Other People's Country

Other Peoples Country thinks through the entangled objects of law legislation, policies, institutions, treaties and so on that govern waters and that make bodies of water lawful within settler colonial sites today. Informed by the theoretical interventions of cosmopolitics and political ecology, each opening up new approaches to questions of politics and the political, the chapters in this book locate these insights within material settler colonial places rather than abstract structures of domination. A claim to water whether by Indigenous peoples or settlers is not simply a claim to a resource. It is a claim to knowledge and to the constitution of place and therefore, in the terms of Isabelle Stengers, to the continued constitution of the past, present and future of real worlds. Including contributions from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, cultural geography, critical legal studies, and settler colonial studies, this collection not only engages with issues of law, water and entitlement in different national contexts including Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Caledonia and the USA but also from diverse disciplinary and institutional contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies.