Indigenous peoples’ struggles

Abstract

This chapter explores how TWAIL has engaged with Indigenous accounts of international law. The chapter examines how before Western colonial powers, the territories named the Third World were governed by Indigenous nations with their own sovereignty and legal imaginations and institutions. It also discusses the Third World as a locus of political struggle and problematize how theories and institutions, such as permanent sovereignty over natural resources, ecological economic zoning of the ocean, and others might be advanced by Third World actors that disregard the agency of Indigenous peoples. The chapter then examines the Third World as a locus of competing international law theories. This means that the cultural and political diversity in the Third World might produce competing theories that engage with different liberatory projects. Overall, the chapter argues that the unified political signifier for both TWAIL and Indigenous movements today shouldn’t be decolonization in its nationalistic form, but decoloniality.