Looking out at our world made up of sovereign states, its organization can feel quite natural. After all, historical development has driven us to the point where sovereignty contained within modern states comes as something of a given. Settler-colonial states, though, offer a bit of a different view. Each time Indigenous peoples refuse to accede to state policy or programs, we start to see settler claims to sovereignty as the “counter-claims” that they are.
Indeed, as critical international relations scholarship reminds us, rather than a fixed state of being, sovereignty is more accurately understood as a claim. In my recently published book I explore how that claim gets translated into an assumed state of being. How does it come to be seen as so natural that we can easily forget its unstable foundations?
While there are many parts to a full answer, I see hegemonic knowledge claims as being key to the process. Rather than providing an objective view of the world, knowledge is being shaped by our underlying assumptions about the world. Our cosmological understandings of the world ground these assumptions. Understood as a “theory of the universe,” cosmology provides what Bentley Allan calls “state purposes”.
Western, especially Christian, cosmologies draw from biblical notions of human dominion wherein humans are given authority over the lands, waters, and all other species. This contrasts sharply with the relational view of many Indigenous peoples whose philosophies reflect the principles that Glen Sean Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson refer to as “grounded normativity.” In settler-colonial contexts, the power that settler governments wield ultimately legitimizes settler authority as dominion through an investment in the logic of improvement. This then organizes what I call settler colonial worldmaking, which collapses the multiplicity of Indigenous sovereignties into a singular settler sovereignty in states such as Canada.
If improvement is at the core of legitimizing settler claims to sovereignty, how do we see it? And what is there to see? For this I go back to Allan’s point about state purposes, because my contention is that we can see this worldmaking occur through state attempts to understand the peoples, lands, waters, and animals that it claims dominion over.
One of these processes that I study in the book is the McKenna-McBride commission. The joint federal-provincial Royal Commission worked from 1913-1916, seeking to arrive at a final answer to the ‘Indian Land Question’ in British Columbia by finalizing the boundaries of First Nations reserves across the province. The commissioners completed their task by gathering data. They visited many of the communities and asked questions such as how big the reserves were, and “How much land is there on this reserve which is good enough for gardens or cultivation in other respects?” They also asked about the number of buildings that had been built and fences that had been put up, animal stock-raising, and whether communities were ensuring their children attended the institutions that made up the genocidal Indian Residential School System, among many other things. What they sought to know was whether communities were seeking improvement by according themselves with the agriculture-centric lifeways premised on human dominion that were expected of modern, liberal subjects. Where communities did, they were identified as “prosperous” or “progressive” and were supported.
The commissioners, then, sought to understand First Nations lives in BC, but only through the prism of improvement. The questions they asked and data they studied shows that they only imagined the world through the sort of lives lived by settlers from Europe, with government policy being made on the basis of these understandings.
But if worldmaking produces a new world in the image of settler assumptions of improvement, it also opens space for the contention of these, which we see in First Nations’ leaders refusal to participate in the process on the terms set by settler governments. When facing the commissioners, they did so in an organized fashion, undermining the Commission’s instructions to focus on agricultural use of land by insisting on their need for fishing rights, or directly engaging in what Audra Simpson calls “ethnographic refusal” by refusing to answer the questions posed. These refusals may not have ultimately stopped the work of settler-colonial boundary-making, but looking at them today opens questions about the seeming naturalness of settler possessiveness, and ultimately, sovereignty.
Settler colonial worldmaking remains forever incomplete while Indigenous peoples insist on their own relational understandings of connectedness, rather than improvement and dominion. If we’re to move towards a meaningful reconciliation, to take strides towards decolonization, then we need to move away from improvement. Asking questions that start to unpack the ongoing work that it takes to legitimize settler claims to sole sovereignty is one place to begin.
Liam Midzain-Gobin is a settler scholar who studies the ongoing remaking of settler colonial sovereignty and Indigenous responses to it. Dr. Midzain-Gobin is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Brock University and an associate editor with Critical Studies on Security. He is the author of Settler Colonial Sovereignty: Visions of Improvement and Indigenous Erasure (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2025) and his work has also appeared in Security Dialogue, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, the American Review of Canadian Studies, and other journals and outlets. He spoke at a CIPS event on March 17, 2026.
