Kinship Beyond Borders: Relational Sovereignty and the Limits of Liberal Statist Secession

The doctrine of territorial integrity remains a dominant debate in international relations discourse, consistently privileging the preservation of existing state structures over the self-determination claims of substate collectivities (Weller 2005). Following, within the liberal canon, this statism2 is found in Allen Buchanan's (1997) distinction between primary-right theories—according to which a people(s) may secede by virtue of their collective identity3—and remedial-right-only theories, which concede secession solely as a remedy for significant injustices already suffered. Buchanan defends the latter on the grounds that remedialism aligns more closely with the morally defensible principles of existing international law (IL), mitigates the risk of perverse incentives, and—though not explicitly stated—implicitly gestures toward a pragmatically viable path to Kantian perpetual peace, as this paper later argues. The present essay contends, however, that Buchanan's position is scaffolded by tacit ontological and normative commitments that cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Drawing on historical–materialist analysis and Anishinaabeg resurgence thought, it exposes five interlocking presuppositions. First, Buchanan's framework is expressly tailored to align with contemporary IL and thereby sustain a teleological march toward perpetual peace. Second, IL itself arose to advance colonial expansion and, as Brown (2020) argues, now operates as a fetish of Liberal Neutralism,4 concealing its role in facilitating capital accumulation. Third, because IL's genealogy is colonial, its normative architecture stands in structural tension with Indigenous assertions of sovereignty. Fourth, the linear temporality implicit in Kantian (and Buchannian) teleology clashes with the cyclical temporalities through which the Anishinaabeg organize political authority and ritual renewal. Fifth, any coherent alternative secession doctrine must therefore ground a primary right to secede in cyclical relationality rather than in the linear progressive horizon on which Buchanan's remedialism depends. This final premise is defended on two interrelated fronts: (1) normatively, as an expression of ontological and epistemological commitments rooted in Indigenous worldviews, whose legitimacy derives from first principles rather than colonial referents—a position oft-framed within Indigenous-resurgence literature as a politics of refusal; and (2) functionally, insofar as Anishinaabeg jurisprudences demonstrate greater systemic coherence and institutional resilience than Buchanan's remedialist model, which paradoxically relies on functionalist reasoning to legitimate itself yet fails to deliver comparable durability—particularly in the economic domain, as will be elaborated through Marxian analysis later in the paper. Of note, within the concrete context of Anishinaabeg experience—marked by land dispossession, cultural suppression, and systemic discrimination (King 2018)—Buchanan's own criteria may, admittedly, permit secession. He states: “in some cases … grosser injustices are perpetrated, not against the citizenry at large, but against a particular group, concentrated in a region of the state,” such that “secession may be justified, and may be feasible, as a response” (Buchanan 1997, p. 585). Notwithstanding, the purpose of this essay is not to seek refuge in Buchanan's remedial gatekeeping but to insist that the Anishinaabeg possess an original entitlement or primary right to secession. In his remedial-rights-only theory, Buchanan underscores the imperative of aligning moral theories of secession with existing IL. He posits that “a proposal should build upon, or at least not contradict, the more morally acceptable principles of existing international law, when these principles are interpreted in a morally progressive way” (Buchanan 1997, p. 591). Thus, for Buchanan, adherence to IL is essential, offering a morally progressive framework for ethically adjudicating secessionist claims. Notwithstanding, primitive accumulation5 theorists challenge any faith in the supposed neutrality and moral progressiveness of IL, demonstrating that colonialism served chiefly as a mechanism for capital accumulation rather than an end in itself (Neocleous 2012). Marx (2024) argues that the initial stock of capital essential to the capitalist mode of production was secured through colonial expansion—specifically, by expropriating Indigenous lands as constant capital and exploiting Indigenous and enslaved labor as variable capital.6 International legal doctrines, such as terra nullius7 and the doctrine of discovery, legitimated this project by denying Indigenous sovereignty, thereby enabling the commodification of both land and labor (Miller 2010; Polanyi 1944). In contemporary global governance, ongoing processes of accumulation by dispossession8 and neocolonialism continue to shape IL, producing what Marx called an “abstract civil law” (1842, p. 300). True to his insight that, under capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air” (1848, p. 4), the decline of overt colonial structures has been replaced by the more diffuse architecture of new constitutionalism. This project fuses legal and regulatory arrangements that restrict state sovereignty in order to advance transnational capitalist interests, embedding neoliberal principles within domestic constitutions and international trade agreements and thereby narrowing democratic control over economic policy (Gill 1998). Such mechanisms illustrate how international jurisprudence has been refashioned to prioritize the rights and freedoms of markets and