Kinship Beyond Borders: Relational Sovereignty and the Limits of Liberal Statist Secession

Abstract

The doctrine of territorial integrity remains a dominant debate in international relations discourse, consistently privileging the preservation of existing state structures over the self-determination claims of substate collectivities (Weller 2005). Following, within the liberal canon, this statism2 is found in Allen Buchanan's (1997) distinction between primary-right theories—according to which a people(s) may secede by virtue of their collective identity3—and remedial-right-only theories, which concede secession solely as a remedy for significant injustices already suffered. Buchanan defends the latter on the grounds that remedialism aligns more closely with the morally defensible principles of existing international law (IL), mitigates the risk of perverse incentives, and—though not explicitly stated—implicitly gestures toward a pragmatically viable path to Kantian perpetual peace, as this paper later argues.

The present essay contends, however, that Buchanan's position is scaffolded by tacit ontological and normative commitments that cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Drawing on historical–materialist analysis and Anishinaabeg resurgence thought, it exposes five interlocking presuppositions. First, Buchanan's framework is expressly tailored to align with contemporary IL and thereby sustain a teleological march toward perpetual peace. Second, IL itself arose to advance colonial expansion and, as Brown (2020) argues, now operates as a fetish of Liberal Neutralism,4 concealing its role in facilitating capital accumulation. Third, because IL's genealogy is colonial, its normative architecture stands in structural tension with Indigenous assertions of sovereignty. Fourth, the linear temporality implicit in Kantian (and Buchannian) teleology clashes with the cyclical temporalities through which the Anishinaabeg organize political authority and ritual renewal. Fifth, any coherent alternative secession doctrine must therefore ground a primary right to secede in cyclical relationality rather than in the linear progressive horizon on which Buchanan's remedialism depends.

This final premise is defended on two interrelated fronts: (1) normatively, as an expression of ontological and epistemological commitments rooted in Indigenous worldviews, whose legitimacy derives from first principles rather than colonial referents—a position oft-framed within Indigenous-resurgence literature as a politics of refusal; and (2) functionally, insofar as Anishinaabeg jurisprudences demonstrate greater systemic coherence and institutional resilience than Buchanan's remedialist model, which paradoxically relies on functionalist reasoning to legitimate itself yet fails to deliver comparable durability—particularly in the economic domain, as will be elaborated through Marxian analysis later in the paper.

Of note, within the concrete context of Anishinaabeg experience—marked by land dispossession, cultural suppression, and systemic discrimination (King 2018)—Buchanan's own criteria may, admittedly, permit secession. He states: “in some cases … grosser injustices are perpetrated, not against the citizenry at large, but against a particular group, concentrated in a region of the state,” such that “secession may be justified, and may be feasible, as a response” (Buchanan 1997, p. 585). Notwithstanding, the purpose of this essay is not to seek refuge in Buchanan's remedial gatekeeping but to insist that the Anishinaabeg possess an original entitlement or primary right to secession.

In his remedial-rights-only theory, Buchanan underscores the imperative of aligning moral theories of secession with existing IL. He posits that “a proposal should build upon, or at least not contradict, the more morally acceptable principles of existing international law, when these principles are interpreted in a morally progressive way” (Buchanan 1997, p. 591). Thus, for Buchanan, adherence to IL is essential, offering a morally progressive framework for ethically adjudicating secessionist claims.

Notwithstanding, primitive accumulation5 theorists challenge any faith in the supposed neutrality and moral progressiveness of IL, demonstrating that colonialism served chiefly as a mechanism for capital accumulation rather than an end in itself (Neocleous 2012). Marx (2024) argues that the initial stock of capital essential to the capitalist mode of production was secured through colonial expansion—specifically, by expropriating Indigenous lands as constant capital and exploiting Indigenous and enslaved labor as variable capital.6 International legal doctrines, such as terra nullius7 and the doctrine of discovery, legitimated this project by denying Indigenous sovereignty, thereby enabling the commodification of both land and labor (Miller 2010; Polanyi 1944).

