This paper argues that the international legal concept of territory is a fundamentally Eurocentric construction of the rightful relationship between community, authority and place. Not only does that construction rely on the ontological rupture between human subject and natural object that characterises European Enlightenment philosophy; it erases the physical earth itself, replacing it with an abstract object over which sovereignty is exercised, or space within which jurisdiction is asserted. As such, the legal concept of territory is neutral neither to global environmental crisis, nor to the ongoing relegation of non-European peoples, cultures and histories in the international legal order. This paper thus calls for the denaturalisation of the legal concept of territory: to unsettle its self-evidence as the presumed universal mode of relation to earth; to demote its status from the universal to the particular; to make it strange. That process necessarily unsettles the statist paradigm of decolonisation, and requires a reckoning with the chronic metaphysical limitations of the distinction between human and nature on which the concept of territory relies.
Dr Cait Storr is a Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School. She researches the law, history and politics of property, territory and jurisdiction, with a focus on struggles for control over natural resources. She has published on the history of international administration, the concept of territory in international law, imperialism in the Pacific, decolonisation, environmental law, and on property and concepts of the commons.