Postcolonial Sovereignty

"My interest in the Nisga'a Final Agreement arose from the trenchant criticisms of the agreement by both Aboriginal rights proponents and conservative factions in the Canadian community. Why did this agreement incite such polarized opposition? I undertook a detailed examination of the agreement and its effect on the Nisga'a Nation. Through community research and discussions with the federal negotiators it became clear that the agreement represented a radical hybridization of western political and legal systems. Obviously, liberal theory did not account for this revision of First Nation and Canadian sovereignty. As such I explored postcolonial theory as an avenue to explain how the treaty was operating and the effects it was having on the Nisga'a Nation and the Canadian political community." -- Tracie Lea Scott In 1999 the Nisga'a First Nation in Northwestern British Columbia signed a landmark agreement which not only settled their land claim but outlined significant powers that could be exercised by its government. This book analyzes the impact the agreement has on federal/provincial/First Nations relations, but also in a concise manner examines the major terms of the agreement. The author summarizes the settlement and, more importantly, the powers over land, resources, education, and cultural policy granted to the Nisga'a government. She notes that the agreement marks a major departure from previous land claims agreements and outlines the opposition, including two court challenges, mounted against the agreement.

This book examines how sovereignty works in the context of European integration and postcolonialism. Focusing on a group of micro-polities associated with the European Union, it offers a new understanding of international relations in the context of modern sovereignty. This book offers a systematic and comparative analysis of the Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs), the EU and the four affected Member States: UK, France, the Netherlands and Denmark. Contributors explore how states and state-like entities play ‘sovereignty games’ to understand how a group of postcolonial entities may strategically use their ambiguous status in relation to sovereignty. The book examines why former colonies are seeking greater room to manoeuvre on their own, whilst simultaneously developing a close relationship to the supranational EU. Methodologically sophisticated, this interdisciplinary volume combines interviews, participant observation, textual, legal and institutional analysis for a new theoretical approach to understanding the strategic possibilities and subjectivity of non-sovereign entities in international politics. Bringing together research on European integration and postcolonial theory, European Integration and Postcolonial Sovereignty Games will be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations, EU studies, Postcolonial studies, International Law and Political Theory.

Greenland views itself as being on the way to sovereignty. This image – and the tensions involved in it – structure the triangular relation between the EU, Greenland and Denmark. The central Other of Greenland has for a couple of centuries been Denmark, the colonial overlord. The national identity discourses of Greenland and Denmark both idealize national homogeneity. A central condition for a continuation of Rigsfællesskabet, the 'community of the realm' including Greenland and Denmark, is the idea that Greenland still needs external assistance in its development towards independence - and that this idea can be formulated in a way which does not infantilize Greenland metaphorically. As part of the postcolonial diversification of Greenland's dependency, the bilateral relation between Denmark and Greenland has gradually been opened up to involve 'other others'. Meanwhile, a discourse prognosticates that climate change is opening up the Arctic to minerals extraction and commerce. In these circumstances, the triangular relation with the EU is played out as a series of rhetorical and practical 'sovereignty games', in Nuuk, Copenhagen and Brussels. Particularly, a number of strategies are employed to minimize the apparent role of Denmark for the Greenlandic relations to the EU. The book approaches these changes in national identity discourse and practical foreign policy in five analytical steps: The core concepts organizing Danish and Greenlandic identity are identified in discourse analyses. Political debates are read as political identity negotiations. The practical diplomatic management of clashing identity discourses is uncovered via qualitative interviews with key actors (politicians, diplomats, and civil servants from Greenland, Denmark and the EU). Legal texts are approached as the 'frozen' outcome of rhetorical and practical sovereignty games. Finally, the book develops scenarios for the future and concludes by pointing out how the continuation of the community of the realm may have a better chance if conceived as an 'ever looser union'. One way for Denmark of facilitating this image would be to employ its diplomacy in the service of diversifying Greenland's dependence - following the example set in relation to the EU.

In 1999 the Nisga’a First Nation in northwestern British Columbia signed a landmark agreement which not only settled their land claim but outlined significant powers that could be exercised by its government. The Nisga’a Final Agreement granted powers over land, resources, education, and cultural policy to the Nisga’a government, a major departure from previous land claims agreements. However, it was not without opposition and Scott also outlines the opposition, including two court challenges, mounted against the agreement. This book concisely examines the major terms of the agreement then deeply analyzes the impact the agreement has on federal/provincial/First Nations relations.

This book explores connections between activist debates about food sovereignty and academic debates about alternative food networks. The ethnographic case studies demonstrate how divergent histories and geographies of people-in-place open up or close off possibilities for alternative/sovereign food spaces, illustrating the globally uneven and varied development of industrial capitalist food networks and of everyday forms of subversion and accommodation. How, for example, do relations between alternative food networks and mainstream industrial capitalist food networks differ in places with contrasting histories of land appropriation, trade, governance and consumer identities to those in Europe and non-indigenous spaces of New Zealand or the United States? How do indigenous populations negotiate between maintaining a sense of moral connectedness to their agri- and acqua-cultural landscapes and subverting, or indeed appropriating, industrial capitalist approaches to food? By delving into the histories, geographies and everyday worlds of (post)colonial peoples, the book shows how colonial power relations of the past and present create more opportunities for some alternative producer–consumer and state–market–civil society relations than others.

Introduction: Politics on the boundaries -- The U.S.-indigenous relationship : a struggle over colonial rule -- Resisting American domestication : the U.S. Civil War and the Cherokee struggle to be "still, a nation"--1871 and the turn to postcolonial time in U.S.-indigenous relations -- Indigenous politics and the "gift" of U.S. citizenship in the early twentieth century -- Between civil rights and decolonization : the claim for postcolonial nationhood -- Indigenous sovereignty versus colonial time at the turn of the twenty-first century -- Conclusion: The third space of sovereignty.

The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories is an essay collection made up of two sections; in the first, a group of anglophone and francophone scholars examines the roots, effects and implications of the major social upheaval that shook Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion in February and March of 2009. They clearly demonstrate the critical role played by community activism, art and media to combat politico-economic policies that generate (un)employment, labor exploitation, and unattended health risks, all made secondary to the supremacy of profit. In the second section, additional scholars provide in-depth analyses of the ways in which an insistence on capital accumulation and centralization instantiated broad hierarchies of market-driven profit, capital accumulation, and economic exploitation upon a range of populations and territories in the wider non-sovereign and nominally sovereign Caribbean from Haiti to the Dutch Antilles to Puerto Rico, reinforcing the racialized patterns of socioeconomic exclusion and privatization long imposed by France on its former colonial territories.

The Postcolonial African State in Transition offers a new perspective on a set of fundamental, albeit old questions with salient contemporary resonance: what is the nature of the postcolonial state? How did it come about? And more crucially, the book poses an often neglected question: what was the postcolonial African state internally built against? Through a detailed historical investigation of the Voltaic region, the book theorizes the state in transition as the constitutive condition of the African state, rendering centralization processes as always transient, uncertain, even dangerous endeavours. In Africa and elsewhere in the colonial and postcolonial world, the centralized sovereign state has become something of a meta-model that bears the imprint of necessity and determinism. This book argues that there is nothing natural, linear, conventional or intrinsically consensual about the centralized state form. In fact, the African state emerged, and was erected against, and at the expense of a variety of authority structures and forms of self-governance. The state has sustained itself through destructive practices, internal colonization, and in fact the production and alienation of a range of internal others.