“Indigenous peoples, Business and the state: from the experience of legal regulation in the Russian arctic”

Abstract

This article examines the role of the Commission on Legal Pluralism and one of its founders, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (1946–2022), to whose memory I dedicate this analysis of the development of legal anthropology in Russia. In the article, I focus mainly on the indigenous peoples of the North of the Russian Federation. Legal pluralism methodology is important for the rights of indigenous peoples in modern Russia from various perspectives. Introduction to the work of the Commission on Legal Pluralism has been an important step in the formation of an interdisciplinary field of legal anthropology in Russia. Keebet von Benda-Beckmann played a major role in this process, and was involved in the 11th International Congress on Customary Law and Legal Pluralism, which was held in Moscow in 1997. Interdisciplinarity has become a defining trend in the study of the legal status of indigenous peoples in legal anthropology, both for the creation of special legislation and for the protection of indigenous rights. There has also been a significant turn in academic discourse from the study of customary law as a traditional law that existed in the past to the study of it as a regulator of the contemporary life of aboriginal and other communities. Field research in recent decades in the Russian Arctic confirms the need to emphasise the role of the state and globalisation when analysing the legal situation of indigenous peoples in the context of legal pluralism. In this article, two cases are analysed. The first is the development of the Russian Federation Standard on Social Responsibility for Business in the Arctic 2020, with which I was directly involved. My task as a legal anthropologist was to prepare a document that combined international law, national legislation, business standards and regulations, and the customary law of indigenous peoples of the North. The second case is related to the analysis of the regional legislation of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) concerning nomadic peoples, and consideration of indigenous customs and traditions in the state legal system. The importance of this perspective for the protection of the rights of these peoples is recognised in the decision of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in response to the complaint filed by Gennady Shchukin, a representative of the Dolgan community of Krasnoyarsk Region, relating to the value of customary law in the regulation of hunting. Such judicial practice is rare, but it is of great importance in determining the status of indigenous peoples in the eyes of the state. This article deals with the possibility of taking into account the customary law of small indigenous peoples of the North based on documents adopted before 2022.

Keywords:

• Keebet Benda-Beckmann
• legal anthropology of indigenous peoples
• Russian arctic
• customary law
• legal pluralism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Evgueny Bocharov, who translated this article from Russian into English. I would also like to thank Emma Wilson for her positive and constructive comments on the paper.

Disclosure statement

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