UNDRIP, State Sovereignty, & Indigenous Collective Rights to Self-Determination

• In Event: Law and Institutions

Abstract

This project potentially aligns with requests for contributions that address the visibility of some issues and the silence of others within the Human Rights and International Relations Theory Divisions. The main problem explored in this paper is: how international law fails to affirm Indigenous collective rights to self-determination (CRSD). International law historically has accorded Indigenous peoples’ inferior status within international law, with implications for both Indigenous peoples’ exclusion from sovereignty recognition and from Indigenous peoples’ human rights realization. I will show how, beginning in the late 15th century, and continuing to this day, international law and the international system continuously evolved to create legal doctrines, categories, and mechanisms that closed off viable opportunities for Indigenous CRSD recognition from nation-states and international society at large. I will diagnose how international law continuously reproduces exclusionary dichotomies that serve to deny Indigenous peoples’ CRSD. Specifically, how these legal and rhetorical dichotomies establish and uphold sovereign exclusion and non-recognition of Indigenous peoples as legislative and diplomatic equals within nation-states and the international community. While the rise and development of international human rights has challenged sovereign domination in some forms, I show that, similar to international law, it has failed to remedy the denial of Indigenous peoples’ CRSD in the international system. This chapter lays out the problems of international order in relation to Indigenous peoples’ CRSD, providing the background context for the central questions guiding my dissertation research project surrounding effective implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

Author

• Makonen E.G Bondoc, McGill University