Claims Of Peoples Research Articles

Challenging the existing order of knowledge sharing governance with digital sequence information on genetic resources

Abstract The Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have begun work on establishing a distinct multilateral mechanism to access and share the benefits (ABS) from digital sequence information on genetic resources (DSI), with the expectation of new monetary benefits. Regulating DSI for benefit sharing is problematic because efficiently and effectively regulating information requires defining DSI and identifying a suitable material proxy for the information because it is itself intangible (probably a levy or tax to access or use a database of information). More problematic is finding a compromise to the competing information governance frameworks: a dominant international intellectual property order that favours the free exchange of resources and information (generally favoured by the technology rich North); the taking of nature by States and re-ordering of biological resources to deliver benefits (generally favoured by the technology poor South); and, the claims of Indigenous Peoples according to their emerging rights in international law.

Colonial violations and the rights claims of indigenous peoples: experiences in the Indigenous Land Mangueirinha

Resumo Este artigo apresenta uma análise sobre o modo como o colonialismo perpetuou e segue produzindo violências sobre os povos indígenas e seus corpos-territórios. As reflexões apresentadas são resultado da pesquisa de campo realizada desde 2018, na Terra Indígena Mangueirinha (Paraná). A perspectiva decolonial é a base de análise, por meio da qual examina-se direitos legais conquistados pelos povos indígenas e aporta-se reflexões sobre os limites para o seu reconhecimento efetivo. Além disso, apresenta-se o histórico de lutas Kaingang pela retomada do território da TI Mangueirinha, em contraposição às violências coloniais sobre eles operadas. Por fim, relata-se uma demanda apresentada pelas mulheres indígenas reivindicando o direito de circular livremente nos espaços públicos das cidades.

Colonialism and rights supersession: a Kant-inspired perspective

ABSTRACT In several essays, Jeremy Waldron has suggested that changed circumstances may have superseded the rights of Native peoples to their ancestral lands. I contend that his argument is problematic and propose a Kant-inspired framework to assess the property and territorial claims of Native peoples. My conclusion is that, while in many cases they must share their country with the descendants of their colonizers and later arrivals, their prior property and territorial entitlements can leave a strong normative residue that should be addressed. My argument has general implications, but I focus on the Qom people in Argentina.

Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel

Old Canaan in a New World: Native Americans and the Lost Tribes of Israel

Decolonizing health care: Challenges of cultural and epistemic pluralism in medical decision-making with Indigenous communities.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada made it clear that understanding the historical, social, cultural, and political landscape that shapes the relationships between Indigenous peoples and social institutions, including the health care system, is crucial to achieving social justice. How to translate this recognition into more equitable health policy and practice remains a challenge. In particular, there is limited understanding of ways to respond to situations in which conventional practices mandated by the state and regulated by its legal apparatus come into direct conflict with the values and autonomy of Indigenous individuals, communities, and nations. In this paper, we consider two cases of conflict between Indigenous and biomedical perspectives to clarify some of the competing values. We argue for the importance of person- and people-centered approaches to health care. These value conflicts must be understood at multiple levels to clarify their personal, social, cultural, and political dimensions. Taking into account the divergence between epistemic cultures and communities allows us to understand the multiple narratives deployed in decision-making processes in clinical, community, and juridical contexts. Recognizing the knowledge claims of Indigenous peoples in health care can help clinicians avoid reinforcing the divides created by the structural and institutional legacy of colonialism. This analysis also provides ways to adjudicate conflicts in health care decision-making by disentangling cultural, political, medical, and pragmatic issues to allow for respectful dialogue. Insofar as the engagement with cultural pluralism in health care rights is conducted with reciprocal recognition, the medical community and Indigenous peoples can address together the difficult question of how to integrate different epistemic cultures in the health care system.

