Speaker: Dr Raza Saeed, Warwick Law School

Discussant: Dr Huw Williams, ENCAP, Cardiff

Time: 1-2pm Friday 15th November  (Light lunch from 1230)

Venue: Room 2.29 Law Building

This paper conducts a dialogue between the scholarship on law and colonialism and moral and analytic political philosophy. The discussion of identifying the distinct wrong of European colonialism has recently gained traction within analytic philosophy, and has raised a crucial question for scholars of law and colonialism to identify the specific and distinct wrong of colonialism, if any – a question that is seemingly simple but which we cannot dismiss so readily. It is premised on the idea that it is not sufficient to critique colonialism as just another example of an unjust political system that employs violence to do its bidding, and questions if there is distinctly problematic about colonialism.

The dominant accounts of the distinct wrong of colonialism either focus on usurpation of resources and appropriation of territory as colonialism’s key harm, or it takes the establishment and continuation of unjust political structures as the defining attribute of colonialism. This paper engages with the accounts these dominant accounts in detail and highlights how these accounts fall short on two fronts: one, they are unable to distinguish between a colonial regime and a democratically deficient system for the most part; and second, that these perspectives take a narrow view on colonialism and, because of this, their distinct wrong remains disassociated from the other wrongs of colonialism. The paper then presents its own perspective on the epistemic wrong of colonialism and suggests how the assumed inequality of human beings was at the foundation of the colonial enterprise. It argues that this distinct wrong was foundational for the problematic colonial policies and contributed to the political and territorial harms perpetrated through the colonial project.