SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In this article the author considers a number of themes and concepts that lie at the core of critical legal engagements with Indigenous rights, but are also of importance to wider and more disparate contexts: forms of legal knowledge that constitute and reproduce unequal relations of power between marginalised and dominant communities; the relationship between property, ownership and subjectivity; the constitution of property as a mutable and changing vehicle for emergent forms of value; and how property functions as a legal technique of fabrication. The author raises essential questions, both political and epistemological, for scholars concerned with the power of property to dispossess and expropriate public goods and spheres of life.