The Democratic Ambivalence of EU Disintegration: A Mapping of Costs and Benefits

AbstractSince Brexit, there has been increasing interest in democratic theory in the question of the conditions under which reversals of European integration can be considered legitimate. So far, however, the literature is very much focused on the specific case of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union. In this article, I seek to prepare the ground for a systematic theory that clarifies, at a general level, the scope and limits as well as the actors and procedures of democratically legitimate disintegration. To that end, I map the potential democratic costs and benefits of EU disintegration. In doing so, I distinguish five types of disintegration: retreat, revocation, exit, expulsion, and dissolution. All of these measures can produce conflicts between the democratic claims of citizens and peoples. Many of these cannot be resolved but must be dealt with politically. Overall, disintegration bears more potential costs for citizens than for peoples.

The Alans between a Scholarly Paradigm and Ethnocentrism: the “Memory Wars” and Their Background

A social (historic) memory and an alternative history are discussed with respect to the hot and very emotional issue dealing with the claims of certain North Caucasian peoples for the Alan ancestors. One should make a difference between academic approaches, on the one hand, and pseudo-scholarly, often highly politicized motives of the alternative history authors, on the other hand. Yet, even scholars who have dual loyalty have to make an uneasy choice between the scholarly paradigm and ethnocentric constructions which serve ethno-national interests. The author argues that a scholarly approach demands for, firstly, a nuanced treatment of the name of the “Alans” which had different meanings in the different historic periods, and secondly, a careful analysis of such names which initially could serve social or political goals rather than ethnic ones.

Non-Apology in the Age of Apology

After more than two decades winding its way through a variety of United Nations (UN) mechanisms, in September 2007 the world’s indigenous peoples welcomed the news that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (hereinafter the Declaration) was at last approved by the vast majority of nation-states.2 The four settler3 states that opposed the Declaration initially (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) have each in turn voiced their ultimate approval of the declaration and have issued statements in support to their indigenous citizens.In spite of the fact that these statements expressed a measure of regret for past wrongs committed, not one of those endorsements embodied a formal apology. Now that the Declaration has entered its eleventh year, many continue to question to what extent these endorsements have meaningfully advanced reconciliation for indigenous peoples and whether these endorsements were authentic in their stated desire to do more than just acknowledge the aspirations contained in the Declaration.This comment will examine the framework for political apologies in general and then consider the endorsements of the Declaration by the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in light of contemporary apology theory. The article will then examine affirmative actions taken by those states following their endorsements in order to advance the claims of indigenous peoples and look at whether these actions have fallen short in providing meaningful redress for centuries of past wrongs.

Public Attitudes to Inequality in Water Distribution: Insights From Preferences for Water Reallocation From Irrigators to Aboriginal Australians

AbstractWater allocation regimes that adjudicate between competing uses are in many countries under pressure to adapt to increasing demands, climate‐driven shortages, expectations for equity of access, and societal changes in values and priorities. International authorities expound standards for national allocation regimes that include robust processes for addressing the needs of “new entrants” and for varying existing entitlements within sustainable limits. The claims of Indigenous peoples to water represents a newly recognized set of rights and interests that will test the ability of allocation regimes to address the global water governance goal of equity. No study has sought to identify public attitudes or willingness to pay for a fairer allocation of water rights between Indigenous and non‐Indigenous people. We surveyed households from the jurisdictions of Australia's Murray‐Darling Basin, a region undergoing a historic government‐led recovery of water, and found that 69.2% of respondents support the principle of reallocating a small amount of water from irrigators to Aboriginal people via the water market. Using contingent valuation, we estimated households are willing to pay A$21.78 in a one‐off levy. The aggregate value calculated for households in the basin's jurisdictions was A$74.5 million, which is almost double a recent government commitment to fund the acquisition of entitlements for Aboriginal nations of this basin. Results varied by state of residency and affinity with environmental groups. An information treatment that presented narrative accounts from Aboriginal people influenced the results. Insights from this study can inform water reallocation processes.

