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Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists from the nineteenth century to the present, Robert Nichols argues that dispossession has come to name a unique recursive process whereby systematic theft is the mechanism by which property relations are generated. In so doing, Nichols also brings long-standing debates in anarchist, Black radical, feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial thought into direct conversation with the frequently overlooked intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples.

This first systematic and comprehensive engagement of the relationship of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault makes a unique contribution to our thinking about the question of freedom and shows why these major thinkers must be read in tandem if we want to fully understand twentieth-century Continental thought.

Freedom and Democracy in an Imperial Context: Dialogues with James Tully gathers leading thinkers from across the humanities and social sciences in a celebration of, and critical engagement with, the recent work of Canadian political philosopher James Tully. Over the past thirty years, James Tully has made key contributions to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including: interventions in the history of moral and political thought, contemporary political philosophy, democracy, citizenship, imperialism, recognition and cultural diversity. In 2008, he published Publ.

In the 1940s the Afghan dynasty in Kabul and newly independent rulers in Pakistan did not meet the challenges of building enduring representative political institutions and sustainable national economies. The dynamics of post-war globalized political and economic relationships undermined perceived elements of colonial-era stability. Borderland individuals and communities buffeted by post-war uncertainties and traumas from the Partition of British-India in August 1947 often ignored or resisted state-building efforts too often seen as lacking political legitimacy or local benefit. State institutional failures of governance in the 1970s that preceded subsequent decades of regional instability were foreshadowed in the 1940s. By 1950, the working of global capital, including in the form of American corporate interests, complicated any state notions that foreign funded economic development schemes might substitute for substantial structural political and social reforms.

Histories of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the North-West Frontier summarize the borderland events of 1947 and the next years as concerned with several enduring issues. The nation-states of Afghanistan and Pakistan became rivals. Each projected different, contested claims to sovereignty over border territories and populations. The Afghan government, especially Sardar Muhammad Daud, used the Pakhtunistan issue to consolidate an Afghan national identity, attract borderland Pashtuns, and extract advantages from an economically weak, politically vulnerable Pakistan. Within the tribal agencies, the government of Pakistan at first withdrew regular military units from forward bases, nominally to exhibit nation-building unity in a new country for Muslims.1In both countries, economic development and political integration were policy goals intended to build human capital and legitimate the nation-state, but also to maintain established internal hierarchies of authority and power.2By 1955 despite such efforts, borderland residents continued to negotiate relationships with state officials now recruiting signatures on documents of national loyalty.3

This article offers a preliminary critical-historical reconstruction of the concept of dispossession. Part I examines its role in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century struggles against European feudal land tenure. Drawing upon Marx's critique of French anarchism in particular, I identify a persistent limitation at the heart of the concept. Since dispossession presupposes prior possession, recourse to it appears conservative and tends to reinforce the very proprietary and commoditized models of social relations that radical critics generally seek to undermine. Part II turns to use of the term in Indigenous struggles against colonization, both in order to better grasp the stakes of the above problematic and suggest a way beyond it. Through a reconstruction of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists, I seek to show the coherence and novelty of their formulation by suggesting that dispossession has come to name a unique historical process, one in which property is generated under conditions that require divestment and alienation from those who appear, only retroactively, as its original owners. In this way, theft and property are related in a recursive, rather than strictly unilinear, manner. Part III provides a specific historical example in the form of nineteenth-century US property law concerning squatters and homesteaders.

Increased access to archival and other textual sources and the situating of "Afghan" history within wider theoretical, comparative, and interdisciplinary thinking have opened Afghanistan-related studies to new fields of research and analysis. This offers new opportunities to reimagine and move beyond established historical narratives and preoccupations. At a point when English-language archives have been comprehensively mined for the political histories of Afghan dynasties, intruding Western empires, and the dynamics of modernity and state-building, non-English-language primary-source material has become increasingly available, including in translation and in online digital archival formats. The recent English translation by M. Mehdi Khorrami and Robert D. McChesney of volume three ofThe History of Afghanistanby the Afghan Hazara historian Fayz Muhammad Katib (c. 1863–1931) offers new material with which to reconsider not only elite political careers but also ethnic identity and competition, the sociology of provincial political networks, and the creation of governing rules codified by ʿAbd al-Rahman and Habibullah.