Cosmology, mobility and exchange: Indigenous diplomacies before the nation‐state

Abstract

The contemporary activism of Indigenous peoples in international institutions and networks is revealing new ways by which culturally and geographically distinct communities can interact and conduct international relations. In this paper, I argue that these contemporary diplomatic practices are grounded in the embedded diplomacy of classical Indigenous traditions. By examining the case of Indigenous Australian peoples, the paper shows how an alternative conception of diplomacy draws from Indigenous cosmology and is visible in the ways that Indigenous communities negotiated practices of mobility and exchange across communal boundaries. Part of the argument herein is that the very notion of diplomacy is a European convention, a way of denoting formal practices of encounter across boundaries. Orthodox accounts of diplomacy thus reinscribe modernity's desire for boundaries and categorization, privileging separation and distinctiveness rather than connection and relation. Not only by encouraging the reconstruction of formal international relations, but also by attending to the embedded aspects of diplomacy, might we elide the destructive effects of a hegemonic but largely artificial order of sovereignty.