Land of Opportunity: Anti-Black and Settler Logics in the Gentrification of Detroit

It is an increasingly common trope in anti-gentrification activism to claim that gentrification of Black neighborhoods is a form of settler colonialism. Although Native critics have pushed back against these metaphors as abstractions of, and false equivalencies to, the concrete conditions of settler colonialism, gentrifying discourse frequently draws on the language and logic of settler colonialism in narratives about the city of Detroit. In this article, I ask what it means that terms and logic that are being applied to a predominantly Black city were, and are, also used to rationalize and structure theft of land from Native Americans. Proposing that shifting white interests in Black land have led to “borrowing” of longstanding logics used to dispossess Native peoples, I argue that the reiteration of settler-colonial logics in Detroit to explain and justify gentrification manifestly both validates land grabs in the city and further erases the claims of both Black and Indigenous peoples to Detroit.

Transnational Legal Process and Discourse in Environmental Governance: The Case of REDD+ in Tanzania

Governments in developing countries have adopted policies, laws, and programs to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), with the funding and rules provided by global institutions and transnational actors. The transnational legal process for REDD+, entailing the construction and diffusion of legal norms that govern the pursuit of REDD+, has been driven by discursive struggles over the purposes and requirements of REDD+. At the global level, the development of legal norms for REDD+ has been primarily influenced by coalitions committed to the discourses of ecological modernization, civic environmentalism, and to a lesser extent, climate justice. Through discourse analysis of the transnational legal process for REDD+ in Tanzania, I show how domestic efforts to operationalize REDD+ have been dominated by a government coalition that has emphasized green governmentality, made few concessions to the discourse of civic environmentalism, and completely neglected the climate justice claims of Indigenous Peoples. This case study reveals how discourse analysis may enhance the study of transnational legal phenomena by drawing attention to the complex interplay of global and domestic discourses and its role in shaping legal norms and reinforcing or challenging structures of power and knowledge within and across legal systems.

The culturalisation of indigeneity: the Palestinian-Bedouin of the Naqab and indigenous rights

ABSTRACTThe Palestinian-Bedouin community in the Naqab, the southern region of Palestine/Israel, has been capitalising since the mid-2000s on the international discourse on indigeneity in their struggle for land justice. The mobilisation of indigenous rights has been advanced by sympathetic critical scholars and civil society organisations, resulting in the international recognition of the Bedouin as indigenous. This article revisits these scholarly and activist efforts and argues that sympathetic scholars and NGOs have mobilised a liberal multicultural notion of indigeneity that draws on the centring of culture in indigenous rights as the defining feature of indigeneity. Justification for the recognition of the Bedouin as indigenous has been predicated on the fetishisation of Bedouin culture as premodern and endangered, and therefore deserving of protection and preservation. Through the case study of the Bedouin, the article demonstrates that in its current multicultural(ist) iteration, international indigenous rights law can operate as an essentialising and racialising instrument and as a site of subjectivation that reproduces the racialising logics of settler colonialism and racial imageries of indigenous peoples. The culturalisation of indigeneity, both in international law and in the production of Bedouin indigeneity, the article concludes, risks compromising the long-term claims of indigenous peoples to land by conditioning them upon the perpetual practice of ‘authentic’ culture.

The Modern and the Political Pluralist Perspectives on Political Authorities

AbstractI contrast two perspectives adopted to theorize political authorities. The first is the modern perspective. It conceives of political society as a civic union of free and equal citizens and regards the state as the political organization of this society. This perspective is primarily concerned with the principles that should govern the use of state power. The second is the political pluralist perspective. It recognizes a multiplicity of normative orders as equally legitimate. The focus is put on the civic processes by which a diverse citizenry should negotiate its interactions. I illustrate these perspectives by considering how they approach diversity, and more specifically the political claims of indigenous peoples. The pluralist perspective is argued to be normatively motivated by a consideration for the actual freedom of citizens to sustain diverse normative orders, to negotiate the structure of political society, and to jointly search for justice.