In contemporary global governance, ongoing processes of accumulation by dispossession8 and neocolonialism continue to shape IL, producing what Marx called an “abstract civil law” (1842, p. 300). True to his insight that, under capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air” (1848, p. 4), the decline of overt colonial structures has been replaced by the more diffuse architecture of new constitutionalism. This project fuses legal and regulatory arrangements that restrict state sovereignty in order to advance transnational capitalist interests, embedding neoliberal principles within domestic constitutions and international trade agreements and thereby narrowing democratic control over economic policy (Gill 1998). Such mechanisms illustrate how international jurisprudence has been refashioned to prioritize the rights and freedoms of markets and capital. Yet this new constitutionalism—like any constitutional order—asserts a “normative supremacy” (Marmor 2007, p. 69), a dimension that Buchanan fails to scrutinize adequately.

Following, capital's need to remedy crises of overaccumulation9 drives it toward fresh territories and resources, typically by invoking legal frameworks that legitimize the commodification and privatization of peripheral wealth (Harvey 2003). As Anghie observes, IL “has always been animated by the ‘civilizing mission’—the project of governing non-European peoples. Racial discrimination, cultural subordination and economic exploitation are constitutively significant for the discipline, rather than aberrations that have been overcome by modern international law” (2005, p. 3), epitomizing what Baskatawang terms the “bogus neutrality” of IL (2023, 80).

Further, Buchanan normatively assumes the positive validity of IL norms as a primary position of their moral authority (Buchanan 1997, p. 591)—in a manner reminiscent of Kant's (1939) vision of a “confederation of free states,” a voluntary league of sovereign nations committed to perpetual peace, yet one that, as Anghie (2005) observes, risks obscuring the role of capital as a de facto sovereign authority, structuring IL through hierarchies that subordinate weaker states to more powerful legal actors.

Notwithstanding, although this analysis ostensibly merely clarifies how IL has enabled what Buchanan calls “grosser injustices” (1997, p. 582) against Indigenous peoples—and thereby appears to bolster their claims to secession under his remedial-rights-only model—it simultaneously reveals a deeper weakness in Buchanan's theory. His framework allows remedial secession only if the claim can be authenticated within the prevailing corpus of IL, yet such authentication remains structurally impossible: IL is neither neutral nor genuinely reformable, operating instead as a vehicle for capital accumulation (Anghie 2005; Goodell Ugalde 2023). Accordingly, the “grosser injustices” inflicted on Indigenous nations are not deviations from the ostensibly “morally acceptable principles of existing international law” (Buchanan 1997, p. 591) but routine products of a legal apparatus designed to preserve and extend economic power rather than to rectify systemic wrongs.

In response, Buchanan might counter that certain elements of IL—such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the UN Special Committee on Decolonization—have equipped colonized and racialized peoples with rhetorical and procedural leverage. Yet this leverage does not dissolve the structural constraints these same instruments embed. Coulthard (2014) shows that even ostensibly, progressive politics of recognition reinscribe colonial hierarchies by compelling Indigenous nations to reactively refract their self-determination claims through settler-state epistemologies and juridical taxonomies; thus, when colonized peoples situate Indigenous resurgence as the dialectical “antithesis” to the colonial “thesis” of IL (Sartre and MacCombie 1964), Indigeneity remains ontologically tethered to the colonial referent, perpetually reproducing the very structures it seeks to escape (Fanon 1970).

Second, positing an inherent right to secession exposes deep fissures in Buchanan's Lockean social-contract framework, casting doubt on its sufficiency as a normative basis for just secession. These limitations sharpen a more urgent inquiry: if IL is irredeemably colonial, what alternative can genuinely liberate subordinated peoples? The solution is not to replace one universalizing institution (e.g., the United Nations) with another, but to cultivate pluri-legal orders—coexisting juridical systems grounded in diverse ontologies. For Indigenous nations such as the Anishinaabeg, sovereignty is not a juridical status conferred by IL; it is a lived practice of relational accountability, sustained through land, kinship, and reciprocity (Simpson 2011; Mills 2025).

Indeed, scholars such as John Borrows, Aaron Mills, and Audra Simpson insist that Indigenous legal orders are not merely adjuncts to Western law but fully formed, self-sufficient systems. Their authority lies precisely in their refusal to mimic global institutions like the International Court of Justice: they remain attentive to the distinctive social, ecological, and spiritual relationships that constitute each polity, rather than imposing abstract, universalist norms. Moving toward such a plural legal landscape therefore demands not wholesale institutional collapse but a fundamental reorientation of our concepts of legitimacy, recognition, and governance. In this light, Simpson's (2017) notion of refusal—a withdrawal from statist recognition—should be read not as a rejection of law altogether but as the self-affirmative assertion of an alternative legal ground.