capital. Yet this new constitutionalism—like any constitutional order—asserts a “normative supremacy” (Marmor 2007, p. 69), a dimension that Buchanan fails to scrutinize adequately. Following, capital's need to remedy crises of overaccumulation9 drives it toward fresh territories and resources, typically by invoking legal frameworks that legitimize the commodification and privatization of peripheral wealth (Harvey 2003). As Anghie observes, IL “has always been animated by the ‘civilizing mission’—the project of governing non-European peoples. Racial discrimination, cultural subordination and economic exploitation are constitutively significant for the discipline, rather than aberrations that have been overcome by modern international law” (2005, p. 3), epitomizing what Baskatawang terms the “bogus neutrality” of IL (2023, 80). Further, Buchanan normatively assumes the positive validity of IL norms as a primary position of their moral authority (Buchanan 1997, p. 591)—in a manner reminiscent of Kant's (1939) vision of a “confederation of free states,” a voluntary league of sovereign nations committed to perpetual peace, yet one that, as Anghie (2005) observes, risks obscuring the role of capital as a de facto sovereign authority, structuring IL through hierarchies that subordinate weaker states to more powerful legal actors. Notwithstanding, although this analysis ostensibly merely clarifies how IL has enabled what Buchanan calls “grosser injustices” (1997, p. 582) against Indigenous peoples—and thereby appears to bolster their claims to secession under his remedial-rights-only model—it simultaneously reveals a deeper weakness in Buchanan's theory. His framework allows remedial secession only if the claim can be authenticated within the prevailing corpus of IL, yet such authentication remains structurally impossible: IL is neither neutral nor genuinely reformable, operating instead as a vehicle for capital accumulation (Anghie 2005; Goodell Ugalde 2023). Accordingly, the “grosser injustices” inflicted on Indigenous nations are not deviations from the ostensibly “morally acceptable principles of existing international law” (Buchanan 1997, p. 591) but routine products of a legal apparatus designed to preserve and extend economic power rather than to rectify systemic wrongs. In response, Buchanan might counter that certain elements of IL—such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the UN Special Committee on Decolonization—have equipped colonized and racialized peoples with rhetorical and procedural leverage. Yet this leverage does not dissolve the structural constraints these same instruments embed. Coulthard (2014) shows that even ostensibly, progressive politics of recognition reinscribe colonial hierarchies by compelling Indigenous nations to reactively refract their self-determination claims through settler-state epistemologies and juridical taxonomies; thus, when colonized peoples situate Indigenous resurgence as the dialectical “antithesis” to the colonial “thesis” of IL (Sartre and MacCombie 1964), Indigeneity remains ontologically tethered to the colonial referent, perpetually reproducing the very structures it seeks to escape (Fanon 1970). Second, positing an inherent right to secession exposes deep fissures in Buchanan's Lockean social-contract framework, casting doubt on its sufficiency as a normative basis for just secession. These limitations sharpen a more urgent inquiry: if IL is irredeemably colonial, what alternative can genuinely liberate subordinated peoples? The solution is not to replace one universalizing institution (e.g., the United Nations) with another, but to cultivate pluri-legal orders—coexisting juridical systems grounded in diverse ontologies. For Indigenous nations such as the Anishinaabeg, sovereignty is not a juridical status conferred by IL; it is a lived practice of relational accountability, sustained through land, kinship, and reciprocity (Simpson 2011; Mills 2025). Indeed, scholars such as John Borrows, Aaron Mills, and Audra Simpson insist that Indigenous legal orders are not merely adjuncts to Western law but fully formed, self-sufficient systems. Their authority lies precisely in their refusal to mimic global institutions like the International Court of Justice: they remain attentive to the distinctive social, ecological, and spiritual relationships that constitute each polity, rather than imposing abstract, universalist norms. Moving toward such a plural legal landscape therefore demands not wholesale institutional collapse but a fundamental reorientation of our concepts of legitimacy, recognition, and governance. In this light, Simpson's (2017) notion of refusal—a withdrawal from statist recognition—should be read not as a rejection of law altogether but as the self-affirmative assertion of an alternative legal ground. Indeed, when Buchanan observes that remedial-rights-only theories are “typified by John Locke's theory according to which the people have the right to overthrow the government if and only if their fundamental rights are violated” (p. 585). This paradigm presupposes an implicit “social contract” with a sovereign authority deemed necessary for collective security (Oakeshott 2017). Within this schema, civil disobedience demands moral justification, whereas obedience to law is ontologically naturalized and requires none (Lyons 1998). New constitutionalism amplifies this dynamic through its claim to “normative supremacy” (Marmor 2007, p. 69), perfidiously seeking “to base the law of the market on the alleged propensities of man in the state of nature” (Polanyi 1944, p. 47). Viewed through an Indigenous-resurgence lens, however, genuine Indigenous participation in shaping any social contract is absent: settlers occupied Indigenous territories without consent, so the contract's legitimacy rests on a “ruse of consent” that obscures its colonial, historical–materialist origins (Simpson 2017, p. 19). Explained, Buchanan insists that “a proposal should build upon, or at least not contradict, the more morally acceptable principles of existing international law” (1997, p. 591). Yet relying on these “well entrenched” principles overlooks the reality that they constitute “little more than a liberal doctrine [that] hypostatizes the workings of some dialectical law in modern society, while in its crudest form it devolves into an assault on political democracy” (Polanyi 1944, p. 151), thereby this dynamic from primitive accumulation and of it a normative order that or some p. capital accumulation and colonial operating under the of liberal even if Buchanan these structures as “grosser injustices” inflicted on Indigenous peoples and grounds for remedial the of Indigenous peoples from any genuine social with the and states and with the international their primary right to Buchanan that recognition of a remedial right to secession can be as Locke's theory of and theories like (Buchanan 1997, p. however, such is when the original social contract is Buchanan's remedial-rights-only theory that secession is necessary to international that of secession are to permit a right to (Buchanan 1997, p. In his the existing state and IL the for and Yet this to overlooks the by the of IL, which cannot with the demands of capital accumulation As Anishinaabeg Baskatawang observes, of at the of p. it to to global of the a critical framework for how capital crises of by into new and thereby and on dialectical of in which it into crises that it through expansion and structural This imperative to social and political systemic (Harvey 2003). The of IL is to with procedural Polanyi p. in the that has liberal so as in its of the of with its of state sovereignty, the international to the and by global capital the in liberal as to and p. by existing and necessary structural with the by capitalist this a of and thereby Buchanan's claim that IL as a As by a secession theory grounded in existing legal Buchanan the very structures that global that of territorial integrity … the morally legitimate of the and that states are to (p. this claim overlooks the of capital's that IL, by to (Anghie 2005). Such a fundamental of sovereignty and The of sovereignty now with transnational that for with (Anghie 2005). normatively relying on and Buchanan's framework overlooks the need for more and genuinely institutional that should be in order to as as on its and p. this particular in the context of Indigenous for sovereignty and The Anishinaabeg the of in ongoing land and that Coulthard as accumulation by the of IL not only fails to Indigenous it by these injustices to secession in the of therefore paradoxically the very and that the global a primary right to the Audra Simpson (2014) which sovereignty from an original position of the need to peoples to in the of systemic by capital. this to the of Buchanan's neutral and on IL, does not his Buchanan that “secession may be justified, and may be feasible, as a to (Buchanan 1997, p. 585). one may that the of capital's constitute a form of inflicted Indigenous secession under his remedial-rights-only theory. the of this lies in the that Buchanan's Kantian on liberal as a is thereby a primary right to secession that presupposes his framework as a primary right or as a of sovereignty In (1) Buchanan's to IL a functionalist on the of (2) IL is itself in the of capital as within the framework of new constitutionalism. … is by a form or of economic and not only is but can be the same liberal institutions remain as Baskatawang observes, the of capital's The is not the Buchanan but rather a structural that, to in which of and of a of the This a functionalist of a primary right to the alternative can more capital's This later argues that Anishinaabeg jurisprudence is of precisely a secession might as a of does it not that IL capital to crises through the of such the of and the of of a framework that state sovereignty over the of capital theory the very it seeks to this is not an to that Buchanan's of political within IL should extend into the economic that of economic and political p. it Buchanan's on IL which economic a that political by that has the of an remains as as its economic by is not (Polanyi 1944, p. Indeed, is it a of political when in such a social as a of In this one may note, as Polanyi that has liberal so as in its of the of p. The analysis the need to the right to secession by a primary-right theory that secession as a legitimate to the systemic by capital's Such a framework must a more notion of attentive to the state IL, and the by global capital. the inherent constraints of legal the to more and arrangements that genuinely global and rather than as “a which only be on the basis of a particular economic of p. Within this a primary right to Audra the of the state from an original position of as a capital is it cannot be by legal Buchanan's on colonial frameworks at the of p. merely a dialectical territorial even as it capital's that very and are of the same juridical a primary right to secession not only defensible but imperative for peoples seeking to and their of Allen Buchanan's remedial-rights-only theory rests on a Kantian teleology toward moral it assumes that the of a “confederation of free a normative horizon and IL as the through which that horizon may be (Buchanan 1997, p. p. to does not a or his international instead a that to read as if it toward perpetual through political that as a functionalist This a linear to Kant's vision of The Anishinaabeg, by such