Reconciliation and Self-Determination: Incorporating Indigenous Worldviews on the Environment into Non-Indigenous Legal Systems

Reconciliation and self-determination are two fundamental claims of Indigenous peoples in their relationship with the state. The recent enactment of the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017, and the inclusion of the “Rights of Nature” in the Ecuadorian Constitution nearly a decade earlier, provide two key case studies of how incorporation of Indigenous worldviews into non-Indigenous legal systems have the potential to give rise to both reconciliation and self-determination. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the process of incorporation for both Te Awa Tupua and the Rights of Nature, which infer two tentative conclusions. Firstly, the incorporation of an Indigenous perspective into a non-Indigenous legal system has the potential to foster reconciliation between a people and a system who have often been at odds, but this potential will not be realised if the process is not enacted in a conciliatory and mutually respectful manner. Secondly, while effective incorporation may allow for reconciliation, it does not necessarily provide Indigenous peoples with the legal self-determination to fully realise and enforce their worldview.

Sacred claims and the politics of indigeneity in Australia

The claims of Indigenous peoples to sacred sites have generated far-reaching debates about identity, authenticity, and history in Australia in recent decades. This is surprising in such an avowedly...

Mythologization of History and the Invention of Tradition in Kazakhstan

This paper is dedicated to the issue of mythologized history andthe invention of traditions in independent Kazakhstan. Every nation state encounters this phenomenon, but it is particularly relevant during the struggle for independent and the process of state building. In this article the author reviews different sources for this in Kazakhstanand reviews often-encountered topics, which are used by mythologizators. First of all, there is the effort to show that the Kazakhs are a very ancient people and tribes and people that were well-known in ancient history like the Sumerians, Sakas, Huns and other ethnic groups were in fact Kazakh tribes. They also often try to prove that Chingiz khan was a Kazakh. Most of those who create these myths are not professional historians, they are mobilizorsof ethnicity, and usually they are physicists, mathematicians, and engineers. They invent traditions too. The mythologized history of Kazakhstan has various functions, one of them to delineate the territory of state. Another is to prove the special claims to authority of some Kazakh tribes. These myths are also used to counter the claims of other peoples to the territory of Kazakhstan.

Lowland Participation in the Irredentist 'Highlands Liberation Movement' in Vietnam, 1955-1975

In the field of mainland South-East Asian history, particular attention has been granted to highlandlowland relations following the central argument James Scott presented in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South-East Asia. Scott’s analytical perspective echoes a long-term trend of scholarly examinations in the region. In a similar fashion, historical examinations of the Vietnam War period view the so-called ‘highlands liberation movement’ or the Unifi ed Front for the Struggle of the Oppressed Races (FULRO) through the lens of a highland-lowland dichotomy. However, based on an examination of the biography of the Cham Muslim leader Les Kosem and various FULRO documents, this article challenges dominant assumptions based on Scott’s argument and argues that a focus on minority majority relations is essential for understanding the origins of irredentist claims of indigenous peoples in the region.

Indigeneity and the Settler Contract today

This article examines the application of social contract theorizing to questions pertaining to the rights of indigenous peoples today, with particular reference to recent work by Jeremy Waldron. It is argued that such theorizing must be examined with reference not only to the content of its claims, but also with respect to its general mode of argumentation and its political function in specific contexts. Read in this light, social contract theory may function to unduly deny the claims of indigenous peoples, oftentimes by shifting the register of debate to a relatively abstract and counter-factual level and relieving settler-colonial societies of the burden of proof. Insofar as social contract theory operates to this effect, it is analysed in terms of a ‘Settler Contract’.

Before the Bride Really Wore Pink

Before the Bride Really Wore Pink

Redistribution and Recognition: Assessing Alternative Frameworks for Aboriginal Policy in Canada

In this paper, we argue that government approaches to addressing the claims of Aboriginal peoples in Canada are insufficient. Historically, these approaches have focused on redistribution. At the same time, these approaches have all but ignored recognition. We argue that a more holistic approach that addresses both redistribution and recognition is necessary. Further, we attempt to show that our approach is consistent with the tenets of liberalism. By conceiving of Aboriginal politics as such, the state may be better able to address claims. We begin by providing a theoretical overview of redistribution and recognition, respectively. Then, we proceed to show how redistribution and recognition must work together in an adequate account of justice with respect to Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Finally, we offer a conception of Aboriginal politics that fulfills this desideratum, and integrates the principle of recognition and redistribution in a way that is within the bounds of liberalism.