Indeed, when Buchanan observes that remedial-rights-only theories are “typified by John Locke's theory according to which the people have the right to overthrow the government if and only if their fundamental rights are violated” (p. 585). This paradigm presupposes an implicit “social contract” with a sovereign authority deemed necessary for collective security (Oakeshott 2017). Within this schema, civil disobedience demands moral justification, whereas obedience to law is ontologically naturalized and requires none (Lyons 1998). New constitutionalism amplifies this dynamic through its claim to “normative supremacy” (Marmor 2007, p. 69), perfidiously seeking “to base the law of the market on the alleged propensities of man in the state of nature” (Polanyi 1944, p. 47). Viewed through an Indigenous-resurgence lens, however, genuine Indigenous participation in shaping any social contract is absent: settlers occupied Indigenous territories without consent, so the contract's legitimacy rests on a “ruse of consent” that obscures its colonial, historical–materialist origins (Simpson 2017, p. 19).

Explained, Buchanan insists that “a proposal should build upon, or at least not contradict, the more morally acceptable principles of existing international law” (1997, p. 591). Yet relying on these “well entrenched” principles overlooks the reality that they constitute “little more than a liberal doctrine [that] hypostatizes the workings of some dialectical law in modern society, while in its crudest form it devolves into an assault on political democracy” (Polanyi 1944, p. 151), thereby advancing settler-colonial projects (Coulthard 2014).10 Although this dynamic differs from Europe's proletarianization via primitive accumulation and enclosure of commons,11 it nevertheless imposes a normative order that invariably “serve[s] someone or some purpose” (Cox 1981, p. 124)—namely, capital accumulation and colonial expansion, all operating under the guise of liberal neutrality.

Consequently, even if Buchanan recognizes these structures as “grosser injustices” inflicted on Indigenous peoples and thus grounds for remedial secession, the long-standing exclusion of Indigenous peoples from any genuine social contract—both with the Canadian and US states and with the international community—supports their primary right to secede. Buchanan himself concedes that “the recognition of a remedial right to secession can be seen as supplementing Locke's theory of revolution and theories like it” (Buchanan 1997, p. 586); however, such supplementation is inadequate when the original social contract is illegitimate.

Buchanan's remedial-rights-only theory holds that limiting secession is necessary to uphold international order, insisting that “the destabilising effects of allowing secession are too great to permit a general right to secede” (Buchanan 1997, p. 588). In his view, the existing state system and IL supply the scaffolding for predictability and stability. Yet this appeal to stability overlooks the turbulence produced by the bureaucratic inertia of IL, which often cannot keep pace with the spatial–temporal demands of capital accumulation (Slaughter 1995). As Anishinaabeg scholar Leo Baskatawang observes, Eurocentric jurisprudence—the intellectual substrate of IL—remains “frozen at the date of signature” (Baskatawang 2023, p. 82), rendering it ill-equipped to adapt to evolving global conditions.

David Harvey's concept of the spatial fix12 provides a critical framework for understanding how capital circumvents crises of overaccumulation by continually expanding into new geographical and temporal spaces, thereby reshaping spatial and temporal configurations. Harvey (2001, 2003) elaborates on Marx's dialectical account of capital, in which internal contradictions drive it into recurrent crises that it manages through geographic expansion and structural reorganization. This imperative to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere [and] establish connexions everywhere” (Marx 1848) destabilizes established social and political arrangements, generating systemic volatility (Harvey 2003). The slow-moving, bureaucratic machinery of IL is consequently ill-suited to keep pace with rapid spatial–temporal shifts. Its procedural rigidity—what Polanyi (1944, p. 35) captures in the observation that “nowhere has liberal philosophy failed so conspicuously as in its understanding of the problem of change”—together with its prioritization of state sovereignty, restricts the international community's capacity to address the complex and evolving challenges posed by global capital flows.

Consequently, the bureaucratic inertia embedded in liberal institutionalism—frequently characterized as “pre-social, resistant to historical evolution” (Marois and McDonald 2022, p. 673)—exacerbates instability by entrenching existing inequalities and impeding necessary structural change. Coupled with the uneven development13 produced by capitalist expansion, this rigidity generates a geography of heightened vulnerability and volatility, thereby undercutting Buchanan's claim that IL functions as a reliable stabilizing force.