as cyclical renewal. For political legitimacy from the to relationships in of accountability, not from of Indeed, Aaron Mills that is not a of but rather is its own of to the political a to law, on its own He that is not what law if one is only or to in the of and that in of are and in these how Anishinaabeg legal are in a cyclical of by should not that our are lived in a linear they that not for however, should that our in a is the of (2023, p. This cyclical temporality Kant's of as “a … of at a p. thereby the linear teleology that liberal legal and political Thus, while Buchanan's framework and Kant's teleological project both a toward perpetual peace, a paradigm through of secessionist theory within this cyclical temporality not as a final but as an sustained by to the of contemporary than any linear authority, must with the of capital and rather than sovereignty in and it against that of the and of its own and p. and thereby the that economic Further, within a cyclical secession is not a but a a is by cyclical demands the of reciprocity or the withdrawal of the into a new This of withdrawal is and very of Buchanan's As Mills observes, is political insofar as it a of p. a right to political therefore in Indigenous legal does not on recognition by IL, as or to a by a dominant one p. nor does it to for p. Indeed, Mills observes that in the of IL, a form of in for This is a in the collective at the of a of to a sovereign In Anishinaabeg constitutionalism this of sovereignty is not conferred and at the of but is sustained through and is a of relational than a legitimacy from the resilience of relationships rather than from the authority of a Following, if international doctrine to a of cyclical and secession on it be through at of rather than in p. and to or contract with and capital rather than under Baskatawang calls the (2023, p. In this model, IL a the ongoing of relational rather than as a mechanism imposing Buchanan that the of territorial integrity … the morally legitimate of within states (1997, p. Yet the of by IL, very territories (Harvey 2003). that is both and this each and for to into a from rather than As Mills is legal insofar as as a for fundamental legal p. are as cyclical not on this the Anishinaabeg can claim a primary right to secession rooted in a functionalist of cyclical polity, not just for colonial wrongs. is neither nor it a juridical order in which are and through and that seek diverse in diverse the practice of as of the political This is in that it does not a of it of and legal orders within a to of For a might be simultaneously by and its own authority rather than subordinated to a sovereign As Coulthard and Simpson and the and on deep that are by an to primary-right theory of secession grounded in this does not a it an authority that has to through cyclical reciprocity already the to itself in and need not as an to territorial legitimacy from colonial to with a grounded in legal norms without reproducing the of the modern international law as the final does not the for a more it the of an primary grounded in Indigenous legal to political through relations with land and This right is both (1) normatively, as an expression of ontological and epistemological rooted in Indigenous from first rather than by a colonial referent, and (2) functionally, insofar as these legal orders demonstrate greater systemic coherence and than Buchanan's remedialist model, which paradoxically relies on functionalist reasoning to its own This has that Buchanan's remedial-rights-only theory, while as is by its on a liberal international legal order not to but to the demands of capital accumulation. Drawing on historical–materialist and Anishinaabeg resurgence thought, it has how IL's “bogus neutrality” its colonial origins and its ongoing role in framework that IL as both moral and procedural cannot deliver the or it to Indigenous nations from the original social remedialism structurally These are not merely to the colonial genealogy or economic of IL. challenge the of remedialism as a normative and basis for secession. remedialism is because it requires Indigenous claims to be authenticated within the very order that their original sovereignty. it is because the of IL is structurally of the by capital's the Buchanan to a theory that Indigenous claims remain tethered to these systemic remedialism does not Indigenous legal orders already and rejection of institutional authority, these orders in ongoing and political in cyclical they a form of primary-right the entitlement to secede in the own legal order from the rather than only are suffered. This primary right is both an expression of first principles rooted in Indigenous a of to and economic more than remedialist In this secession is not an but a routine of political The right to secede of IL's framework, on it not only but this right is not a of Indigenous claims to an of remedial a form of primary-right theory that secession as an inherent entitlement grounded in the own legal In this framework, secession is through at with they into This is not but a deeper and more form of peace. should extend this framework in two by legal the procedural of cyclical within Anishinaabeg and Indigenous to the of pluri-legal secession and by political to how cyclical sovereignty might or the of capital's than Buchanan's theory cannot be through or of IL. are structurally with the lived of Indigenous than Indigenous into colonial the is to legal orders as legitimate on their own Anishinaabeg cyclical already a the remedial gatekeeping of liberal sovereignty in relationships rather than in it gestures toward a self-determination is not but not but and from to land and one

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.