In recent decades, sovereignty has come under increased academic scrutiny for being a Eurocentric notion antithetical to emancipatory politics, leading critical theory scholars to call for an overcoming or even abandonment of the concept. Paradoxical as it may seem, it nonetheless remains an appealing ideal for many colonised peoples. Indigenous activists and scholars have actively re-appropriated the language of sovereignty to encapsulate and advance Indigenous political aspirations. This paper discusses how Māori, Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Indigenous people, navigate their relations to the concept in their contemporary political discourses pursuing self-governance. Building on interviews with Māori leaders, scholars, and activists, it offers empirical insights into Indigenous political thought’s engagement with the idea of sovereignty. It highlights an ambivalence oscillating between rejection and rearticulation present both in Indigenous theorising and Māori politics. From an analysis of Māori contemporary conceptual strategies, this paper suggests that Yarimar Bonilla’s notion of ‘strategic entanglement’ offers a productive account to comprehend the approached Māori actors’ deployment of the sovereignty concept, and possibly that of Indigenous peoples beyond Aotearoa. This paper thus highlights the continued relevance of the sovereignty framework, both analytically and politically, to meaningfully engage with contemporary Indigenous politics.

This presidential address on Canada and the study of territorial politics makes four main arguments. The first is that territory is a central component of politics, especially of Canadian politics, and that it should remain a focal point of specialists of Canadian and comparative politics. The second is that territory matters in contemporary politics because it serves as grounding for political communities, their claims, and their politics. The third is that not “identifying” parts of Canadian politics as “territorial politics” risks overlooking the importance of territory in the theorizing of federalism, nationalism and regionalism. The fourth is that, through the case of Canada, political scientists have made significant contributions to the study of comparative territorial politics.

The emergence of the Sámi Parliament has lifted Norwegian Sámi politics into an international discourse on indigenous peoples. The clearest imprints of the new Sámi political space are found in the High North region of Norway, where the Sámi account for a significant proportion of the population. The article shows to what extent and how Sámi agency affects governance structures and business development in the north in an increasingly globalised economic setting. From its origin, Sámi agency has influenced development in the High North through three processes: the first is through the Sámi institution building and strengthening of Sámi communities; the second is through its links to local and regional societal development; and the third is through the role of Sámi politics in globalised development processes. One main finding is that the boundaries between these links to the surrounding environment have become more diffuse. Sámi agency is taking a more important role in the economic development processes in the High North, often in terms of the local and regional processes, and now also within the increasingly important globalised economic modernisation processes in which inclusion in new multi-level governance structures is important.

Despite long-standing academic interest in Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state, there has been little study of Indigenous elected officials as representational actors. We ask: What are the distinctively Indigenous forms of representation practised by Indigenous elected officials in Canada? And how does clarifying the role of Indigenous elected officials as representatives both contribute to and enhance our overall understanding of Indigenous politics, governance and sovereignty? We draw on the existing literatures on substantive representation as well as original interviews conducted with current and former Indigenous elected officials to develop an original conceptualization of Indigenous representation. These actors differ in their perceptions of themselves and their roles as representatives, the representational behaviours they engage in and the outcomes they seek. Our conceptualization of Indigenous representation engages with four themes: Indigenous perspective, Indigenous advocacy, balance with other imperatives including constituency representation and party discipline, and Indigenous nationhood.

This article examines the life and career of Alejandro Lipschütz, Chile's most accomplished indigenista, to investigate his influence on the scientific and political discourse about the role of indigenous peoples in modern American states, known as indigenismo. Trained as an experimental biologist, Lipschütz criticized prevailing views of race in the Americas, arguing for a social interpretation and analysis of racial categories that defined indigeneity. Lipschütz then promoted the creation of an indigenous institute within the Chilean state and advocated on behalf of the Mapuche people. Because indigenous leaders themselves developed a strong political movement in the mid twentieth century, transnational indigenismo failed to produce meaningful or lasting progress in Chile. That failure convinced Lipschütz that indigenous peoples should preserve and strengthen traditional communities and seek political autonomy. This analysis joins a growing body of scholarship that challenges conventional views of indigenismo, which characterize it as a repressive ideology used by paternalistic states. This study of Alejandro Lipschütz prefigures the shift toward acknowledging the greater indigenous agency that accompanied identity-based social movements emerging in the 1980s.