As such, by advancing a secession theory grounded in existing legal principles, Buchanan inadvertently shores up the very structures that generate global volatility. Although he maintains that “the principle of territorial integrity … furthers the most basic morally legitimate interests of the individuals and groups that states are empowered to serve” (p. 596), this claim overlooks the destabilizing repercussions of capital's spatial–temporal fixes—dynamics that IL, by design, helps to reproduce (Anghie 2005). Such fixes compel a fundamental re-examination of sovereignty and territoriality. The traditional Westphalian conception of sovereignty now collides with transnational forces that routinely transcend national boundaries, rendering classical doctrines increasingly inadequate for grappling with globalization's complexities (Anghie 2005). By normatively relying on outmoded assumptions about statehood and stability, Buchanan's framework overlooks the pressing need for more agile, responsive, and genuinely stabilizing institutional arrangements—namely, that “rapid change should be managed in order to accommodate as much as possible those on its losing end” (Shehu and Germain 2025, p. 1).

Certainly, this critique acquires particular force in the context of Indigenous struggles for sovereignty and self-determination. The Anishinaabeg disproportionately face the destabilizing consequences of capitalism's spatial–temporal imperatives, manifested in ongoing land dispossession and resource extraction—processes that Coulthard identifies as accumulation by dispossession (Coulthard 2014). Still, the bureaucratic inertia of IL not only fails to shield Indigenous rights; it actively sustains instability by allowing these injustices to persist unchallenged. Limiting secession in the name of stability therefore paradoxically reinforces the very instabilities and inequities that threaten the global order. Advocating a primary right to secession—embracing the misrecognition14 Audra Simpson (2014) theorizes, which rejects Westphalian sovereignty from an original position of refusal—recognizes the need to empower distinct peoples to reclaim autonomy in the face of systemic disruptions wrought by capital.

Admittedly, this argument, akin to the previous critique of Buchanan's neutral and positivist stance on IL, does not outright contradict his theoretical framework. Buchanan contends that “secession may be justified, and may be feasible, as a response to selective tyranny” (Buchanan 1997, p. 585). Here, one may argue that the destabilizing impacts of capital's spatial–temporal fixes constitute a form of “tyranny” disproportionately inflicted upon Indigenous peoples, potentially validating secession under his remedial-rights-only theory. However, the crux of this critique lies in the paradox that Buchanan's Kantian reliance on liberal institutionalism as a stabilizing force is inherently destabilizing, thereby justifying a primary right to secession that presupposes his framework either as a primary right or as a “misrecognition” of Westphalian sovereignty altogether.

In other words, (1) Buchanan's appeal to IL constitutes a functionalist argument premised on the pursuit of stability. Yet, (2) IL is itself enmeshed in the imperatives of capital accumulation, as theorized within the framework of new constitutionalism. Moreover, (3) “Capitalism … is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary” (Schumpeter, 1942/1994, pp. 82–83). At the same time, liberal institutions nonetheless remain rigid—and, as Baskatawang (2023) observes, “frozen”—in the face of capital's rapid volatility. The outcome is not the stability Buchanan envisions but rather (4) a structural contradiction that, paradoxically, “lead[s] to explosions, crises, in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great part of the capital” occurs (Marx, 1857–1858/1973, Notebook VII). This contradiction (5) necessitates a novel functionalist defense of a primary right to secession, where the seceding alternative can more effectively manage capital's destabilizing effects. This document later argues that Anishinaabeg jurisprudence is capable of doing precisely that.

Explicated, envision a post-industrial city where secession might initially appear as a source of destabilization.15 Yet, does it not equally threaten stability that IL enables capital to address overaccumulation crises through the financialization of such cities, the offshoring of labor, and the erosion of local means of subsistence? By maintaining a rigid framework that privileges state sovereignty over confronting the root causes of instability—specifically, unregulated capital flows—Buchanan's theory inadvertently sustains the very destabilization it seeks to mitigate. To clarify, this is not an argument employing whataboutism to suggest that Buchanan's conception of political stability within IL should extend into the economic realm—a misinterpretation that would treacherously assume “the separation of economic and political struggles” (Wood 1981, p. 67). Rather, it problematizes Buchanan's reliance on IL itself, which fosters economic instability, a condition that dialectically precipitates political instability by ensuring that “the common mind has received the impression of an acute danger, [and] fear remains latent, as long as its ultimate cause [i.e., economic instability catalysed by IL] is not removed” (Polanyi 1944, p. 199). Indeed, is it not, indeed, a question of political instability when former workers in such a city endure social decay as a consequence of job loss?16 In this sense, one may note, as Polanyi does, that “nowhere has liberal philosophy failed so conspicuously as in its understanding of the problem of change” (1944, p. 35).

