Ndahinda, Felix. ‘Contrasted Perspectives on Recognition and Implementation of Indigenous Rights’.
Swepston, Lee. ‘Discrimination, Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, and Social Indicators’
Courtis, Christian. ‘Notes on the Implementation by Latin American Courts of the ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous Peoples’
He, Baogang. ‘The Contested Politics of Asian Responses to Indigenous Rights’
Ndahinda, Felix Mukwiza. ‘Marginality, Disempowerment and Contested Discourses on Indigenousness in Africa’
Sing’Oei, Korir. ‘Engaging the Leviathan: National Development, Corporate Globalisation and the Endorois’ Quest to Recover their Herding Grounds’
Suksi, Marku. ‘Asymmetric Autonomy and the Settlement of Ethnic Conflicts’
Odello, Marco. ‘On Cultural Rights: The Equality of Nations and the Minority Legal Tradition’
Filed under: Human Rights, law, Political developments, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Book Review’, Ethnic and Racial Studies (2011).
The Two Faces of American Freedom outlines the rise and fall of the US ‘experiment’ in settler constitutionalism. It is an ultimately convincing outline of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American history as the history of a settler colonial project. While this project and the conception of freedom that underpinned it had emerged victorious with independence, they were terminated sometime between the defeat of Populism and the establishment of the New Deal order. To frame this narrative, Rana understands the settler order as fundamentally characterized by a political theory that was at once internally inclusive and premised on exclusion and expansion. On the one hand, it constituted an ostensibly egalitarian political community that allowed its members, including its most recently arrived members, northern European ‘co-ethnics’ who were immediately allowed to access republican freedoms, an enhanced degree of meaningful participation. On the other hand, this egalitarianism was most decidedly not universal, and these freedoms necessitated an ongoing expansionary project of conquest. The two elements of this equation, Rana emphasizes, were predicated on each other and could not be separated; hence the two faces referred to in the title.[…]It is the notion that we are no longer in the presence of a settler colonial political regime that allows Rana to propose a return to the openness and inclusiveness of a settler colonial project. However, I wonder whether a ‘settler-freedoms-for-all’ proposition is tenable. If the two faces of American freedom could not be separated then how can one think of separating them now? On the one hand, Rana’s prescription ultimately clashes with his original recognition that a settler project is necessarily premised on the subjection of others and on ongoing expansion. On the other, there is slippage, and that the co-ethnics were never outsiders should be emphasized. Most importantly, was the settler colonial project terminated in its entirety? Many Native Americans would beg to differ (indeed, it is significant that indigenous people are entirely absent from Rana’s account). Thinking it is, is like assuming that a party must be over because the bouncers are no longer letting anyone in the private area of a trendy club.
Filed under: Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
This essay articulates the ways in which the Indigenous People’s Movement leading to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples (2007) succeeds in what postcolonial theory has conventionally set out to emancipate, but has failed to do. Postcolonial theory challenges all eurocentric and liberal humanist discourses on rights which place the Western subject as the ideal subject figure of all histories and societies, and appeals for a language that would articulate other ways of being human and humanist. Yet recent trends in postcolonial theory have come to embrace the language of cosmopolitanism and humanism as viable alternatives for a postcolonial future. Drawing upon the principle thematic of the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, the article suggests that the Declaration provides an alternative to postcolonial theory’s revisionist humanism—the re-cognition of difference. As part of the international legal discourse, the Declaration is particularly noted for its political victory in the legitimisation of collective rights in postcolonial societies. Furthermore, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) remains an integral part of the collective rights of the Indigenous Peoples, the article suggests that the Indigenous People’s Movement succeeds in negotiating a language that would legitimise other ways of being human without being adversarial or antithetical to euro-humanism.
Filed under: postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights | Closed
Ruth Hall provides a sound critical appraisal of this report in Another Countryside:
The new Green Paper on Land Reform offers little policy direction for the important but controversial work of land reform. It was the culmination of a long, hotly debated policy process which started with government’s acknowledgement at the National Land Summit in 2005 that land reform was not on track, and a commitment to review its ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ policy.
