler relations are the policies and approaches through which settler states seek to advance the elimination of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous political difference. The logic of elimination takes many forms, some of which appear more benign or progressive than others (Strakosch and Macoun 2012, 45). The most obvious strategy is the physical elimination of Indigenous peoples, historically through massacres and other forms of frontier violence, and still today through ongoing state violence evident in the over-policing and hyper-incarceration of Indigenous populations (see Anthony 2016 inter alia). Over time, settler governments have also pursued other strategies of elimination, including the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from the lands that are central to their political systems, identities and spiritual lives, and the destruction of Indigenous families and communities through policies of containment and child removal. Taking an apparently more progressive orientation, however, elimination may also look like policies focussed on the inclusion or recognition of Indigenous polities within the settler state. Indeed, as Wolfe (2006, 402) has argued, these other modes of elimination – those that are, in effect, assimilatory – may be more effective for the settler than killing as they do not disrupt the conventional rule of law. Indigenous critics (see Coulthard 2014, Simpson 2014 inter alia) point to the ways in which settler policies of reconciliation and recognition in fact further the settler logic of elimination. Such policies, which appear to accommodate Indigenous demands, are part of the processes underlying the structure of ongoing colonialism that, as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017, 45) has argued, create a ‘scaffolding’ for the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the settler state.

It is in this context that this paper, in keeping with the focus of this special issue, considers the extent to which policies of reconciliation may advance an agonistic peace rather than further the elimination of Indigenous peoples. Some of these arguments may be familiar to scholars working in critical Indigenous studies, but for those in the field of peace research this analysis may be new. Elsewhere, I have argued for an understanding of reconciliation as an agonistic and transformative process – a process that is deeply political and that prioritises the capacity to retain and develop democratic political contest (Maddison 2015, 3). A fully political understanding of reconciliation recognises the futility of attempting to transcend conflict, instead framing reconciliation as ‘a potentially agonistic clash of worldviews within the context of a community that is “not yet”’ (Schaap 2005, 4). Agonism forces us to eschew a view of reconciliation focussed on unity, harmony, or nation-building as goals that avoid the need for a radical restructuring of the relationship between Indigenous and settler peoples and does not pressure Indigenous peoples to seek inclusion in the settler state in order to survive. Agonistic reconciliation foregrounds ongoing conflict, plurality and openness (Maddison 2015, 41) – a view that recognises and supports the inevitably conflictual nature of Indigenous–settler relations.

But does the agonistic demand to engage with conflict in Indigenous–settler relations have the capacity to advance decolonisation? Taking up Shinko’s (2008, 488) ideas of ‘Foucauldian-infused agonism’, in what follows I build on my earlier work to question the extent to which reconciliation (as a form of peace) can be understood as ‘just another tactic for reinscribing hegemonic structures of domination, exclusion, and marginalisation’ – in other words, as a tactic for Indigenous elimination. While agonism provides a crucial lens through which to ‘politicise the concept of peace’ (and reconciliation), analysis must be always alert to the possibility that agonistic politics may still ‘replicate the same structural, cultural, liberal western facets of domination, exclusion, and marginalisation within the terms of its own contestational discourses’ (Shinko 2008, 473–475). This article considers the material aspects of agonism, inherent to what I describe below as ‘agonistic decolonisation’. This recasting of agonism directs our attention towards the materiality of power structures that sustain unjust settler–colonial relationships, and questions whether it is possible to dismantle these structures through agonistic discourse alone. In the context of Indigenous–settler relations, the risk is that the promise of agonistic reconciliation may not produce the material consequences required for decolonisation in these relations.

Thus, in what follows in this article, I build on earlier work on reconciliation and in critical Indigenous studies (that may not yet have travelled to the field of peace research) to outline a new analytical approach to agonistic reconciliation by mapping the polar ends of a spectrum of responses to conflict in Indigenous–settler relations, with inclusion at one end of this spectrum and decolonisation at the other. Agonistic inclusion seeks to engage reconciliatory relations within colonial democratic institutions, while agonistic decolonisation rejects the legitimacy of these institutions and seeks radical innovation in their place. In the second section I revisit Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s important intervention in this space, which asks us to confront the incommensurability between these two positions. In the third section I (re)consider what – if anything – this spectrum of agonistic reconciliation might offer these complex political relations. The paper concludes by confronting the limitations of agonistic reconciliation as a productive means of engaging with conflict between Indigenous peoples and settlers. While reconciliation as agonistic inclusion remains important for sustaining the view that conflict between Indigenous peoples and settlers is ‘perpetually contestable’ (Bohle 2017, 257), without innovations beyond the limits of liberal democratic institutions, reconciliation does not support calls for decolonisation.

