Indigenous Self-Determination and the Legitimacy of Sovereign States
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Indigenous Self-Determination and the Legitimacy of Sovereign States Paul Keal Department of International Relations, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]
Self-determination is the cardinal right sought by Indigenous peoples and in practice it may require states to accept divisible sovereignty. For most states, selfdetermination is framed by decolonization and is applicable to Indigenous peoples only in limited senses of self-government within state structures. Self-determination, however, is enshrined in key human rights documents and by denying Indigenous peoples the right to it, they jeopardize the legitimacy of the human rights regime, and the legitimacy of the United Nations as a source of progressive international law. They also widen the rift between international and world society raising important questions for the legitimacy of the sovereignty system. International Politics (2007) 44, 287–305. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800189 Keywords: Indigenous peoples; legitimacy; recolonization; self-determination; sovereignty
Introduction Sovereignty and self-determination are distinct but intertwined principles of central importance to the normative framework of international politics. The principle of self-determination is fundamental to statehood and the right to it is written into the key documents of the international human rights regime. It is an ethical component of the states system and it ‘informs and complements’ state sovereignty as a principle of international law (Brownlie, 1966, 483). In spite of or perhaps because of their centrality, self-determination and sovereignty are inherently unstable concepts. From one time to another there is no agreement over the exact content and scope of the two principles and states have difficulty dealing with this. Concerning self-determination, there is argument about whether it is a legal, moral or political principle, and an important question has been ‘who has the right to determine what’ (Shaw, 1986, 162). In conventional understandings, the right to self-determination has been represented as the right to an independent state, implying that it leads to sovereignty. Debate about sovereignty includes issues such as whether it has been diminished by globalization and whether or not it is divisible. The
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majority of states have been unable to satisfactorily resolve the selfdetermination claims of peoples within their borders, which are typically perceived as challenges to state sovereignty and the belief that sovereignty is indivisible. The self-determination claims made by Indigenous peoples do not presently constitute an immediate crisis of political legitimacy for either the institution of the state or the governments exercising authority within states that have Indigenous populations. Self-determination is paramount among the rights sought by Indigenous peop
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