As a result of anthropogenic climate change, Inuit in the Arctic and island inhabitants in the Pacific Ocean both experience interrelated changes in their maritime environments. Global warming causes Arctic ice to melt, which leads to rising sea levels. As a result, local inhabitants in both regions experience the disappearance of their space (land and ice), paired with the arrival of new stakeholders with a diverse range of interests in the areas. As the inhabitants of the regions most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, Inuit and Pacific Islanders have engaged in counter-mapping and counter-narrating their space that colonial powers have previously conceptualized as isolated, remote, and peripheral. In contrast, the maps of Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific illustrate and tell the stories of transnational spaces that have been collectively shared and used since time immemorial. These counter-mapping and counter-narrative approaches shape a new perception of the regions. This chapter contributes to conceptual development of environmental violence by discussing case studies of counter-mapping and counter-narration in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean – as locals’ responses to experiences of structural and cultural violence to overcome their vulnerability, challenge power differentials, and satisfy their human needs.

This chapter will analyse the right of self-determination in respect of its external and internal dimension, the rights of minorities and the rights of indigenous peoples. Self-determination is the point of reference for any discussion of indigenous and minority rights, although it is far broader than both of these. Minority rights in turn are not considered collective entitlements in relevant international human rights instruments. None the less, as the reader will come to appreciate, they are not devoid of a collective character altogether. Indigenous rights are largely based on soft law and some of their fundamental premises (for example, land rights) are hotly disputed by interested states. Yet, it is indisputable that the international community recognises that the vulnerable status of indigenous peoples necessitates a distinctive approach based on the adoption of measures that allow the preservation of their culture and traditions, while on the other hand helping them to develop, whether technologically, financially, educationally or otherwise. Group rights are controversial primarily because they give rise to questions of ‘us’ and ‘others’ in addition to challenging traditional notions of state sovereignty.

Australian novels of recent decades, canonical and lesser-known works, created by both Indigenous and non-indigenous writers, have been telling stories the nation and its readers have not wanted to hear for most of Australia’s colonial history. While novelists did engage, prior to the 1980s, with Indigenous presence on the continent, such engagement was sporadic and mostly peripheral to grander stories of pioneering bravado, white achievement and the battle with nature on the frontier. Now, peripheral stories have moved to the centre, for Australia was not an empty land settled peacefully by the British. The land was already occupied by sovereign nations of people. Storied, sung place was invaded with orchestrated violence; the land was taken, not ‘taken up’. Indigenous peoples now demand that their ‘ancient sovereignty’ be allowed to ‘shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood’ via constitutional amendment and treaty. Read against the backdrop of relatively recent developments – land rights, the Mabo decision, Stolen Generations, History Wars – this chapter examines work by non-indigenous authors like Kate Grenville and Andrew McGahan as well as Indigenous writers such as Alexis Wright and Tara June Winch, in tracing the rise of the postcolonial novel in Australian fiction.

In past years, many histories of Australia began with the so-called ‘discovery’ of parts of the ‘Great South Land’ by European explorers.

While this approach may be understandable, it is no longer acceptable to view the Indigenous history of Australia purely from a European perspective. To do so would disrespect profoundly the continent’s first inhabitants. This chapter thus begins with a consideration of the profound relationship between Indigenous Australians and the land. It examines the landmark 1992 decision in Mabo v Queensland (No 2), which led to the passage of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) ensuring the continuing recognition and protection of Indigenous Australians’ native title rights and interests. The chapter focuses on the rights, obligations and procedures for establishing, proving, and contesting native title claims through both the Federal Court and the National Native Title Tribunal. It discusses the landmark High Court decision in Northern Territory v Griffiths in relation to compensation for extinguishment of native title. The chapter concludes by considering state and territory legislation introduced following the enactment of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth).

Since the 1960s, Australian law has responded to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Most States and Territories have land rights legislation. These schemes vary, for example in their reliance on claims processes, administrative transfer and statutory vesting for returning land into Indigenous hands. In general, they confer robust property rights (often freehold) and a strong say over mining and development. The concept of native title emerged from the common law decision of the High Court in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) in 1992 and is regulated by a complex federal statute. The capacity for native title to deliver on Indigenous expectations has been influenced by court decisions in key cases, about what groups must prove in order to win recognition, what rights they obtain, what rules apply to the extinguishment of native title and what constitutes ‘just terms’ for dispossession. Governments have also affected developments, as authors of policy and legislation, and as respondents to Indigenous claims in courts and tribunals. Achieving greater land justice from native title and statutory land rights will require governments to adopt a longer-term strategic focus that emphasizes Indigenous empowerment and self-determination.

Australia is unusual in lacking a formal bill of rights. Nevertheless, rights protections have developed, initially in the context of the emergence of settler colonialism within the British Empire. While Indigenous people were only gradually brought within the status of subjecthood, and have continued to be denied fundamental rights, early settlers including convicts had a well-developed sense of their rights as freeborn Britons. The development of the jury system, self-government and democracy were the context for a rights regime associated with a colonial liberal order in the second half of the nineteenth century. From the late nineteenth century, Australia developed a system of social rights based on the elevated status of the male breadwinner. Through the first half of the twentieth century, the British basis of rights claims remained dominant in Australia, but from the 1940s Australia was gradually drawn within an international human rights order, in a manner that strengthened the ability of marginalised groups to make rights claims through appeals to international standards and covenants. Despite the continued absence of a constitutional or legislative bill of rights, governments and courts have been active in recent decades in developing rights protections across a wide domain.