Minority voters have experienced a renewed effort to curtail their access to the ballot box in recent years. Although a host of research has examined the impact of election changes on Black and Latino voters, scholars have dedicated much less attention to the rights of Native Americans, even as they face challenges to voting in states where they comprise a significant portion of the population. Many of these states are likewise increasingly important to national elections. Such laws may impact Native Americans when they intersect with the political geography of living on a reservation, and voting rights advocates have challenged them in places like Montana, Nevada and North Dakota. This paper empirically evaluates how such laws might uniquely impact Native American voters. We draw on North Dakota's voter identification law as a case study, but our analysis has wider implications, since residency is the primary means by which election administration uniquely impacts this group. Drawing on two rich survey datasets collected in 2015 and 2017, we offer descriptive evidence of the barriers individuals may encounter while trying to obtain an ID under North Dakota's law, and find that Native Americans are statistically less likely to have access to an ID than are whites. This gap is largely due to the requirement that an ID has a physical address and attendant difficulties in obtaining such an ID, given the remote nature of reservations. We bring needed attention to the impact of carefully crafted electoral rules on this often-overlooked group.

One of the leading features of colonialism is the imposition on a given territory and people a framework for what constitutes authority that renders pre-existing governing practices and legal orders unrecognizable as features of legitimate law and governance. Understood in this way, colonialism renders Indigenous law and governing practices invisible. As a result, decolonization requires changing how authority is apprehended and not only how it is distributed. This article compares two frameworks of authority in relation to the conflict on Wet'suwet’en territory: liberal postcolonial statism and relational pluralism. It shows how each framework provides a distinct lens through which to understand the pertinent features of political authority but argues that relational pluralism presents a better account of how to reconceive political authority in the context of real-world conflict.

Autonomy carries the promise of resolving longstanding distributive inequalities between indigenous and non-indigenous groups. Yet, contemporary autonomy arrangements have often been associated instead with a reduction in native communities' access to needed public goods and services. I situate these negative effects within a broader autonomy-representation dilemma: autonomy provides indigenous groups with more responsive coethnic leaders, but these leaders frequently face difficulties in collecting and deploying revenue. These capacity constraints often arise from the way national governments have recognized autonomy. As such, pursuing coethnic representation within the state might—under certain conditions—be more likely to provide indigenous groups with needed goods and services. Drawing on natural experimental evidence and an original survey of indigenous community presidents from Peru, I first demonstrate that achieving coethnic political representation within the state can expand indigenous groups' access to the public good they most need: water. I then illustrate how capacity constraints that arise from autonomy have prevented native groups in Bolivia's autonomous municipalities from achieving similar distributive gains. Ultimately, the findings provide insights for understanding the sources of—and potential institutional remedies for—indigenous groups' unequal access to local public goods in the Americas and beyond.

In April 2019, the Japanese government officially legally recognized the Ainu as Indigenous people. Building on an institutionalist framework, the paper suggests that a phenomenon of institutional layering has taken place, resulting in tensions between the desire to preserve the legitimacy of old institutions and the pressure to develop more progressive policies. To explain this process, policy legacies, and institutional opportunities are relevant. First, the narrative that equality can be attained through assimilation, and the political construction of the “Ainu problem” as a regional one tied to Hokkaido pervade political imaginaries and institutions. Second, institutional opportunities have mediated the ways activists have sought to make their voices heard in the political arena. A focus on key historical segments illuminates the difficulty for activists to penetrate high-level political arenas while indicating the importance of agency, ties and interests in explaining major reforms and their limitations. The ambiguity that characterizes current policy framework points to the potential leverage that this policy configuration represents for the Ainu. At the same time, historical and institutional legacies that have shaped Indigenous politics continue to constrain, to a great extent, the possibilities for meaningful and transformative developments for the Ainu.

This article explores the tension between multicultural legal reforms and the liberal state-building project in present-day Mexico. Specifically, it traces the process by which the Mexican state challenged and eventually forced changes to customary restrictions on women in public life in some indigenous communities in the southern state of Oaxaca. The study argues that the act of formalizing autonomy for indigenous communities, in the context of Mexico’s homogenizing neoliberal state, had the unanticipated effect of exposing exclusionary practices to state scrutiny, which eventually forced those communities to recognize women’s political rights. Thus the effort to protect indigenous practices facilitated the territorial and juridical expansion of the Mexican state into formerly autonomous areas of the countryside.