The foregoing analysis highlights the need to reconceptualize the right to secession by advancing a primary-right theory that treats secession as a legitimate response to the systemic disruptions generated by capital's destabilizing dynamics. Such a framework must adopt a more sophisticated notion of stability—one attentive to the interplay among state institutions, IL, and the spatial–temporal pressures exerted by global capital. Recognizing the inherent constraints of current legal regimes opens the door to more flexible and equitable arrangements that genuinely foster global stability and justice, rather than entrenching inequalities as “a historical abstraction which could only be evolved on the basis of a particular economic development of society” (Pilling 1980, p. 1). Within this context, asserting a primary right to secession—or, following Audra Simpson, the Anishinaabeg's misrecognition of the Westphalian state from an original position of refusal—emerges as a cogent progression. Because capital is intrinsically volatile, it cannot be governed by rigid legal doctrines: Buchanan's reliance on colonial frameworks “frozen at the date of signature” (Baskatawang 2023, p. 40; Marshall [1999] 3 S.C.R. 456, para. 78) merely reproduces a dialectical contradiction, preserving territorial boundaries even as it facilitates capital's deterritorializing impulses that undermine those very borders. Stability and instability are thus mutually constitutive moments of the same juridical form, making a primary right to secession not only defensible but imperative for peoples seeking to reclaim autonomy and secure their means of subsistence.

Allen Buchanan's remedial-rights-only theory rests on a Kantian teleology oriented toward moral progress: it assumes that the ideal of a “confederation of free states” constitutes a normative horizon and treats IL as the medium through which that horizon may be realized (Buchanan 1997, p. 591; Kant 2008, p. 77).17 Kant, to clarify, does not espouse a deterministic or metaphysical teleology; his international thought instead deploys a regulative ideal that invites us to read history as if it were tending toward perpetual peace through rational political development, that is, as a functionalist telos (Wilkins 1966). This perspective imparts a linear narrative to Kant's vision of progress. The Anishinaabeg, by contrast, reject such linearity, conceiving time as cyclical renewal. For them, political legitimacy arises from the capacity to re-create relationships in rhythmic rounds of accountability, not from achieving—then defending—an end-state of perfected order.

Indeed, Aaron Mills maintains that “kinship is not a unique feature of First Nations citizenship, but rather is its own model of belonging to the political community: a model internal to First Nations law, understood on its own terms.” He adds that “one is not hearing what First Nations law says about belonging if one is only willing or able to listen in the language of citizenship,” and stresses that “the stakes in one's choice of model are significant: citizenship and kinship structure legality in fundamentally different ways” (Mills 2025, pp. 2–3). Together, these insights reveal how Anishinaabeg legal traditions are anchored in a cyclical understanding of time—a sensibility captured by Winona LaDuke's assertion: “We should not believe that our lives are lived in a linear fashion; they don't go that way, not for no reason; therefore, however, we should believe that our lives go in a circular manner. That is the Anishinaabe way of life” (2023, p. 111).18 This cyclical temporality directly contests Immanuel Kant's conception of history as “a universal … plan of nature aimed at a perfect civic union” (2006, p. 11), thereby unsettling the linear teleology that permeates liberal legal and political thought.

Thus, while Buchanan's remedial-statist framework and Kant's teleological project both assume a normative, unilinear trajectory toward perpetual peace, a kinship-centered paradigm distributes obligations through continually renewed cycles of reciprocal accountability. Re-situating secessionist theory within this cyclical temporality reframes autonomy not as a final achievement but as an ongoing, intersubjective duty sustained by living relationships—an outlook better attuned to the spatiotemporal volatility of contemporary politico-economic life than any linear blueprint. Legitimate authority, accordingly, must evolve with the oscillations of capital and ecology rather than fossilizing sovereignty in parchment and zealously defending it against revision—a posture that soon becomes “incapable of capturing the full diversity and dynamism of its own institutions” (Marois and McDonald 2022, p. 673) and thereby incubates the bureaucratic inertia that ultimately fuels economic instability.