Agonistic reconciliation: between inclusion and decolonisation

Agonism has made an important contribution to thinking about the possibilities and limitations of reconciliation. For agonists, conflict is not a negative dynamic in reconciliation processes; rather, it is seen as an essential dynamic that allows opposing groups to actively contest their future ways of living together. Agonists articulate a ‘paradoxical reconciliation’ that does not pursue the ‘suturing’ of social and political division, but rather centres irresolvable conflict – not in the pursuit of an ‘aspirational unity’ but in the belief that this will ‘instead disclose democratic politics itself as an expressive contest between plural articulations of identity, history, and community’ (Bohle 2017, 257). Indeed, Muldoon and Schaap (2012, 182) contend that reconciliation processes are inevitably agonistic precisely because they ‘open up a space of contestation and disagreement’ between opposing groups focussed on claims and counter-claims about past wrongs.

In this article I am seeking to refine an analytic approach to evaluating agonistic reconciliation. While wary of establishing an inevitably problematic binary, I want to situate the ongoing conflict of settler colonialism within a spectrum of (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) views about how this conflict might be transformed or resolved. The two poles on this agonistic reconciliation spectrum, which I refer to as ‘agonistic inclusion’ and ‘agonistic decolonisation’, reflect profoundly different views of both what is possible or desirable in future relations between Indigenous peoples and settler states, and what is required in order to meaningfully transform the material structures of injustice in these relations. This spectrum may be seen, then, as an analytic lens for understanding the capacity for agonistic reconciliation to more or less effectively advance Indigenous claims to justice.

At one end of the agonistic reconciliation spectrum is the view that what is needed to resolve conflicts between Indigenous peoples and settlers is policy that will support and enable the full inclusion of Indigenous peoples in settler society and its institutions. This view, which I have previously described as the ‘colonial fantasy’ (Maddison 2019), rests on a hope that the colonial project can one day be completed, leaving the violence of colonisation and the injustice of dispossession behind, replaced by a united, morally legitimate, postcolonial and inclusive nation. At various times both non-Indigenous and Indigenous actors have expressed the desire to resolve settler–colonial conflict through the inclusion of Indigenous people in the settler order. A notable strand of Indigenous struggle has been focussed on achieving civil rights – particularly substantive citizenship rights and equality through gaining the franchise and through improved policy and services – along with constitutional reform and recognition, and achieving greater representation in settler parliaments (see Chesterman 2005 inter alia). Non-Indigenous political actors have often shared these views, with a strong policy focus on achieving statistical parity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples as an indication that reconciliation has been achieved. Despite the ‘assimilative objection’ to such approaches, they may still be understood as agonistic because, as Schaap (2008, 256) argues, they often retain ‘the potential to politicise the terms of association in a divided society’. For Schaap, agonistic inclusion is not the same as agonistic incorporation, the latter being more akin to elimination than the former.

Critics of demands for the inclusion of Indigenous peoples within the settler state, however, suggest that such inclusion can only be understood as another form of elimination. Indigenous policy from colonisation to the present is often framed as a positive progression from exclusion to inclusion, when in reality these often function as ‘twin strategies’ that effectively trap Indigenous resistance in the continual oscillation between the two (Macoun and Strakosch 2013, 429). What Steinman (2016, 219) calls the ‘ubiquitous minoritizing conception’ of Indigenous peoples, which reduces sovereign First Nations to just another ethnic minority within liberal multicultural societies, effectively eliminates Indigenous sovereignty and replaces it with liberal inclusion. Indigenous peoples become just one of ‘various social groups that can organize to make demands upon the state for full inclusion in the liberal order’.

Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard has argued that even though contemporary colonial states no longer reinforce their power over Indigenous people through policies ‘explicitly oriented around the genocidal exclusion/assimilation double’ they continue to reproduce these same power relations ‘through a seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and institutional practices that emphasize [Indigenous] recognition and accommodation’. Regardless of this change of emphasis, however, Coulthard argues that ‘the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state has remained colonial to its foundation’ (2014, 6, emphasis in the original). A belief in the inevitable completion of the colonial project and the creation of a peaceful, unified nation obscures the ongoing intent to permanently displace Indigenous populations without any intention that the nation might one day undertake a process of structural, material decolonisation (Strakosch and Macoun 2012, 41; see also Veracini 2010). Thus, even where a more political view of reconciliation is held in view (as per Schaap’s 2008 argument outlined above), agonistic inclusion fails to grapple with the fundamental material (rather than metaphorical or discursive) incommensurability of decolonisation discussed in the following section.

At the opposite end of the agonistic reconciliation spectrum is the view that ongoing conflict between Indigenous peoples and settler states can only be resolved through decolonisation. Those who hold a decolonial perspective consider that strategies such as recognition, or efforts to achieve socioeconomic parity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations through policy interventions, do not attend radically enough to the material foundations of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and settler colonial states.