This about-turn was given added impetus at the ANC’s National Conference at Polokwane in 2007, where its resolutions provided a clear and progressive mandate for a pro-poor land reform, to expand the ‘role and productivity of modern small-holder farming’ while ‘maintaining a vibrant and competitive agricultural sector’. After the 2009 elections, Zuma’s government declared that reinvigorating rural development and land reform would be one of its top five priorities, and promised to unveil a new policy to replace the 1997 White Paper on South African Land Policy. That was two and a half years ago.
This wait has proved to be in vain. Those concerned about the future of rural South Africa have been dumbfounded at the vacuous Green Paper unveiled by Minister Gugile Nkwinti. Consisting of a mere eleven pages of rhetoric and vague proposals, it fudges all the most pressing questions facing the programme and falls far short of being the new policy framework that has been promised over the past six years.
Few documents provide a more disheartening illustration of the degree to which our national discourse has been re-racialised than the recently published Green Paper on Land Reform.
The Green Paper’s ideological fountainhead is the ANC’s National Democratic Revolution – which, believe it or not, still views South Africa through the prism of a continuing liberation struggle against whites. The ideology is reflected in the Green Paper’s assertion that “all anti-colonial struggles are, at the core, about two things: repossession of land lost through force or deceit; and, restoring the centrality of indigenous culture.” The authors are actually saying that seventeen years after 1994 the anti-colonialist struggle is not over; whites are colonialists; the struggle is against them; and only the indigenous culture should be central.
According to the Green Paper, “…the debate about agrarian change, land reform and rural development” should begin with national sovereignty – since national sovereignty is defined in terms of land. The implication is that national sovereignty will not be restored until a sufficient amount of land has been repossessed by black South Africans. In the Green paper’s view this ‘fundamental assumption’ should supersede all other considerations, including “talk of effective land reform and food sovereignty and security.”
But how can this be? Is this ‘fundamental assumption’ really more important than the nation’s food security? Is the United States any less sovereign because all its agricultural land is owned by less than 3% of the population? And how does ownership of land by white citizens detract from national sovereignty?
Filed under: Political developments, Southern Africa | Closed
It is not common for the Hasbara machine, disseminating Israeli state propaganda, to be exposed in such a way. As if by coincidence, two expatriate South African Jews, with a bit of a liberal reputation, came out of retirement to produce almost identical pieces for the press, rejecting the analogy between Israel and apartheid. That both have chosen to do that at the same time, using the same arguments and examples, raises an obvious suspicion that they speak from an identical script which looks as if it was produced by officials in the Israeli Ministry against Delegitimisation.
[..]
Having ignored the existence of refugees, Goldstone and Pogrund proceed conveniently to forget other components of the situation. Take settlers. Who? Good question. In their version of reality, the 1967 occupation is a temporary security measure that would end with successful negotiations. That the ‘peace process’ has served to entrench Israeli control over the territories, and has resulted in hundreds of settlements and hundreds of thousands of settlers, products of hundred billion US dollars in investment, is not something of which they seem aware. Goldstone, for example, tells us that the ‘security fence’, AKA the ‘apartheid wall’, aims to prevent terrorist attacks. If so, why is it not built on the Green Line, to separate Israel from the territories? Why is it constructed to include maximum land and settlers but exclude as many of the local as possible? Why does investment in settlements, roads, housing and infrastructure continue, making negotiations (over the ever-shrinking remaining land) increasingly meaningless? How long can this situation be regarded as ‘temporary’, when it has lasted longer than apartheid did, and shows no signs of coming to an end? On the contrary, it continues to expand and shape not only what is happening in the territories but also in Israel ‘proper’, thus making the distinction between the two irrelevant.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, media, Southern Africa | Closed
The July 14th Movement and Occupy Wall Street efforts have deservedly garnered press attention. Much more importantly, they have mobilized huge numbers of people who had not been politically active previously and have radicalised others. These are ‘awakenings’ of a rare kind and should be constructively engaged where possible. The lessons from the July 14th Movement show that some kinds of engagement, anti-colonial and anti-racist specifically, are made difficult by the very structures of the movements themselves. These can be fixed and, in the case of the Occupy efforts in the U.S., might still be avoided altogether. (Un)occupy Albuquerque, Occupy the Hood, and the Occupy Wall Street fight against anti-Semitism are clear examples where anti-colonial and anti-racist efforts have been had some success in making the Occupy efforts more inclusive. The July 14th response to the Trajtenberg Report too has the chance to incorporate Tent 1948 into its efforts at a more inclusive change, one that would empower all people ruled by the Israeli government to take a stand for social justice.