Further, within a cyclical ontology, secession is not a terminal exit but a lawful realignment. When a kin-group's livelihood is degraded by external extraction, cyclical renewal demands either the restoration of reciprocity or the consented withdrawal of the injured party into a new governance circle.19 This act of withdrawal is routine, corrective, and stabilizing—the very opposite of Buchanan's anxieties. As Mills observes, “kinship is citizenship's political equal insofar as it offers a justificatory account of belonging” (2025, p. 2); a preexisting right to recompose political community therefore inheres in Indigenous legal orders. Its exercise does not hinge on recognition by IL, understood as something “granted” or “accorded” to a subaltern group by a dominant one (Coulthard 2014, p. 24), nor does it amount to “an othered plea for inclusion” (Habermas 2018, p. 143).

Indeed, Mills (2025) observes that in the citizenship model of IL, individuals relinquish a form of pre-political freedom in exchange for standardized entitlements. This is a Hobbesian trade-off: membership in the collective comes at the price of surrendering a portion of one's autonomy to a sovereign authority. In contrast, Anishinaabeg constitutionalism refuses this consolidation of sovereignty altogether. Here, belonging is not conferred once and fixed at the date of signature but is continually sustained through reciprocal care, mutual aid, and shared responsibilities. Membership is fluid—more a spectrum of relational ties than a rigid insider/outsider binary—and legitimacy arises from the resilience of those relationships rather than from the authority of a central state.

Following, if international doctrine were to adopt a principle of cyclical renewal and fluid membership, secession would no longer hinge on adversarial, one-time referenda. Instead, it would be pursued through iterative, relationship-centered mediations convened at culturally appropriate intervals—the “language of kinship rather than citizenship,” in Mills's phrase (2025, p. 3). Each cycle would revisit and refine earlier outcomes, allowing boundaries to expand or contract with socio-ecological change and spatiotemporal capital flows rather than fracture under accumulated strain—what Baskatawang calls “polishing the silver” (2023, p. 123). In this model, IL would serve a facilitative role, safeguarding the ongoing process of relational recalibration, rather than acting as a disciplinary mechanism imposing rigid finalities.

Recontextualized, Buchanan contends that the “principle of territorial integrity … furthers the most basic morally legitimate interests” of those living within states (1997, p. 596). Yet the spatial–temporal “fixes” of capital, shielded by IL, continually destabilize those very territories (Harvey 2003). A governance model that is cyclical—relational across both space and time—addresses this volatility head-on. Because each renewal ceremony examines and reallocates obligations, no actor suffers harm long enough for disruption to crystallize into a crisis. Stability, then, emerges from adaptability rather than rigidity. As Mills notes, “kinship is [also] citizenship's legal equal insofar as it, too, serves as a foundation for fundamental legal interests” (2025, p. 2)—but those interests are conceived as living, cyclical responsibilities, not static rights. Building on this analysis, the Anishinaabeg can claim a primary right to secession rooted in a functionalist defense of cyclical polity, not just retroactively for colonial wrongs.

Kinship governance is neither anarchic nor statist; it constitutes a pluriversal20 juridical order in which obligations are constituted, renewed, and enforced through ceremony, redistribution, and land-based accountability—practices that seek “relationality among diverse ontologies” or, in Mills's words, “kinship across worlds” (Mills 2021). By “relationality among diverse ontologies,” I mean the practice of treating actors as coequal members of the political community. This is “pluriversal” in that it does not impose a single universal model of legitimacy; instead, it accommodates multiple temporalities, modes of knowledge, and legal orders within a shared governance process akin to Mignolo's (2000) concept of border epistemology.21 For example, a land-use decision might be guided simultaneously by ceremonial protocol, intergenerational treaty obligations, and environmental science—each retaining its own authority rather than being subordinated to a single sovereign framework.

As Coulthard and Simpson observe, “grounded normativity houses and reproduces the practices and procedures, based on deep reciprocity, that are inherently informed by an intimate relationship to place” (2016). A primary-right theory of secession grounded in this tradition does not create a novel entitlement; it simply recognizes an authority that has never migrated to Westphalian institutions. A polity organized through cyclical reciprocity already possesses the capacity to recompose itself in lawful ways and thus need not solicit external certification as an exception to territorial integrity. By relocating legitimacy from colonial parchment to living relationships, kinship governance replaces remedialism's conditional license with a continuous jurisdiction grounded in ceremony—retaining coherent, enforceable legal norms without reproducing the hierarchical consolidation of the modern state.

