Author ORCID Identifier:
Date of Graduation
7-2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
Philosophy
Advisor/Mentor
Donohue, Jenna
Committee Member
McMullen, Amanda
Second Committee Member
Adler, Jacob
Keywords
Colonial Injustice, morality, agency
Abstract
Few moral claims enjoy more widespread agreement than the claim that “colonialism is morally wrong.” However, this consensus fractures once the question becomes “what exactly makes colonialism morally wrong.” For some, the wrong is territorial injustice: colonialism involves dispossession, disruption of local patterns of land use, and severing of the special relationship between people and their territory that is necessary for autonomous life (Ferguson and Veneziani 2021; Nine 2023). For others, the injustice is procedural: it lies in political imposition, in the unilateral character of colonial relations, and in the denial of collective self-determination of the colonized (Ypi 2013; Stilz 2015; Valentini 2015). Still others locate the wrong in economic exploitation or cultural domination, which displace indigenous systems of meaning (Tan 2005; Butt 2012; Moore 2019). Despite their differences, these accounts share what I call a subtractive picture of harm. Under these views, colonialism is understood primarily as a wrong because it disables, constrains, or removes the agency of colonized subjects. Yet several features of colonial and postcolonial life suggest that this picture is incomplete. If agency were simply taken away, how do we explain the active and deliberate participation of colonized people in administering and enforcing colonial rule? How do we make sense of the persistence of colonial languages, institutions, and norms long after formal independence? And why do postcolonial political and economic structures, which purport to be decolonial and anti-colonial, so often reproduce the very hierarchies they were meant to overcome? All of this points to a different form of injury. Colonialism did not merely subtract agency, it reshaped it. It reconstituted the frameworks through which colonized subjects understood value, obligation, and selfhood, such that participation in colonial structures could appear intelligible, desirable, and even necessary from within those frameworks. This is the central claim of the dissertation. I argue that colonialism operates not only through subtraction, but also through the transformation of agency itself. To capture this, I develop the concept of conditioned agency, which names the strategic and systematic reorientation of the colonized peoples’ will through mechanisms such as religion, education, bureaucratic discipline, and economic dependency. Colonialism not only constrained action; it altered the standards by which action itself is judged and justified. This transformation gives rise to what I call oppressive complicity: a condition in which oppressed subjects, acting in ways that are intelligible within the very frameworks imposed upon them, come to sustain and reproduce the structures that oppress them. My account has implications for dominant approaches to moral responsibility and reparative justice for colonial wrongdoing. Existing reparative proposals such as the inheritance-based and migration-based models respond to an incomplete account of colonial injury and therefore offer incomplete solutions. While they may address material dispossession, they often overlook the capture of the evaluative frameworks through which those goods acquire meaning, thereby leaving intact conditions for the persistence of colonial harm. A satisfactory account of colonial injustice must therefore attend not only to what was taken, but also to how agency itself was remade.
Citation
Tivane, T. (2026). Conditioned Agency and Responsibility for Colonial Injustice. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/6362
