‘Executive robbery’: UK public law, race, and ‘regimes of dispossession’ in the Chagos Archipelago

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between United Kingdom (UK) public law and ‘regimes of dispossession’, taking the Chagos Archipelago as its point of departure. This article argues that this instance of dispossession, typically understood as fortifying the military power of the United States, was also part of a wider geography of states dispossessing land for a specific set of economic purposes that were tied to particular class interests. Deploying a relational geographies of materialist public law approach, the article reconceptualizes the scales of public law, extending an examination of its effects and constitution beyond the territory of the UK, and considers public law's relation to capitalism, exploring the ways in which its technologies (re)produce regimes of dispossession. The article argues that the dispossession of the Chagos Archipelago was an example of ‘executive robbery’, a racialized dispossession (produced through conferring displaceability and disposability on the Chagossians) enacted to construct military infrastructure that was key for accumulation in the Middle East.