Since the invasion of their territories as part of the British colonial project, Indigenous peoples have consistently resisted and contested colonial domination. In response to ongoing colonisation, in all of the CANZUS nations, Indigenous peoples continue to assert their abiding sovereignties and nation- tribe- or clan-based identities. Many Indigenous actors insist that their status as sovereign peoples must be the basis for any relationship with the settler order. This view refuses projects of reconciliation or recognition (Simpson 2014), instead prioritising efforts towards more autonomous, decolonised community life focussed on local, place-based politics and cultural rejuvenation (Elliott 2016, 413) and on the resurgence of Indigenous nationhood (see Alfred and Corntassel 2005 inter alia). Indigenous peoples working from a decolonial perspective do not seek inclusion as subjects or citizens of the settler state but instead demand acknowledgement of their distinct moral claims as dispossessed First Nations (Short 2005, 272). Agonistic decolonisation, then, must involve material, structural change in the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state, supported by radical innovation in political institutions.

These two perspectives are fundamentally, ontologically incommensurable, even as the spectrum between them opens up space for an agonistic analysis. What this article contributes to our understanding of agonistic reconciliation is an analytic lens through which agonism in practice can be observed across this spectrum, from a politics more focussed on discourse, which inherently drifts towards inclusion because it can only address decolonisation as metaphor, to an agonism that is material and structural in that it seeks radical reform to liberal democratic institutions, including but not limited to land tenure. In the following section I explore the challenges that structural decolonisation, observed through the lens of agonism, offers to the politics of reconciliation.

Reconciliation is not decolonisation

Much has already been written about the limitations of agonistic inclusion as an approach to reconciliation (see Schaap 2005, 2006, Short 2005 inter alia), although, as noted above, there is merit still in politicising the terms of association in settler colonial societies (Schaap 2008). In this section, I focus on the opposite end of the agonistic reconciliation spectrum by revisiting one significant contribution to thinking about the possibilities of decolonisation in settler colonial societies. In language that suggests the ways in which the emphasis on decolonisation brings an agonistic politics to the fore, Tuck and Yang (2012) contend that a decolonial politics ‘will not emerge from friendly understanding’. Indeed, they argue, understanding decolonisation as practice rather than metaphor will require ‘a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics’ (2012, 35, emphasis added). This section of the article engages with Tuck and Yang’s analysis of decolonisation and their concern at the extent to which it risks being subsumed by other social justice paradigms, suggesting a slide back towards inclusion.

Echoing Shinko’s concern that agonistic politics may replicate existing forms of domination, Tuck and Yang (2012, 2) express their ‘growing apprehension’ at the ways settlers have taken up the ‘too-easy adoption of decolonising discourse’ (2012, 3), seeing the language of decolonisation ‘superficially adopted’ by the social sciences and deployed as a synonym for other human rights projects. The authors suggest that the ‘distinct project’ of decolonisation too often becomes ‘subsumed’ into other social justice projects ‘with no regard for how decolonisation wants something different than those forms of justice’. Well-meaning examples abound, with calls to decolonise curricula, health, design, journalism, social work, and so on. For Tuck and Yang, however, decolonisation must be more than the ‘empty signifier’:

Though the details are not fixed or agreed upon, in our view, decolonisation in the settler colonial context must involve the repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted; that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically. This is precisely why decolonization is necessarily unsettling. (Tuck and Yang 2012, 7, my emphasis)

Tuck and Yang (2012, 3) critique the elision of decolonisation with other forms of social justice as ‘a form of enclosure, dangerous in how it domesticates decolonisation … limiting in how it recapitulates dominant theories of social change’. The authors insist that ‘decolonisation is not a metaphor’:

When metaphor invades decolonisation, it kills the very possibility of decolonisation; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future. Decolonise (a verb) and decolonisation (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. The easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonisation is yet another form of settler appropriation. When we write about decolonisation, we are not offering it as a metaphor …. Decolonisation doesn’t have a synonym. (Tuck and Yang 2012, 3)

What Tuck and Yang make clear is that while related movements – such as those for equality-based citizenship, human rights, anti-racism and social justice – are important to anti-colonial struggles, they are not the same as justice in the context of settler colonialism and indigeneity, and they do not necessarily respond to Indigenous peoples’ relationships with the land (Boudreau Morris 2017, 468). Acknowledging the complex place of Black enslavement in the colonial project, elsewhere Tuck et al. (2014, 57) theorise the connections between anti-colonial and decolonial struggles as ‘contingent collaborations’. Such collaborations, the authors contend, still ‘require an ethic of incommensurability that recognises what is distinct between various projects of social justice and decolonisation’.

The ‘ethic of incommensurability’ that separates social justice and decolonial goals has important implications for how we might think about agonistic reconciliation in settler colonial societies. At the core of Tuck and Yang’s (2012, 35) argument is their view that an ethic of incommensurability ‘stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation’. While reconciliation ‘is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future’, decolonisation allows no comfortable future for settlers on Indigenous lands. Similarly, when asking ‘what justice wants’ in later work together, Tuck and Yang (2016, 6–7) consider justice as bounded by a ‘colonial temporality’ that operates in similar ways to the complex temporality of settler colonialism itself. Like colonial completion, justice is always ‘desired and deferred’ in pursuit of the ‘self-perpetuating futurity’ of the modern colonial and colonising state. Like justice, reconciliation cannot make the settler innocent and decolonisation does not answer to reconciliation.

