The adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on September 13, 2007, represented a watershed moment for the world's 300 million Indigenous peoples. After decades of struggle in both international and national forums, these efforts culminated in the creation of a human rights framework dedicated to protecting and promoting the rights of one of the world's most marginalized populations. While many detractors were quick to point to its non-legally binding nature, supporters celebrated the development of a new and powerful international legal norm. A decade on, what are we to make of the Declaration? Does this document represent merely an aspirational (or perhaps even token) recognition of the rights of Indigenous peoples? Or does this text provide the groundwork for a fundamental shift in global Indigenous politics (GIP)?
In Global Indigenous Politics: A Subtle Revolution, Sheryl Lightfoot provides a bold argument in favour of the latter interpretation. As the subtitle to the book not so subtly implies, she argues we are witnessing a subtle revolution in the international order. According to Lightfoot, “Global Indigenous politics, defined as a project that advances Indigenous peoples’ rights, is far from insignificant and is forging major changes in the international system” (4). This is because GIP serves as a “transformational norm vector,” which challenges many of the core elements of the dominant paradigm of the contemporary international system, namely, state sovereignty, self-determination, territoriality and the privileging of individual over collective rights. While there is fierce resistance to change (notably by today's settler colonial societies), Lightfoot concludes that the “UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples helps point the way toward a new and infinitely more fair, just and hopeful global future” (211).
Although framed as a study of global Indigenous politics, the book is perhaps better described as an analysis of the contentious politics surrounding the Declaration. Divided into two parts—Indigenous rights and politics and state resistance to GIP—the book provides an astonishingly rich and complex investigation of the actors, detractors and factors behind the creation of the Declaration and its profound implications for unsettling the dominant paradigms of the international political system. In doing so, the book begins with a useful overview of the history of the Indigenous rights movement before discussing in chapter 3 “practising” global politics in Indigenous ways. In Part II, the book systematically studies the motivations and tactics of states that resist the transformative pressure of GIP. Developing the concept of “selective endorsement,” Lightfoot explains why states counterintuitively engage in a paradox of “over-compliance” in which states exhibit over-compliant behaviour while resisting more comprehensive efforts to acknowledge Indigenous rights. This paradox is empirically explored in chapters 6 and 7 on Indigenous rights in New Zealand and Canada, respectively.
Lightfoot, who is Canada Research Chair of Global Indigenous Rights and Politics at the University of British Columbia, is no stranger to the Indigenous rights movement. Along with her academic credentials, she has extensive work experience with the American Indian Policy Center in the areas of both research and advocacy. This comes across in the book as she acknowledges that this is an emancipatory project, which aims to provide concrete contributions to Indigenous communities. To this end, she embraces a methodology that “fuses qualitative international relations with Indigenous community-based participatory research methods and perspectives” (21). This speaks to one of the core strengths of the book, which is fundamentally rooted in a mixed-methods approach. While the theoretical framework is grounded in the constructivist tradition of international relations (IR) theory, Lightfoot also engages with political and legal theory to great effect as she provides a theoretically sophisticated exploration of GIP by advancing the concept of “selective endorsement.” Aside from the theoretical contribution, insights are garnered from a multiplicity of methods, including historical documentary analysis, interviews and qualitative comparative case studies. Consequently, Lightfoot succeeds in developing a highly original theoretical argument while simultaneously generating new and counterintuitive empirical findings from her field research and careful combing through historical documents.
The book, however, is not without limitations. As Lightfoot acknowledges in the introduction, there are some important caveats that warrant mention. Notable among these is that she develops a “hypothesis-generating study” guided by a case study method employed as an exploratory mode and not a confirmatory-disconfirmatory mode. She notes that the transnational Indigenous rights movement is a singular case. Moreover, the universe of cases is rendered smaller by the fact that only four cases exhibit the outcome of interest: over-compliance in the domain of respecting Indigenous rights. While these points underscore some of the limitations of this work, a larger concern looms over the book. Can an analysis, largely of Western settler colonial states (such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United States), and focused on the narrower topic of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, generate enough evidence to speak of a global revolution in Indigenous rights? There is a degree of irony here as Lightfoot critiques the field of IR which has historically failed to incorporate the experiences of Indigenous peoples but yet does so through an analysis largely focused on the empirical realities of a small (and arguably unique) subset of the world's Indigenous population. In this sense, the book could have benefited from a more sustained engagement with a more diverse geographical representation of Indigenous peoples. Moreover, by casting a wider net on various themes beyond the politics of the Declaration (that is, cultural genocide, language politics, resource extraction) the book might have succeeded in advancing a more comprehensive analysis of what might be understood as “global Indigenous politics.”
Notwithstanding these minor quibbles, Lightfoot's book provides a much-needed and timely contribution to the fields of IR, Indigenous studies and political science. As such, the book should be of great interest to academics across these fields and those outside of the academy searching for a thoughtful and rigorous study of the evolving political landscape of Indigenous rights. Whether or not we are in fact observing a subtle revolution, it is hard to disagree with Lightfoot's concluding statement that GIP indeed “challenges states and the international system to complete the post-colonial project, reclaim moral legitimacy, and restructure themselves along lines that promote justice, fairness, and human dignity for all” (211).
