ABSTRACT
There is a form of intra-national international territorial conflict that has so far received relatively little attention in IR.1 What happens when a national legal system, deciding a territorial dispute, is confronted with a parallel legal culture-one that shares the ‘same’ nation and territory as itself? This is precisely the situation in which some postcolonial courts find themselves when they decide on claims to ‘native’ or ‘aboriginal’ title. In this particular kind of situation-where the project of colonization is unfinished because it is too late for the colonizers and their descendants to be characterized as immigrants and too early for indigenous peoples to imagine themselves as co-participants in some dynamic, but essentially irenic, multicultural2 project-territory becomes a very particular medium of conflict. When indigenous peoples go to the courts of the colonizer to reclaim their ancestral lands, an ostensibly unitary nation is divided into a number of incommensurable territories. Although the political formulation of these conflicts casts territory as a singular, linear, scarce and hence contestable, resource, the legal claims made on each side diffract ‘territory’ into as many terrains and as many proprietary genealogies as there are interests in play. Territorial conflict-even in this apparently primal form-takes place between (systemic) discourses rather than between persons or cultures.3 So, far from being the rawest or most primal container of social relations, ‘territory’ turns out to be a multiple medium, traversed by a multiplicity of legal orders (not just the classical triptych of property, contract and public law), each of which articulates law’s relation to a specific discursive construction of ‘territory’.
