Franke Wilmer

The indigenous voice in world politics : since time immemorial

Fighting Back Fourth World Peoples in the World System Development Can Have Many Meanings Indigenous Peoples and the Discourse of Modernization Colonization, Conquest and the Moral Boundaries of the Legal and Political Community The Great Cause of Civilization What Indigenous Peoples Want and How They Are Getting It From Conquest to Self-Determination The Decolonization of Fourth World Peoples The Indigenous Voice in World Politics

Transnational Normative Struggles and Globalization: The Case of Indigenous Peoples in Bolivia and Ecuador

Since the 1990s, the indigenous rights movement has catapulted from resource-poor, local activists to global activists. The rise of transnational indigenous rights movements has paralleled and interfaced with significant structural developments at the international and state-systemic level, raising questions about the interplay between global and local politics as arenas of social change. To trace these transnational networks to the articulation of norms supportive of indigenous claims, we examine two cases of transnational indigenous activism and domestic responses in the Andean region of South America. We find that the additional dimension of domestic and transnational mobilization that first contests existing international norms, such as neoliberalism and individual rights, and then seeks to diffuse normative changes at both the domestic and international levels provides new insight about norm formation, transformation, and diffusion in international politics in favor of anti-globalization and community equality norms on local, national, and global levels.

Including Native American Perspectives in the Political Science Curriculum

pline of political science has certainly been guilty of such neglect with regard to Native Americans (Melody and Murdock 1987; McCulloch 1989). In political science we have largely left the study of native peoples and their political systems to sociologists and anthropologists and have, therefore, denied the role that indigenous peoples have played in the development of the American political system as well as the role they continue to play in the political and economic processes of this country. This neglect has even led us to ignore the existence of tribal governments as autonomous entities in

Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit

Indigenous peoples’ political resistance to conquest parallels the globalization of European dominance and the world system created as a result of it by the twentieth century By the late nineteenth century several Indigenous leaders living within the postcolonial English settler states of Canada, the United States, and New Zealand were convinced that the European settlers were not and would not respect their rights as Indigenous peoples, in spite of the fact that these rights were recognized in treaties either with the settlers or the imperial government itself. Indigenous representatives traveled to Britain to present their grievances to King George, but were denied an audience with the king and told that their concerns fell within the “domestic jurisdiction” of the settler states.1 Thus began the long quest for justice in settler-Indigenous relations, and the pattern of dislocation and relocation, forced assimilation and, at times, outright brutality, was reproduced wherever European settlers (or Indigenous agents of European state-building) expanded their control over resources and territories through the state-building process. Indigenous representatives persisted in seeking redress through international structures, approaching, but denied a voice in the League of Nations, and later, the United Nations. Finally, in the 1970s, the United Nations took up the question of Indigenous peoples within the Economic and Social Council and created a special sub-commission to study and make recommendations regarding their “situation.”

Indigenous Peoples’ Responses to Conquest

While American students learn that Columbus’ first voyage to the western hemisphere set the stage for the creation of settler states that have become some of the most influential and pluralistic modern democracies in the twenty-first century, indigenous peoples living in those states today view that historical chapter with mixed appraisal. For many indigenous peoples who lived for centuries and millennia in these areas before the arrival of European settlers, the arrival of Europeans signaled a long period of struggle for their continued existence both physically and culturally. But they have never remained passive in the face of state-building in formerly colonized areas and their survival presents these democracies with new challenges arising from old injuries and their present effects and they have mobilized for political action to remedy historical injustices in local, state, regional, and international forums.

Critical Security Studies and World Politics

Critical Security Studies and World Politics. Edited by Ken Booth. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005. 336p.

The Indigenous Voice in World Politics

62.00 cloth,

The Social Construction of Conflict and Reconciliation in the Former Yugoslavia

24.50 paper. Ken Booth has tasked himself and his contributors (particularly chapters by S. Smith, A. Linklater, H. Alker, and R. Wyn Jones) with sorting out the menagerie of theoretical criticisms often identified as either critical or in some way as alternatives to realism, including not only those that directly engage questions of security—“securitization” theorists and constructivists—but also the various “post” (modern, structural, positivist, colonial) theoretical critiques. Though on the whole the book rejects both realism and poststructuralism, the contributors do find some common ground with and among “critical,” “post,” and “alternative” writers on the question of improving the human condition (as an implicit goal of criticism), and applauds those who engage ethical issues to the extent that criticism is undertaken in order to reveal and confront, if not overcome, oppression.