Institute of Advanced Studies

Law, legitimacy and ‘the frontier’

The quest - relentless, urgent, and absurd - to establish the legitimacy of the colonial enterprise makes law's relation to colonialism particularly compelling in demonstrating and explaining the comprehensive discrimination experienced by Indigenous peoples and this discrimination’s enduring resistance to reform.

This lecture focussed on the settler-colonial frontier as both notion and actuality, in order to discuss two aspects of Dr Evans' broader research on law, race and colonialism.

First, she considered the development of international law in conjunction with colonialism, suggesting the need to reassess the narrow nationalist framework within which ‘the frontier’ is usually understood.

Second, she examined certain frontier experiences, commonly viewed as exceptional, or as confined to an interstitial period of ‘lawlessness’, suggesting their significance in constituting and sustaining the sovereignty claims of the colonizers.

By homing in on the appeal to law to legitimate the transfer and transformation of sovereignty in settler states, the lecture also elaborated on the mutual constitution of law and nation more generally.