In the UN, indigenous peoples have achieved more rights than any other group of people. This book traces this to the ability of indigenous peoples to create consensus among themselves; the establishment of an indigenous caucus; and the construction of a global indigenousness.

In the UN, indigenous peoples have achieved more rights than any other group of people. This book traces this to the ability of indigenous peoples to create consensus among themselves; the establishment of an indigenous caucus; and the construction of a global indigenousness.

This key resource for anyone interested in the United Nations, global issues, or world politics provides accessible and comprehensive coverage of the history, growth, and development of ideas and institutions governing the globe. The United Nations has been an essential actor in world politics for 75 years. Its entities have eliminated smallpox, protected the ozone layer, promoted arms control, and helped to save the lives of over 90 million children. Yet, it is frequently criticized as ineffective and antiquated. This book provides a balanced and systematic overview of the UN's contributions and challenges, highlighting areas where it plays an essential role in global governance as well as areas of redundancy and needed reform. This book provides readers with a clear, well-organized reference resource to the entire UN system-its principal organs, specialized agencies, programs and funds, and key issues of engagement. Through individual entries, it examines the history of UN engagement, ranging from peace and security to migration and climate change. It moves beyond a simple description of UN entities as it assesses the development of ideas (such as that of sustainable development), as well as responses to changes in world politics. Finally, it presents both the significant successes of UN work and continued challenges.

This volume assembles in one place the work of scholars who are making key contributions to a new approach to the United Nations, and to global organizations and international law more generally. Anthropology has in recent years taken on global organizations as a legitimate source of its subject matter. The research that is being done in this field gives a human face to these world-reforming institutions. Palaces of Hope demonstrates that these institutions are not monolithic or uniform, even though loosely connected by a common organizational network. They vary above all in their powers and forms of public engagement. Yet there are common threads that run through the studies included here: the actions of global institutions in practice, everyday forms of hope and their frustration, and the will to improve confronted with the realities of nationalism, neoliberalism, and the structures of international power.

Today human rights represent a primary concern of the international legal system. The international community’s commitment to the protection and promotion of human rights, however, does not always produce the results hoped for by the advocates of a more justice-oriented system of international law. Indeed international law is often criticised for, inter alia, its enduring imperial character, incapacity to minimize inequalities and failure to take human suffering seriously. Against this background, the central question that this book aims to answer is whether the adoption of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples points to the existence of an international law that promises to provide valid responses to the demands for justice of disempowered and vulnerable groups. At one level, the book assesses whether international law has responded fairly and adequately to the human rights claims of indigenous peoples. At another level, it explores the relationship between this response and some distinctive features of the indigenous peoples’ struggle for justice, reflecting on the extent to which the latter have influenced and shaped the former. The book draws important conclusions as to the reasons behind international law’s positive recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights, shedding some light on the potential and limits of international law as an instrument of justice. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of public international law, human rights and social movements.

This book offers a distinctive approach to the key international instrument on indigenous rights, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Declaration) based on a new account of the political history of the international indigenous movement as it intersected with the Declaration's negotiation. The current orthodoxy is to read the Declaration as containing human rights adapted to the indigenous situation. However, this reading does not do full justice to the complexity and diversity of indigenous peoples' participation in the Declaration negotiations. Instead, the book argues that the Declaration should be subject to a novel, mixed-model reading that views the Declaration as embodying two distinct normative strands that serve different types of indigenous peoples. Not only is this model supported by the Declaration's political history and legal argument, it provides a new and compelling theory of the bases of international indigenous rights while clarifying the vexed question of who qualifies as indigenous for the purposes of international law.

This book investigates how western anthropological trends, development discourse and transnational activism came to create and define the global indigenous movement. Using Bolivia as a case study, the author demonstrates through a historical research, how international ideas of what it means and does not mean to be indigenous have played out at the national level. Tracing these trends from pre-revolutionary Bolivia, the Inter-American indigenismo in the 1940s up to Evo Morales’ downfall, the book reflects on Bolivia’s national-level policy discourse and constitutional changes, but also asks to what extent these principles have been transmitted to the country’s grassroots organisations and movements such as “Indianismo”, “Katarismo”, “CSUTCB” and “CIDOB”. Overall, the book argues that indigeneity can only be adequately understood, as a longue durée anthropological, political, and legal construction, crafted within broader geopolitical contexts. Within this context, the classical dichotomy between “indigenous” and “whites” should be challenged, in favour of a more nuanced understanding of plural indigeneities. This book will be of interest to researchers from across the fields of global studies, political anthropology, history of anthropology, international development, socio-legal studies, Latin American history, and indigenous studies.