Rejecting international law as the final arbiter, then, does not pave the way for a more expansive remedialism; rather, it necessitates the affirmation of an ever-active primary right, grounded in Indigenous legal orders, to reconstitute political life through reciprocal relations with land and kin. This right is justified both (1) normatively, as an expression of ontological and epistemological foundations rooted in Indigenous worldviews from first principles, rather than by a colonial referent, and (2) functionally, insofar as these legal orders demonstrate greater systemic coherence and stability than Buchanan's remedialist model, which paradoxically relies on functionalist reasoning to justify its own positions.

This article has argued that Buchanan's remedial-rights-only theory, while presented as pragmatic, is fundamentally compromised by its dependence on a liberal international legal order created not to safeguard justice, but to manage the spatial–temporal demands of capital accumulation. Drawing on historical–materialist critique and Anishinaabeg resurgence thought, it has shown how IL's “bogus neutrality” (Baskatawang 2023) conceals its colonial origins and its ongoing role in dispossession. A framework that treats IL as both moral compass and procedural guarantor cannot deliver the stability or justice it promises—especially to Indigenous nations excluded from the original social contract—rendering remedialism structurally inadequate.

These critiques are not offered merely to expose the colonial genealogy or economic complicity of IL. They directly challenge the plausibility of remedialism as a normative and functional basis for secession. Normatively, remedialism is defective because it requires Indigenous claims to be authenticated within the very colonial–capitalist order that denies their original sovereignty. Functionally, it is inadequate because the rigid legalism of IL is structurally incapable of managing the volatility produced by capital's spatial–temporal fixes—precisely the instability Buchanan invokes stability to avoid. Even a remedial-rights theory that heavily favored Indigenous claims would remain tethered to these systemic constraints.

Rejecting remedialism does not entail embracing anarchism. Indigenous legal orders already provide coherent, enforceable, and stabilizing alternatives. Unlike anarchism's rejection of institutional authority, these orders embed jurisdiction in ongoing reciprocal obligations, sustaining lawful and functional political realignment. Grounded in cyclical relationality, they justify a form of primary-right theory: the entitlement to secede inheres in the polity's own legal order from the outset, rather than arising only after specific wrongs are suffered. This primary right is justified both normatively—as an expression of first principles rooted in Indigenous ontologies—and functionally—as a governance model capable of adapting to ecological and economic volatility more effectively than remedialist frameworks. In this view, secession is not an exceptional rupture but a lawful, routine recalibration of political relationships. The right to secede exists independently of IL's disciplinary framework, making reliance on it not only unnecessary but counterproductive.

Recognizing this right is not simply a matter of adding Indigenous claims to an expanded list of remedial exceptions. It constitutes a form of primary-right theory that reconstitutes secession as an inherent entitlement grounded in the polity's own legal order. In this framework, secession is exercised through iterative, relation-centered deliberations held at culturally appropriate intervals. Political boundaries thus adjust with socioeconomic change, diffusing tensions before they harden into conflict. This is not instability, but a deeper and more durable form of peace.

Future research should extend this framework in two directions: first, by having legal ethnographers document the procedural rhythms of cyclical decision-making within Anishinaabeg and other Indigenous polities, to guide the development of pluri-legal secession protocols; and second, by encouraging political economists to explore how institutionalized cyclical sovereignty might better absorb or deflect the destabilizing shocks of capital's spatial fixes than state-centric regimes can.

Buchanan's theory cannot be rehabilitated through generous exceptions or reinterpretations of IL. Its foundations are structurally misaligned with the lived legalities of Indigenous nations. Rather than retrofitting Indigenous governance into colonial categories, the task is to affirm kinship-based legal orders as legitimate on their own terms. Anishinaabeg cyclical governance already offers a lawful, adaptive alternative—rendering the remedial gatekeeping of liberal statism obsolete. By rooting sovereignty in living relationships rather than in dead parchment, it gestures toward a post-colonial world polity where self-determination is not granted but practiced, not episodic but ongoing, and never separated from reciprocal obligations to land and one another.