Nevertheless, Tuck and Yang point to the ways in which metaphorical versions of decolonisation recentre whiteness and enable settlers to imagine a peaceful future on Indigenous lands. Many settlers crave absolution from colonial complicity and in so doing produce ‘a premature attempt at reconciliation’ (2012, 9) that is grounded in the logic of elimination. For Tuck and Yang, ‘The desire to reconcile is just as relentless as the desire to disappear the Native’. Work at the inclusion end of the spectrum of agonistic reconciliation may be understood as what Tuck and Yang call ‘settler moves to innocence’ – ‘those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all’ (2012, 10). This view gives rise to a complex set of ‘excuses, distractions, and diversions from decolonisation’ (Tuck and Yang 2012, 10) and promotes a banal and disingenuous view of reconciliation as primarily an educative strategy. Decolonisation is evaded when settler education is allowed ‘to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land’ (Tuck and Yang 2012, 19). Rather than countering this dynamic, agonistic inclusion may further it. Settlers are too often inclined to congratulate ourselves for sitting in difficult, conflictual relations even when such interactions produce no material change in Indigenous–settler relations.

An illustrative example of the kind of agonistic politics enabled through this approach to reconciliation was clearly evident in the formal Australian reconciliation process, a legislated decade of activity that concluded in 2000. During this decade, the education of non-Indigenous peoples in order to ‘change their hearts and minds’ was at the core of the official Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation strategy. This approach absorbed considerable effort and millions of dollars of public funding. Facilitating a deeper understanding of the nation’s colonial history and its impact on Indigenous peoples was seen as crucial if any further structural or institutional change was to be possible. The Council actively pursued the conscientisation of non-Indigenous attitudes through the development of learning materials such as the Australians for Reconciliation Study Circle Kit released in 1993, which was designed to enable small, self-directed groups to undertake an eight-week learning programme exploring reconciliation and a range of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues (Gunstone 2009, 96; Maddison and Stastny 2016). Through such activities, non-Indigenous Australians were invited into agonistic engagements, both with one another and with Indigenous peoples, in conversations that contested the founding illegitimacy of the Australian settler colonial state. The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation advanced this kind of ‘bottom-up’ reconciliation process in the belief that reconciliation would be inevitable once the non-Indigenous population was adequately educated about the wrongs of Australia’s colonial past and about the needs and aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Yet this work had no material consequences. Rather than prioritising decolonisation and structural reform to the relationship, Australian reconciliation pursued a programme of conscientisation that ultimately sought inclusion rather than structural decolonisation in Indigenous–settler relations.

Such approaches to reconciliation, which focus primarily on the education of non-Indigenous people, have dominated in settler colonial states. This work is agonistic in the inclusive sense outlined above in that it opens political space for engagement through which enemies (in the contest over the (il)legitimate possession of Indigenous territories) may become more respectful political adversaries (Shinko 2008, Mouffe 2005). When we employ agonism as an analytic, however, and consider gradations towards the decolonial end of the agonistic reconciliation spectrum, it becomes evident that an inclusive approach is inadequate even when it questions the terms of association in settler colonial societies. The discursive focus of agonistic inclusion does not adequately disrupt the status quo in any material sense, nor does it question the dominance of liberal political institutions, and nor does it return Indigenous lands to Indigenous control. As Shinko (2008, 490) points out, deploying an analytic of agonism, such as the reconciliation spectrum articulated here, should ‘serve as a constant reminder of our own complicity in the perpetuation of structures of domination and moral hierarchies’. We should be alert to the drift towards agonistic inclusion as the dominant mode of reconciliation and mindful of its limitations.

The second key implication that I want to draw out of Tuck and Yang’s analysis concerns the ways in which settler colonialism works as a political form seeking constantly to absorb and domesticate Indigenous resistance, in the process reducing agonism to discursive inclusion, regardless of how conflictual that discourse may be. As they remind us, ‘The horizons of the settler colonial nation-state are total and require a mode of total appropriation of Indigenous life and land’ (Tuck and Yang 2012, 5). As noted above, however, settler appropriation may take many forms, including those dressed as benevolence and reconciliation. As Glen Coulthard (2014, 151) has argued, ‘the reconciliation of Indigenous nationhood with state sovereignty is still colonial insofar as it remains structurally committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of our lands and self-determining authority’ (Emphasis is in the original). Similarly, Leanne Simpson (2017, 45–46) cautions against the ‘complex and overlapping processes’, evident in apparently conciliatory or progressive state practices, which, on the surface, ‘can appear to present an opportunity to do things differently, to change our relationship to the state’. Noting the seductive nature of this shape-shifting ‘structure made up of processes’, Simpson argues that the state, in fact, always ‘controls the processes as a mechanism for managing Indigenous sorrow, anger, and resistance, and this ensures the outcome remains consistent with its goal of maintaining dispossession’. Thus, while these processes may be agonistic, they do not advance decolonisation because they do not disrupt settler colonial power structures. Simpson contends that ‘Colonialism as a structure is not changing. It is shifting to further consolidate its power, to neutralise our resistance, to ultimately fuel extractivism’.

