Decolonizing Governance from the grassroots to the State: Navigating politics through Identity and State Power

The term ‘Indigenous’ denotes the aboriginal residents of a particular area in a region. The Indigenous Peoples (IP) make up 6.2% of the world’s population with an estimated 370-500 million people living in 90 countries across all regions of the world and speak more than 4,000 languages. The largest concentration is in Asia with 70.5%, followed by Africa (16.3%) and Latin America (11.5%). What strikes out them as a community from the other cultures, is their perceptions of how they view themselves i.e., identity, cultures, language, belief system are inextricably linked with the land that they live in. The IP own, occupy about 22% of the world’s land which includes 11% of the world’s forests and 80% of the world’s biodiversity as they have developed their own knowledge system of the territories vis a vis management and sustenance of the natural resources.
However, in the contemporary times, Indigeneity is a contested term as its a coveted term for which many mainstream communities seek to appropriate them while some known indigenous communities have been denotified from being indigenous communities, such as in the case of the Maori people in New Zealand. The contest of being part of Indigenous communities comes from the fact that the territories of indigenous communities hold the world’s biodiversity hotspots and the web of life. This has led to many conflicts around the world about resource management, indigeneity, These are issues which are an interplay of political, legal, historical and social factors as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, together with ongoing Indigenous mobilizations that the Indigenous Politics encompass and is forming an emerging area of study in the field of Political Science.
The panel invites any study on indigenous communities of/ around the world that academically engage using political concepts of sovereignty and self-governance, constitutional and legal status within nation-states, land rights, historical treaties and resource management, political representation and inclusion, politics of consultation and participation in the development of natural resources, cultural preservation, representation and participation, global indigenous movements, intersectionality of gender, sexuality and class in Indigenous Politics, economic sovereignty and development using either normative or empirical methods in the study of Indigenous politics