How thinking indigenous alterity was a result of the political transformations of 1989: Will Kymlica, ‘Liberalism, Community and Culture Twenty-Fife Years On: Philosophical Inquiries and Political Claims’, Dve Domovini / Two Homelands, 44, 2016, pp. 67-76 | settler colonial studies blog

How thinking indigenous alterity was a result of the political transformations of 1989: Will Kymlica, ‘Liberalism, Community and Culture Twenty-Fife Years On: Philosophical Inquiries and Political Claims’, Dve Domovini / Two Homelands, 44, 2016, pp. 67-76

27Sep17

Excerpt: Due to the explosion of state-minority conflicts after 1989 around the world, it became clear to me that what we required was not further refining of the old liberal-communitarian debate about atomism, but rather a more direct exploration of the normative structure of majority-minority relations in multiethnic, multinational and postcolonial settler states. And this suggests a quite different starting point for the analysis. For example, if we want to explore the normative structure of state-minority relations, an obvious first question is to ask, how did this minority come to be a minority in the first place? How did a particular state come to have (or to assert) a right to rule this particular minority and its territory? The fact that a particular state rules a particular minority is clearly not a God-given fact, but rather has emerged out of a particular historical process, and these processes matter normatively.

For example, in the case of settler states ruling over indigenous peoples, the state’s claim to rule indigenous peoples and territories is rooted in the process of colonization.

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