In Excess of the Nation: Territorial Histories and the Politics of Self-Determination

Swati Birla, State University of New York-New Paltz

This paper develops a critical historical geography of territory to rethink the relationship between self-determination, sovereignty, and land. It argues that both colonial and anticolonial projects naturalized nation-state as the primary horizon of political belonging, thereby foreclosing alternative territorial futures. During formal decolonization (1945–1965), struggles for self-determination were resolved through the transfer of power from empire to nation, preserving the assumption that sovereignty entails exclusive authority over bounded territory. In this process, the nation became an enclosure of history—reorganizing fluid and layered spatial relations into fixed territorial containers, and recasting dispossession as liberation. The paper traces this enclosure through a dual genealogy: colonial regimes produced territorial enclosures to extract and govern, while postcolonial states reframed these same enclosures as sites of national recovery. Drawing on South Asia—where nearly 600 sovereign polities were absorbed into India and Pakistan between 1947 and 1975—it focuses on annexations such as Hyderabad and Bastar to show how territorial consolidation generated new forms of dispossession and militarized ecological extraction. The enclosures of the nation uplifted, buckled, and jammed up deep time-spaces, producing enduring forms of misplacement and new realities of dispossession. By foregrounding these dynamics, the paper argues that territory is not a static foundation of sovereignty but a historically produced and contested field. It calls for a critical rethinking of the relationship between territory, historical belonging, and statehood in the politics of self-determination.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 6. Critical Perspectives on Colonial Projects across the Globe