Department of Philosophy, Spring 2027

My dissertation addresses a constellation of problems surrounding reconciliation, democratic legitimacy, legality, hope, and the justification of political and legal authority in contexts of internal (or ‘settler’) colonization. It diagnoses and explains the pathologies of internal colonialization, investigates the politics of reconciliation, and defends our reasonable hope in the possibility of reconciliation. At the heart of internal colonization is a legal pathology that I call, following Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, the settler contract. This contract is a series of institutionalized justification narratives and legal fictions that justify and obscure the atrocities of colonialism, turn Indigenous peoples into permanent minorities, and make the sovereignty of settler states appear natural and beyond question. Reconciliation is a political project of establishing legitimate political orders and social relations considering the injustice of the current dispensation. Over the last thirty years, reconciliation has emerged as the dominant framework for addressing internal colonization in settler states. In response, Indigenous political theorists and activists have criticized the politics of reconciliation for perpetuating colonial domination in refusing to question the pathological foundations of settler states. Thus, there is a widespread lack of hope in the possibility of reconciliation in these social locations, marked as they are by enduring injustice, deep diversity, and disagreement. This despair is a political problem, not merely a philosophical one, since it renders us unable to summon the commitments and efforts at compromise and sacrifice necessary for diverse societies to work towards establishing legitimate political orders and social relations. To address this problem, I show that there are good grounds for us to have reasonable hope in the possibility of reconciliation when it is put in the service of a decolonial project aimed at abolishing the settler contract and overcoming internal colonization.