Separating the Wrong of Settlement from the Right to Exclude: Territory and Cultural Stability

Abstract

Recent philosophical work on settler colonialism has attempted to account for the distinctive wrong in these practices in terms of the violation of exclusionary territorial rights held by inhabitants of colonised areas. If it turns out that such rights are needed to account for this distinctive wrong, that appears to be a significant cost for views sceptical of territorial rights. This paper sets out to explore the possibility of accounting for this wrong without invoking exclusionary territorial rights and puts forward an account of sociocultural stability rights that allow us to do so (thereby indirectly supporting sceptical views of territorial rights).