Collective Indigenous Rights and Global Social Movements in the Face of Global Development

Abstract

Most traditional indigenous peoples continue to value collective rights and mutual obligations in contrast to the growing efforts of various global and national organizations to promote individual human rights and ostensible economic development projects. Under the guise of ‘progress’ and ‘development’, global corporations impose economic profit over sacred places, precious time and human dignity. Evidence from traditional indigenous people suggests that acceptance of human rights and global diversity is indeed limited when it is built within the constraints of current law and narrow meanings of diversity, which often view development as deviance if it does not conform to modern ideas and definitions via neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is examined as extending far beyond the West, as a major force in the world system, which contains an ongoing, extensive, relatively complex social division of labor with an integrated set of production processes that are intimately related to the resources and lives of indigenous peoples throughout the world.