Agonistic inclusion as a mode of reconciliation is emblematic of this kind of colonial shape shifting. In advancing a view of reconciliation as a process that aims to replace social divisions with a shared sense of belonging in the settler nation, Indigenous people are encouraged towards a ‘harmonious and integrated society’ in which they might be part of a ‘unified political community’ (Bashir and Kymlicka 2008, 15). Holding out national unity as an unproblematic political good immediately diminishes the demand for decolonisation in the eyes of the settler, by effectively erasing Indigenous sovereignties and their continuing challenge to the legitimacy of a unitary settler sovereignty. This has the inevitable effect of reducing reconciliation to, at best, a form of agonistic inclusion, in which settlers and Indigenous peoples might engage in conflictual discourse without any resulting material change in structural relations. While Borrows and Tully (2018, 5) see reason for optimism in linking Indigenous resurgence to projects of reconciliation, they also reject forms of reconciliation that ‘perpetuate unjust relationships of dispossession, domination, exploitation, and patriarchy’ and thereby ‘reconcile Indigenous peoples and settlers to the status quo’. Borrows and Tully maintain that relationships of ‘transformative reconciliation’ are possible, but for this transformative potential to be realised, they argue, these relationships must be ‘empowered by robust practices of resurgence’ that infuse ‘reciprocal practices of reconciliation in self-determining, self-sustaining, and inter-generational ways’. In other words, transformative reconciliation must have material, decolonial effects. Understanding the implications of decolonisation suggests we must be alert both to the limitations of agonistic inclusion and the limitations of agonism itself. Decolonial reconciliation does not easily fit within the framework of liberal democratic society.

Beyond liberal pluralism: the limits of agonistic reconciliation

As I have argued above, agonistic reconciliation provides an analytic approach to understanding Indigenous–settler relations that polarise along the agonistic inclusion–agonistic decolonisation spectrum. Through this analytic we can observe the ways in which the rhetoric of reconciliation is used to describe a hoped-for future transformation in Indigenous–settler relations while, for the most part, the actual work of reconciliation supports only the more inclusive approaches that centre on the education of settler peoples through primarily discursive practices. These approaches, which in the CANZUS states (at least) remain the dominant approach to reconciliation, are agonistic in the sense that they seek to open political space for engagement ‘predicated on an awareness that community is always not yet’ (Schaap 2004, 538). Nevertheless, as outlined above, such approaches have been extensively criticised by actors advocating decolonisation precisely because they do not necessarily attend radically enough (or, indeed, at all) to the underlying structural fabric of settler colonial societies. In this section I consider what agonism offers to the possibility of decolonial reconciliation, and outline the limitations of agonism for transforming Indigenous–settler relations.

First, let us reconsider briefly what agonism, particularly as articulated by Chantal Mouffe, might offer this incommensurable politics of inclusion and decolonisation. Mouffe (2005, 8–9) contends that conflict is intrinsic to ‘the political’ – an ontological understanding of society as both constituted and instituted through spaces of power, conflict and antagonism that she distinguishes from conventional ‘politics’. Unlike aggregative or deliberative approaches to managing conflict in political relationships, Mouffe (2005, 30) argues for an agonistic politics that would allow the full expression of conflicts within pluralist liberal democratic societies. This is a political ethic that seeks not to suppress or even to resolve conflict, but instead to enable a contestatory engagement of adversaries across profound differences. For Mouffe (2016, 3), the ‘antagonistic dimension’ of politics is ‘always present’, precisely because ‘what is at stake is the struggle between opposing hegemonic projects that can never be reconciled rationally’. These struggles are not some kind of temporary state on the road to a more reconciled society but rather are inherent to a functioning democracy, which, according to Mouffe (2000, 104), requires the capacity for ‘a vibrant clash of democratic political positions’ to play out. Democracy is envisioned as a ‘continual contest among incompatible visions, identities, and projects’ in which no view can dominate or assume hegemonic status for very long (Wingenbach 2011, 21). Indeed, in place of a view of political conflict as inherently threatening to a society, an agonistic ethic sees disagreement as ‘the lifeblood of a democratic order’ and ‘essential to democratic engagement across difference’ (Little 2007, 154–155). As Shinko (2008, 480–481) notes, in an agonistic political encounter, respect and recognition are ‘the hard-won fruits of a struggle within and against pressing structural, cultural, political, economic, and/or social impediments’.

Returning to the inclusion–decolonisation spectrum of agonistic reconciliation, it is clear that, as noted above, inclusive approaches may still be agonistic. Promoting reconciliation discourse and educating settlers about the harms of colonisation contributes to opening political space in which Indigenous peoples and settlers may engage in contests over the hegemonic project of unity and nation-building. Certainly, as Steinman (2016, 232) argues, ‘it is likely that neither settler colonialism or indigenous [sic] decolonisation will reach an end point’. Agonism does not seek to resolve the foundational conflict between Indigenous and settler peoples, and even agonistic inclusion as a mode of reconciliation offers far more than just the demand for unity and harmony. Winning respect and recognition, as Shinko suggests above, is no easy thing. That does not, however, mean that this engagement moves Indigenous–settler relations towards the decolonial end of the agonistic reconciliation spectrum.