Filed under: Israel/Palestine, media, Political developments, Scholarship and insights, United States | Closed
khoisan language revival
In order to create a cadre of Khoisan linguists capable of facilitating the preservation and development of the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa, CASAS administers a scholarship scheme for University linguistic studies in Cape Town, at the undergraduate level with possibilities of advancement to post-graduate studies thereafter. The KLSSS is supported by Brot fur die Welt, Stuttgart, Germany. The scholarship scheme started with the first cohort in the academic year starting in January 2002.
More details here.
Hat tip, Luke S.
Filed under: Southern Africa | Closed
Stumbled across this today, fresh of the press at the William & Mary Quarterly. Each contribution is available for free here.
Critical Forum. Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865
Julia Adams, ‘Clear, Hold, Build: Patriarchy and Sovereignty in the Colonization of Early English America’.
Tamar Herzog and Richard J. Ross, ‘Law, Labor, and Civic Identities in the British and Spanish Empires’.
Paul K. Eiss, ‘Indigenous Sovereignty under and after Spanish Rule’.
Richard White, ‘Legal Pluralism and Native Sovereignty’.
Stuart Banner, ‘Legal History, Inside and Out’.
Christopher Tomlins, ‘Freedom Bound: A Response to Readers’.
Filed under: Empire, law, Scholarship and insights, Sovereignty, United States | Closed
In the late nineteenth century, European expansionism found one of its last homes in the North American West. While the settlement of the American West was renowned for its lawlessness, the Canadian Prairies enjoyed a tamer reputation symbolized by the Mountie and his legendary triumph over chaos.
Westward Bound debunks the myth of Canada’s peaceful West and the masculine conceptions of law and violence upon which it rests by shifting the focus from Mounties and whisky traders to criminal cases involving women between 1886 and 1940, where offences ranged from rape and wife-beating to husband murder and prostitution. In doing so, Erickson opens a window onto a world where judges’ and juries’ responses to the most intimate or violent acts were coloured by a desire to shore up the liberal economic order by maintaining boundaries between men and women, Native people and newcomers, and capital and labour. Victims and accused could only hope to harness entrenched ideas about masculinity, femininity, race, and class in their favour. The results, Erickson shows, were predictable but never certain.
This fascinating exploration of hegemony and resistance in key contact zones not only complicates traditional narratives of prairie exceptionalism, it also draws the region’s history into larger debates about law, colonialism, and nation building. This book will be welcomed by social and legal historians, those with an interest in colonial and frontier history, as well as scholars and students of law and gender.
Filed under: Canada, law, Scholarship and insights | Closed
The Griqua people are commonly misunderstood. Today, they do not figure in the South African imagination as other peoples do, nor have they for over a century. This book argues that their comparative invisibility is a result of their place in the national narrative.
In this revisionist analysis of South African historiography, the author analyses over a century’s worth of historical studies and identifies a number of narrative frameworks that have proven resilient to change over this time. The Griqua, in particular, have fared poorly compared to other peoples. They appear in, and disappear from, this body of work in a number of consistent ways, almost as though scholars have avoided re-imagining their history in ways relevant to the present. This book questions why that might be the case.
Filed under: Africa, Genocide, postcolonialism, Scholarship and insights, Southern Africa | Closed
