Contested frontiers: Understanding the metapolitics of settler-state peripheries

Introduction

Between Indigenous self-determination and settler colonization lie contested frontiers, subject to metapolitics – i.e., to competition over the framing of polities. In the past, settlers, using force, domesticated frontiers. Recent decades have seen an Indigenous resurgence, rekindling metapolitics, particularly on settler-state peripheries.

Contest Dynamics

These contests are increasingly waged by weaponizing “constitutive principles”:

• Is the demos universal or divisible?
• Should individual or collective rights prevail?
• Should democracy or self-determination decide?

Resolving such contests is difficult. Yet the metapolitics of today’s frontiers have escaped political-science attention.

Project Objectives

CONFRONT aims to develop a theory of frontier metapolitics. It will study contests over constitutive principles in, and how such contests shape and are shaped by, settler-state peripheries. The project will gather and test data from settler federal territories and related peripheries to pursue four research objectives:

1. Conceptualizing metapolitics to render it cognizable.
2. Compiling the first dataset of frontier constitutive metapolitical contests.
3. Analyzing such contests and their interaction with the constitution of peripheries.
4. Normatively theorizing how such contests should be approached/resolved.

Methodology

CONFRONT will combine comparative politics, comparative constitutional law, and normative political theory to identify and open a salient new research field.

Leadership and Impact

Led by a pioneer of settler-metapolitical studies with a unique pre-academic background in peripheral areas, this project will make modern frontier metapolitical contests visible, comprehensible, and more soluble.

Conclusion

If successful, it will place peripheries central to studies of metapolitics, inspiring and preparing scientists, decision-makers, civil-society actors, and even colonized peoples to grapple with the rising metapolitical instability of peripheries and of the “late Westphalian” world at large.