‘Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.’1 So begins Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa, a book in which he appeals against one of the most consequential pieces of legislation passed by the new Union of South Africa after its establishment in 1910. The Natives Land Act of 1913 restricted ownership of land by black South Africans to a small fraction of the available agricultural land of the country. It decreed that whites and blacks were not allowed to buy land from each other. And although the Act did not have an immediate impact, as many, including Plaatje, had thought it would, it began a process of legislative segregation that would ultimately culminate in Grand Apartheid – the division of South Africa into white and black territories or ‘homelands’ – half a century later.

In the wake of the ‘golden age’ of economic growth in the early 1970s, public provision of urban infrastructure came under the close scrutiny of governments seeking to reduce the size of their bureaucracies in the face of expanding budgets, rising prices, and increasing unemployment. Australian governments and water utilities followed the UK and USA by introducing price mechanisms to attain more efficient water use. This coincided with severe droughts that affected urban water supplies and led state governments to impose residential water restrictions, save for Brisbane, where catastrophic floods in 1974 reminded residents of their vulnerability to the elements. Growing concern for the environment, as well as the implications of environmental degradation for human health, meant that the sights, smells, and sounds of the Australian suburbs were on the eve of change. The use of suburban waterways as drains for industrial and domestic waste would no longer be tolerated, as local residents campaigned to protect built and natural environments from pollution and development projects. Such health and ecological concerns collided with the neoliberal reform agenda of the 1990s, when newly restructured water utilities faced a series of crises in their provision of water and disposal of wastes.

This chapter reveals that African inhabitants of the United Nations trust territories – pivotal sites for the emergence of international human rights law – used the newly implemented mechanism of petitioning the Trusteeship Council and the General Assembly to claim their socio-economic rights by challenging their administering authorities’ policies on the use, ownership and distribution of land. In the aftermath of the Second World War and the UN’s formation, inhabitants of African trust territories sought legal counsel to reclaim, before the UN, lands that they viewed as misappropriated. Using contextualised analyses specific to the locales of land claims examined, this chapter considers the social, economic and cultural meanings of land that African claimants had in mind as they and their advocates presented arguments for its return to the UN in the 1940s and 1950s.

This chapter identifies the rise of a new paradigm of contracts within the modern global political economy: direct private contracts negotiated between companies and indigenous peoples (IPs) with a special socio-economic and cultural relationship to land.The above clause is taken from one such contract. These contracts are unique as IPs are one of the main negotiating parties and benefits for them are viewed as the main focus of negotiation. The contract cited above is special as it goes further than community development or social impact agreements, in order to translate indigenous rights to land by way of contract. These contracts effectively recognise indigenous rights on land and various forms of authority over said land, in addition, or in the absence of any formal title. They expose an emerging practice of formalizing free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) processes which may result (or not) in some procedural and substantive benefits for IPs. Consequently, we call this paradigm a contractualisation of indigenous land rights.

Chapter 5 asks why contentious land narratives emerge between two ethnically distinct communities in one area, but not another nearby area. To examine this question, the chapter draws on an in-depth case comparison between two sets of farming communities in Nakuru County, in Kenya’s Rift Valley region. It argues that where two neighboring ethnic communities gain access to land through distinct processes, group members from both sides are likely to challenge the legitimacy of the other groups’ land claims. Yet where both communities acquire land through a similar process, group members are less likely to challenge the claims of the other, and contentious narratives are far less salient. The chapter demonstrates that contentious land narratives between ethnic groups are not the inevitable outcomes of ethnic rivalry but are instead endogenous to the local institutional context governing the provision of land rights.

Chapter 4 asks why contentious land narratives form between some communities, but not others. The chapter presents a large qualitative dataset collected through case comparisons of settlement schemes and land-buying companies in the Rift Valley and Coast regions. The chapter provides brief summaries of each of these eight case studies to demonstrate how inequality in land rights – or lack thereof – manifests in different contexts. Leveraging comparisons between neighboring communities, the chapter argues that the degree of land rights inequality plays an important role in the formation of contentious land narratives.

Chapter 7 examines why contentious land narratives are not sufficient predictors of electoral violence. In contrast to the previous chapter, which demonstrates how elites use narratives to organize violence, this chapter draws on evidence from counties in the Coast region where there are salient contentious land narratives yet electoral violence is rare. The chapter argues that land narratives work differently along the Coast because residents do not link their land rights with electoral outcomes. Hence, residents have few motives to participate in electoral violence and politicians have far less power to use land narratives to organize violence. To account for this regional difference, the chapter brings the reader back to the theory of “landlord” and “land patron,” which it discusses in terms of patronage strength. It also explains the importance of group size: the proportion of ethnic insiders relative to outsiders at the local level.

Chapter 2 presents the book’s main theory, which links contests over land with the local-level dynamics and escalation of electoral violence. It argues that the escalation of electoral violence is part of an historically-rooted process that includes inequality in land rights between two identity-based groups, the formation of contentious land narratives between these groups, and the mobilization of these land narrative to organize and produce electoral violence. The chapter explains each of these “stages” in the process of violence. It begins by theorizing how inequality in land rights between groups can shape a distinct set of contentious narratives around land. It then explains how these land narratives can shape political action, enabling or restraining the production of violence. The chapter also explains the research design and methodology that provides the evidentiary basis for this theory of electoral violence.

Chapter 9, the conclusion, provides a brief summary of the book’s main argument and discusses its generalizability. To do so, it draws on examples that illustrate how the book’s theory might generalize to other cases such as Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as cases such as Colombia, Peru, and India. The chapter then discusses how the main argument can inform broader theorizing about the relationship between democratization, political violence, and postconflict politics. Finally, it reflects on potential lessons learned from a close study of land rights, group narratives, and violence.