So, how far might agonistic reconciliation – at any point on the spectrum of inclusion and decolonisation – actually take us in advancing genuine decolonisation? The first limitation of agonism as it applies to Indigenous–settler relations arises from its central orientation as a mode of engagement within liberal democracies (Shinko 2008). Even radical democrats ‘share a commitment to the liberal democratic values of liberty and equality’, although they may contest the liberal interpretation of those values (Lloyd and Little 2009, 5). And while most agonists value the contest over democratic values, principles and interests, many still conceive of democratic institutions as the most fruitful location in which this contestation might occur. Mark Wenman (2013, 15–16) argues (somewhat provocatively) that contemporary agonistic theorists are ‘alike in their broad commitment to the traditions and practices of liberal democratic constitutionalism’ and ‘associate the democratic contest with creative iterations of established institutions and practices … but not with the prospect of more radical innovation in social and political forms’. Mouffe (2016, 3), for example, insists that the deep confrontation inherent to agonism must occur ‘under conditions regulated by a set of democratic procedures accepted by the adversaries’.

It is evident, however, that liberal, multicultural democracies (among which the CANZUS nations are emblematic), seek to contain political conflict within the existing structures of the colonial state. Indigenous people may seek representation in and through such structures, but the institutions of democracy themselves are generally regarded as benign and neutral. This view assumes that the institutions of democracy are appropriate for governing Indigenous lives, rather than understanding these institutions as colonial – as being in an ongoing colonial relationship that fails to acknowledge the sovereignties of the Indigenous peoples whose lands they occupy (Nakata and Maddison 2019, 418–419). Thus, there are limits to any form of agonistic reconciliation – inclusive or decolonial – that continues to contest Indigenous–settler relations within the confines of the democratic systems that derive from the settler nation rather than from the First Nations. The continued presence of Indigenous peoples raises foundational questions about the society that has been structured on top of their lands and existing political orders. Is agonism able to challenge those structures in a material sense, or does it merely sustain critical discourse about their function? What would it look like if the hegemony of democratic values and institutions were really opened as a contestation in agonistic terms?

A second limitation of agonism in Indigenous–settler relations is evident in Mouffe’s description of the actors who form ‘the central category of democratic politics’, namely the ‘adversary’; ‘the opponent with whom we share a common allegiance to the democratic principles of “liberty and equality for all” while disagreeing about their interpretation’ (2016, 2, my emphasis). Mouffe’s view of agonistic pluralism envisages a democratic politics in which a political adversary ‘is no longer perceived as an enemy to be destroyed’, but as an ‘adversary’, that is, somebody whose ideas we combat ‘but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question’. This, for Mouffe, ‘is the real meaning of liberal-democratic tolerance’:

An adversary is an enemy, but a legitimate enemy, one with whom we have some common ground because we have a shared adhesion to the ethico-political principles of liberal democracy: liberty and equality. But we disagree concerning the meaning and implementation of those principles, and such a disagreement is not one that could be resolved through deliberation and rational discussion. Indeed, given the ineradicable pluralism of value, there is no rational resolution of the conflict, hence its antagonistic dimension. This does not mean, of course, that adversaries can never cease to disagree, but that does not prove that antagonism has been eradicated. To accept the view of the adversary is to undergo a radical change in political identity. It is more a sort of conversion than a process of rational persuasion …. Compromises are, of course, also possible; they are part and parcel of politics; but they should be seen as temporary respites in an ongoing confrontation. (Mouffe 2005, 102)

For Mouffe, while adversaries will fight against one another in order for their interpretation of the conflict to become hegemonic, they do so in a context where they do not question the ‘right’ of their opponent to fight for their own position. For Mouffe (2016, 3), ‘different forms of citizenship identification’ are the bedrock of democratic politics, without which ‘passions cannot be given a democratic outlet and the ground is laid for various forms of politics articulated around essentialist identities of a nationalist, religious or ethnic type, and for the multiplication of confrontations over non-negotiable moral values’.

In Indigenous–settler relations, the kind of ‘common allegiance’ that Mouffe imagines cannot be assumed. It is difficult to imagine a circumstance in which Indigenous people might be ‘converted’ to a view of their relationship with the settler state divorced from their identities as sovereign First Nations, and it is fundamentally problematic to assume that adversaries in decolonial politics understand themselves as common citizens in a democratic society. Many Indigenous people do not identify as citizens of the settler states that occupy their lands. While the twentieth century saw many Indigenous people campaign for civil rights – for their full inclusion within the settler order and the rights that attend to that inclusion – the category of citizenship remains, at best, ambivalent. Many Indigenous people refuse the identity of the settler state in favour of their clan or First Nation identity. As Michael Mansell (2003, 8) argues, ‘citizenship is not offered without strings attached – it comes at a heavy price. The price to be paid … is the abandonment of indigenous sovereignty, and with it the loss of self-determination. Any rights would be limited to those granted by the parliaments or recognised by white law’.