Over the last two decades, Latin America has witnessed a massive expansion of resource extraction. One of the most significant countermovements to emerge out of this context in Ecuador features a strong base and leadership of indigenous women from the Amazon. In their collective effort to resist extractivism, Amazonian women have drawn from elements of ecofeminist discourse and, in the process, situated their own claims within the broader indigenous territorial struggle. Ecofeminism has been transformed through this allyship as well, becoming more inclusive of indigenous women's perspectives. To shed light on these complex relationships, this article applies the framework of “partial connection” from feminist anthropology. It shows how postcolonial encounters between the state, missionaries, environmental activists, and indigenous communities in the Amazon carved out unique spaces for indigenous self-organization and politics. The historical analysis of such spaces, I argue, is crucial for grasping the allyship between Amazonian women and ecofeminists today. Rooted in a combination of positions that are partially, asymmetrically, and ambiguously connected, the allyship between Amazonian women and ecofeminists is best understood as a form of partially connected relationship.

Although women and men enjoy formally equal political rights in today's democracies, there are ongoing gaps in the extent to which they make use of these rights, with women underrepresented in many political practices. The gender gap in democratic participation is problematic because gendered asymmetries in participation entail collective outcomes that are less attentive to women's needs, interests, and preferences. Existing studies consider gender gaps in voting behavior and in certain forms of nonelectoral politics such as boycotting, signings a petition, or joining a protest. However, almost no work considers gendered variation in discursive politics. Do women participate in small, face-to-face political discussion groups at the same rate as men? And does gender intersect with other identities—such as ethnicity—to impact attendance at political discussion groups? I use data from the Canadian Election Study 2015 Web Survey to answer these questions. I find that women are significantly less likely to attend small-group discussions than men and that ethnicity intersects with gender in some important ways. However, I find no evidence that other social attributes—poverty or the presence of young children in the home—suppress women's participation in political discussion groups more than men's.

In the 1990s, Colombia decentralised politics and passed multicultural reforms as part of wider strategies to strengthen the state. Multiculturalism produced a complex institutional environment marked by jurisdictional overlap and legal plurality. The literature on Colombia's multiculturalism confirms that violence, indigenous rights abuses and the lack of enabling legislation on indigenous territorial entities limited ethno-political autonomy and instead enhanced the capacity of the state to transform indigenous identity and bureaucratise local decision-making practices. However, some indigenous authorities used the new institutions to take control of communal matters, changing local governments along the way. The better-known case of indigenous self-government is that of the Nasa people in Cauca, characterised by the capture of local institutions to advance ethnic rights. In my study of the Embera Chamí of Karmata Rúa (Antioquia) I argue that they represent an alternative approach centred on institutional embeddedness, or the repetition of ethnic autonomy rules by multiple layers of government.

This article examines how neoliberal multicultural governance shapes the political imaginaries and practices of rural indigenous Guatemalans in the town of San Pedro Necta. Decades of counter-insurgency warfare have displaced radical politics into sanctioned forms of ethnic empowerment, memory and development, but most indigenous sampedranos have maintained radical investments. Persistent political violence, stalled reforms and clientelist favouritism undermined multicultural inclusion, development and optimism regarding the 1996 peace accords, and weakened community autonomy. The resulting mix of pessimism, unmet needs and divisionism has discouraged progressive politics and normalised political disengagement and, increasingly, self-interested affiliations with multiple conservative parties, including corrupt authoritarian populists implicated in genocide.

This essay, written in September 2006, considers the first months of the MAS government headed by Evo Morales in the light of the virtually constant political crisis in Bolivia since 2000. The first part asks why the turbulent course of public life in Bolivia has proved so difficult to explain. It seeks to show that the recent period has been depicted in rather narrow interpretations that stress institutional failings, poverty and oppression, or civic heroism, but do not try to find the linkages between these phenomena. The second section proposes an alternative approach, treating the recent experience of conflict as a revolutionary episode in which the idea of ‘Two Bolivias’ needs to be qualified by appreciation of past revolutionary experiences. The final sections suggest that the ardour and complexities of the current conflict might seem more comprehensible if the MAS and its supporters are viewed as essentially plebeian in both condition and ideological disposition. Such a classical and early modern allusion provides a fuller analytical palate for understanding the current conjuncture and the socio-political propositions being made in a ‘semi-modern’ environment.