The four worlds of recognition of indigenous rights

ABSTRACT

The demands of indigenous peoples pose radical questions about how we understand the capitalist mode of production, socio-cultural relations and the distribution of political power within a state. This paper presents a systematic study of the way in which these three dimensions (territorial, socio-cultural and political) are addressed in the constitutions of 59 countries in different parts of the world. We identify what we refer to as four worlds of recognition, based on these texts’ distinctive configurations of indigenous rights. We then analyse emblematic cases as a means of better illustrating each of these groups. The paper makes a theoretical–conceptual and empirical contribution by identifying certain clusters of indigenous rights that are present cross-regionally and within regions of the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous peoples
• constitutional recognition
• nation-state
• plurinationalism
• multiculturalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Nancy Fraser subsequently continued this discussion in the mid-1990s with reference to ‘struggles for recognition’ (Fraser and Honneth 2003).

2 De Castro and Pedreño relate this process of mercantilization with a logic of de-democratization that implies a loss of citizen rights and the destruction of both local communities and ecological balance, in response to which a new moral economy of the crowd emerges.

3 Escobar (2011) recognizes a number of contradictions in the materialization of this alternative conceptualization. Analyzing the case of Ecuador, he notes that, at odds with anti-capitalist stances, traditional individualist conceptions persist along with the establishment of extractivist objectives in certain strategic areas of development. However, for the purposes of our conceptualization, the point here is to draw attention to this paradigm’s distinctive emphases.

4 Even though there is a gray area between ‘sovereignty’ and ‘self-determination’ in many cases of indigenous groups the struggle is for the achievement of greater levels of political autonomy within an organized state. In few cases the demand is related to the emergence of a new, independent state (see Hannum 1990).

5 The Comparative Constitutions Project was implemented by the Department of Government of the University of Texas in conjunction with the University of Chicago Law School and Google Ideas. They developed an open database of constitutional texts. In order to allow comparisons, the database provides the English translation of the different texts.

6 In most cases, the data was taken from the country’s latest census. In other cases, data from ECLAC, large-scale Population Characterization surveys and the CIA World Factbook was used.

7 In this sense, we acknowledge the limitation of this descriptive methodogical option as the concept ‘indigenous peoples’ may adopt different meanings in several institutional and political settings. However, our goal is to account for the types of rights defined in a variety of constitutional texts. Methodologically speaking, we use the English translation of the constitutions in order to make comparable assessments which it may affect our understanding of what the word ‘indigenous’ means. However, in all cases refers to the pre existing nations prior to the creation of modern nation-states no matter if they are numerically minorities or not. Hence, we suggest it is suitable to use it.

8 We identified the presence of 11 types of rights: self-determination, autonomy, own social organization, mechanisms of political representation, right to be consulted, customary law, right to language, bilingual education, traditional medicine, protection of natural resources and rights to land and territories.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Develpment (FONDECYT) [Grant #1170025].