Scale Political
The Social Territorial Foundations of Animal Politics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.28259Keywords:
Animal politics, right to politics, social membership, territorial rights, interspecies politics, treaty relations, interstitial federalismAbstract
The animal ethics literature tends to focus on animals either as individuals (with rights or moral standing) or as part of biological populations or species (vulnerable to extinction, loss of genetic diversity, resilience, abundance, etc.). But politics takes place at the level of social and cultural groups, not individuals or biological populations, and it concerns how members of groups navigate and shape the terms of collective life together. We explore the importance of seeing animals as members of groups or associations (e.g. herds, pods, neighbours, clans, commoners), and how such groups fit into larger visions of interspecies politics and justice. Political theory has long faced the challenge of how to relate different scales of political community (local, national, transnational), each with its own rules of membership, authority and legitimacy. Adding animal groups to the mix ramps up this complexity, but we argue that this complexity is generative. It helps clarify the need to think about political communities as interdependent (not isolated or self-sufficient), grounded (in physical space and/or social connection), and overlapping (with different communities having divided authority in shared places, not exclusive or unitary power). We explore how political community of this scale and scope could enable justice in more-than-human politics.
Downloads
References
Allard-Tremblay, Yann and Elaine Coburn, “The Flying Heads of Settler Colonialism; or the Ideological Erasures of Indigenous Peoples in Political Theorizing.” Political Studies 71, no. 2 (2023): 359–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217211018127
Allard-Tremblay, Yann. “The Two Row Wampum: Decolonizing and Indigenizing Democratic Autonomy”. Polity 54, no. 2 (2022): 225–49. https://doi.org/10.1086/718331
Andrews, Kristin, Simon Fitzpatrick, and Evan Westra. “Human and Nonhuman Norms: A Dimensional Framework.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 379, no. 1897 (2024): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0026
Bauböck, Rainer. Democratic Inclusion. Manchester University Press. 2018.
Blaser, Mario, and Marisol de la Cadena. “The Uncommons: An Introduction.” Anthropologica 59, no. 2 (2017): 185–93.
Cochrane, Alasdair. Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Cornell, Stephen. “‘Wolves Have a Constitution’: Continuities in Indigenous Self-Government.” International Indigenous Policy Journal 6, no. 1 (2015): 1–20.
Crist, Eileen. “For Cosmopolitan Bioregionalism.” The Ecological Citizen 3 (2020): 21–29.
Donaldson, Sue and Will Kymlicka. Animals and the Right to Politics. Oxford University Press, 2025.
Garner, Robert. “Animals and Democratic Theory: Beyond an Anthropocentric Account.” Contemporary Political Theory 16, no. 4 (2016): 459–77. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-016-0072-0
Green, Joyce. “The Impossibility of Citizenship Liberation for Indigenous People.” In Citizenship in Transnational Perspective, edited by Jatinder Mann, 175–88. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Hamilton, Robert. “Indigenous Peoples and Interstitial Federalism in Canada.” Review of Constitutional Studies 24, no. 1 (2019): 43–82.
Lorini, Giuseppe. “Animal Norms: An Investigation of Normativity in the Non-Human Social World.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 18, no. 3 (2022): 652–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872118800008
Maldonado‐Chaparro, Adriana A., and Gloriana Chaverri. “Why do Animal Groups Matter for Conservation and Management?” Conservation Science and Practice 3, no. 12 (2021): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.550
Nine, Cara, Sharing Territories: Overlapping Self-Determination and Resource Rights. Oxford University Press, 2022.
Noël, Alain. “Quebec’s New Politics of Redistribution.” In Inequality and the Fading of Redistributive Politics, edited by Keith Banting and John Myles, 256–82. UBC Press, 2013.
Ochoa Espejo, Paulina. On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy, and the Rights of Place. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Pasternak, Shiri. Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Potulski, Jakub. “Bioregionalism.” Journal of Geography, Politics and Society 2, no. 2 (2012): 5–15.
Ruiz Jiménez, Antonia María, Daniel Romero Portillo, and Luis Navarro Ardoy. “Social Patriotism: Populist Glue for a Multinational Democracy.” National Identities 23, no. 2 (2021): 127–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2020.1735326
Simpson, Leanne. “Looking after Gdoo-Naaganinaa: Precolonial Nishnaabeg Diplomatic and Treaty Relationships.” Wicazo Sa Review 23, no. 2 (2008): 29–42.
Stark, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik. “Changing the Treaty Question: Remedying the Right(s) Relationship.” In The Right Relationship: Reimagining the Implementation of Historical Treaties, edited by John Borrows and Michael Coyle, 248–76. University of Toronto Press, 2017.
Williams, Bernard. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument, edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn. Princeton University Press, 2005.
Youatt, Rafi. Interspecies Politics: Nature, Borders, States. University of Michigan Press, 2020.
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Sue Donaldson (Author); Will Kymlicka
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
How to Cite
