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This chapter explores the development of international law on indigeneity. It reviews the legal protections endowed by key documents, such as International Labor Organizations Convention No. 169 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The chapter also provides a short comparative legal perspective on land rights of indigenous peoples which helps to situate the Israeli case within other settler colonial situations and to address the status of the relevant international legislation and norms. It concludes that several components of the UNDRIP have gained a status of international customary law, and hence with growing relevance to Israeli jurisprudence and to the Bedouins. The chapter ends by addressing the question of indigenous peoples’ rights in Israeli law and how Israeli basic laws should expand to incorporate the legal protection of the Bedouins.

This chapter sets the historical, anthropological and cosmopolitical context for the 13 other chapters assembled here. It is organised around the 5 thematic parts of the book. ‘The Indigenous Australian Experience of the Rhizome’ (Part One) explains Guattari’s interest for the rhizomatic practice of the Aboriginal nomadic territorialisation of myth, ritual and dreams with examples of oneiric revelations and speeches by Warlpiri women and men. ‘Totem, Taboo and the Women’s Law’ deconstructs anthropological and psychoanalytical preconceptions about religion, gender and society. ‘The Aboriginal Practice of Transversality and Dissensus’ (Part 3) analyses various forms of local, national and transnational Indigenous resistance to defend their culture, their land and social justice. ‘Micropolitics of hope and De-essentialisation’ (Part 4) introduces decolonial debates about race and environment with examples from France, Africa and the Pacific. ‘Dancing with the Spirits of the Land’ (Part 5) draws ecosophical lessons from Afro Brazilian and Indigenous forms of spiritual healing.

The politics of identity discussed here are still at the heart of current Indigenous Australian struggles for recognition. In the 1960s, for ethical and political reasons, the term Aboriginal became an ethnonym written with a capital ‘A’ to designate the descendants of the first inhabitants of Australia, some 500 groups speaking different languages. Aboriginal groups have not only different language names and cultural backgrounds, but different histories — massacres, forced sedentarisation in reserves, separation from their parents of children of mixed descent, discrimination, criminalisation — all of which broke the transmission of some peoples’ heritage. Yet many claim their ‘Aboriginality’ which gathers all under an Aboriginal flag (since 1972), even if not everyone agrees on the definition of a common identity. Some priviledge an identity of continuity, based on language, localised spirit-children and ritual links with the land, pre-contact modes of existence; others put forward an identity of resistance, rewriting colonial history, valorising a national Aboriginal identity that encompasses all mixed descendants, struggling for land-rights, against bad living conditions, exclusion and exploitation. First published in 1997.

Chapter 4 turns to the commissions of inquiry that the Australian and Canadian governments created when they realized they had to respond to some of the demands of indigenous peoples as a consequence of the key legal cases discussed in previous chapters. Examining the workings of three commissions (the Canadian Indian Claims Commission; the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission; and the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry), this chapter argues that these commissions helped to splinter the old notion of the social contract in the two settler states. The commissions became key sites for debates about indigenous history and how indigenous peoples might be better incorporated into the story of the settler state as co-founders. The chapter assesses the complex and even paradoxical implications for indigenous peoples of incorporation into narratives of the state.

This chapter argues that the case of Rajpura provides insights into the causes and trajectory of India’s “land wars” and their implications for development. It suggests that the exclusionary trajectory of capitalism in contemporary India is the structural underpinning of farmer protests and explains why the political stability of India’s neoliberal regime of dispossession rests on its ability to substitute land prices for inclusive development. However, even an ostensibly “pro-farmer” overhaul of India’s Land Acquisition Act will be inadequate to generalize the compliance achieved in Rajpura, especially where agricultural profitability and dependence are higher, inequalities are more muted, and histories of peasant activism are more militant. “Land wars” are a symptom of dispossession without development and will not disappear without a major redirection of India’s political economy. To the extent that they can foster this redirection, anti-dispossession movements are agents of—rather than obstacles to—development.