In an effort to advance this field, then, I am here arguing that an understanding of the incommensurable differences to be found along the spectrum of inclusive and decolonising agonistic reconciliation (informed by Tuck and Yang inter alia), go beyond disagreement about the implementation of the ‘ethico-political principles of liberal democracy’. While reconciliation may be more or less agonistic in how such disagreements might be managed and sustained, for as long as these disagreements are still envisaged to occur within existing democratic institutions they cannot be considered to be decolonial. Little (2014, 75) points to the normative dimension of agonism, suggesting that theorists such as Mouffe attempt to ‘domesticate’ political conflict by ‘broadening the spectrum of acceptability in the analytical framing of particular issues’. In this view, although agonism resists the drive to fabricate social and political consensus, and emphatically legitimises disagreement, it nevertheless seeks to contain this disagreement within problematic democratic institutions. While this orientation towards conflictual engagement may, in theory, support decolonisation, in practice an understanding of the relentless logic of elimination inherent to settler colonialism suggests that what is needed is far more radical innovation that can break the bounds of colonial institutions and sustain material, structural change to Indigenous–settler relations.

One example we might look at is the emerging treaty negotiations in several Australian jurisdictions. While the federal government remains resolute in its opposition to negotiating treaties with First Nations, several sub-national jurisdictions (Victoria, Queensland and the Northern Territory) have committed to this work, which, it is envisaged, will take place over several decades to come. Treaty negotiations will inevitably be agonistic; there will be considerable, irresolvable conflict over the settler state’s continuing occupation of Indigenous territories. Were this agonistic engagement to remain at the level of discourse – through, for example, the intended processes of ‘truth-telling’ that will accompany treaty negotiations – without leading to significant structural transformation in the relationships between First Nations and the state, we would have to assess the process as being one of agonistic inclusion. If, however, these agonistic engagements produce material change in the relationships between First Nations and the state (in the form of the return of land, substantial reparations, and a commitment to supporting First Nations governance and self-determination) then we might assess this engagement as edging towards agonistic decolonisation. Treaty negotiations that result in these kinds of material changes would, by definition, be a form of radical innovation in Australian democracy.

As Wenman (2013, 17) reminds us, ‘it is incumbent on democratic theorists to hold on to the idea of radical innovation’. Agonistic reconciliation at the decolonising end of the spectrum demands such innovation if it is to resist the pull back to inclusion. Starblanket and Stark (2018, 176) contend that as Indigenous peoples continue to encounter the limits of articulating decolonial political goals ‘through state-sanctioned mechanisms of rights and recognition’, a growing number of Indigenous people ‘are engaging in forms of political action that are not mediated by the colonial state or imposed through state legislation’. This is a refusal of state authorisation, what Simpson (2016, 327–328) describes as ‘the very deliberate, wilful, intentional actions’ that Indigenous people are making ‘in the face of the expectation that they consent to their own elimination as a people’. Resurgent First Nations in all CANZUS states are engaged in projects of decolonial, radical innovation. Emerging treaty processes in Australia may prove to be an example of such innovation. It is not yet evident that such innovation is also possible in an agonistic reconciliation that remains bounded by existing democratic institutions.

Conclusion: what future for Indigenous–settler relations?

In bringing the limits of agonistic reconciliation into view in I do not intend to jettison it as a useful way of engaging with conflict in Indigenous–settler relations. I do, however, think that we must ask different questions of these ideas. Is it useful, for example, to conceptualise agonism as an analytic that reveals two incommensurable positions, as suggested by the inclusion–decolonisation spectrum outlined here? Agonism foregrounds the centrality of conflict in all political relations. Is it possible that, in Indigenous–settler relations in particular, an agonistic orientation will help both settlers and Indigenous peoples to grapple with the conflicts intrinsic to contemporary colonialism? And might it, as Macoun (2016, 87) asks, help to keep these conflicts visible ‘in the face of ongoing white attempts to erase, suppress or even to transcend them’. Even decolonised relations are still relations, and as Stuart Bradfield (2006, 81) has pointed out, between ‘assimilation and secession lies a multitude of possibilities for realising aspirations to both retain rights as citizens and a unique status as Indigenous peoples recognised by the state’. What, then, might be done to enable an agonism that is material and structural in that it seeks radical reform to liberal democratic institutions, including but not limited to land tenure, rather than an agonism centred on discursive conflict, which inevitably drifts towards inclusion because it only addresses decolonisation as metaphor? How might agonistic reconciliation foster radical innovation in the settler democratic institutions that perpetuate contemporary settler colonialism? What role might contemporary treaty processes play in enabling such innovation in political institutions?

Any approach to reconciliation must, above all else, be accountable to Indigenous peoples and their struggles for justice. Indigenous resistance movements are key to sustaining agonistic engagement in Indigenous–settler relations. Were it not for Indigenous activists and intellectuals and their continued efforts to contest colonialism, the settler logic of elimination would be invisible to the majority population (Maddison 2016). Agonistic reconciliation seeks to disrupt settler legitimacy, and reveals the falsity of a linear narrative of progress towards the ‘vanishing endpoint’ of decolonisation (Strakosch and Macoun 2012) – that fantasised moment of colonial completion that is forever out of reach. Indeed, while the contemporary settler colonial imaginary still sees Indigenous–settler relations on a pathway towards a reconciled, post-colonial future, it is in fact the continued desire to include Indigenous peoples within the state that colonises them that most clearly reveals the dynamics at play. Indigenous resistance is inherently agonistic and functions to reveal the colonial intentions behind settler gestures towards inclusion.

Writing with Nakata and Maddison (2019, 419), I have previously argued for a political research agenda ‘focused on the centering of the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the [settler] state as foundational to the nation and fundamental to its contemporary politics’. Agonistic relationality continues to be important for decolonial politics. Colonialism is ‘always in relationship’, it is not an ‘abstract logic that operates outside of people’ (Starblanket and Stark 2018, 182–183). Decolonising relations of solidarity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is important, and must be agonistic. This relational practice ‘requires constant and uncomfortable engagement with difference’ (Boudreau Morris 2017, 466). Steinman (2016, 233) reminds us that participation in ‘racially oriented coalition efforts’ can reinforce ‘minoritising perceptions’ of Indigenous peoples. While settler colonial education does little to prepare racialised settlers for collaborating in decolonial projects, for Steinman the recognition that all non-Indigenous people, including other oppressed racial groups, are living on unceded Indigenous land is a precondition for Indigenous participation in ‘race-oriented coalitions’. An agonistic orientation to Indigenous–settler relations might support both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to more fully understand the dimensions of the conflictual relations within which they must coexist. At the very least such an orientation must centre accountability to Indigenous peoples as the basis for assessing its progress towards material decolonisation.

The two poles of the inclusion–decolonisation spectrum represent incommensurable political goals. Agonistic inclusion can sustain critical discourse on the terms of association within settler colonial societies by centring reconciliatory relations within colonial democratic institutions. Agonistic decolonisation, however, rejects the legitimacy of these same institutions and seeks radical innovation in their place. An emphasis on relationality should neither comfort the settler nor suggest that the pursuit of solidarity between Indigenous peoples and settlers is an inherent good. As Tuck and Yang (2012, 4) suggest,

attending to what is irreconcilable within settler colonial relations and what is incommensurable between decolonising projects and other social justice projects will help to reduce the frustration of attempts at solidarity; but the attention won’t get anyone off the hook from the hard, unsettling work of decolonisation.

It is possible, then, to choose to work towards relations of ‘contingent collaboration’ (Tuck et al. 2014) or ‘decolonising solidarity’ rather than the more inclusion-focussed politics of recognition (Boudreau Morris 2017, 461). Such contingent relations can only be agonistic; settlers must ‘cultivate uncertainty and discomfort’ in order to ‘participate in the difficult work of decolonisation’ (Boudreau Morris 2017, 467). But these agonistic, unsettled relations should not be mistaken for decolonisation itself. The inclusion–decolonisation spectrum of agonistic reconciliation outlined in this paper provides an analytic tool that highlights this ethic of incommensurability, which, as Tuck and Yang (2012, 36) point out, means ‘relinquishing settler futurity, abandoning the hope that settlers may one day be commensurable to Native peoples’. Agonism is not an alternate pathway to settled and harmonious relationships; it is a permanent state of discomfort that is only of benefit if it also facilitates the restructuring of Indigenous–settler relations and the return of land. It will be up to Indigenous people – both activists and scholars – to determine whether the analytical approach outlined here is of service in their struggles. It is my hope that this approach will illuminate work that risks succumbing to the seductive pull of inclusion, and instead support work that pushes ever further towards the radical innovation that decolonisation demands.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the editors of this special issue and the participants in the Lund workshop on Agonistic Peace in November 2020 for their comments and feedback in developing the ideas in this paper.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Sarah Maddison

Sarah Maddison is Director of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne, where she is also a Professor of politics in the School of Social and Political Sciences. She has published widely on Indigenous–settler relations, settler colonialism reconciliation and conflict transformation. Her most recent monograph is The Colonial Fantasy: Why White Australia Can’t Solve Black Problems (Allen & Unwin 2019), and her other books include the co-edited first volume in the Springer series Indigenous–Settler Relations in Australia and the World (with Sana Nakata, 2020); The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation (co-edited with Tom Clark and Ravi de Costa, Springer 2016); Conflict Transformation and Reconciliation (Routledge 2015); Beyond White Guilt (Allen & Unwin 2011), Unsettling the Settler State (co-edited with Morgan Brigg, Federation Press 2011) and Black Politics (Allen & Unwin 2009).