Edited by Professor Sheryl Lightfoot and Sarah Maddison
This ground-breaking Handbook explores the key legal, political and policy questions concerning the implementation of Indigenous rights across the world. An exciting mix of expert Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors analyse the complex dynamics of contestation, engagement, advocacy and refusal between governments and Indigenous peoples, presenting a profound challenge to mainstream policy scholarship.
Chapters employ both country-level case studies as well as global analyses, covering key themes such as self-determination, sovereignty, culture, land and territory. They showcase the extensive evidence that policy imposed on Indigenous peoples without their involvement is at best ineffective and at worst harmful. Through examining the ongoing impacts of colonisation, contributors identify future pathways for Indigenous public policy, including truth-telling processes, resurgence movements, and international human rights law. Ultimately, the Handbook highlights the vital importance and extensive policy benefits of treating Indigenous people as rights-bearing members of sovereign and self-determining Indigenous nations.
The Handbook of Indigenous Public Policy will be essential reading for students and scholars of Indigenous studies, public policy, international relations, and political science. It will also be invaluable for policy-makers looking to centre Indigenous people and their rights in the policy-making process.
Written by Professor Matthew Wright, Jack Citrin and Morris S. Levy
What does a nation of immigrants think and feel about immigration? Recent accounts of immigration policy routinely cast Americans as divided into two warring camps – one fueled by threat to livelihoods and way of life, the other by a fervent cosmopolitanism that sees the nation-state as passé.
This counter-intuitive book shows that these accounts miss the mark. First, almost all Americans hold a mix of “pro-” and “anti-immigrant” opinions. Their views are pragmatic and flexible rather than dead-set. Second, opinions about immigration are more powerfully influenced by liberal values and concerns about the well-being of American society as a whole than by identity politics. Third, the assimilation Americans demand from immigrants matches patterns of integration that Hispanic and Asian immigrants overwhelmingly follow. Finally, American attitudes toward immigrants are “”exceptional”” for their openness and respect for cultural pluralism.
In Citrin, Levy, and Wright’s view, long-elusive comprehensive immigration reform can win in the court of public opinion – but only if leaders heed their constituents rather than the polarized activists who claim to speak on their behalf. This expert analysis rethinks the role of public opinion in immigration matters: its insights will be welcomed by all interested in immigration debates and public policy.
Written by Professor Nazmul Sultan
An original reconstruction of how the debates over peoplehood defined Indian anticolonial thought, and a bold new framework for theorizing the global career of democracy.
Indians, their former British rulers asserted, were unfit to rule themselves. Behind this assertion lay a foundational claim about the absence of peoplehood in India. The purported “backwardness” of Indians as a people led to a democratic legitimation of empire, justifying self-government at home and imperial rule in the colonies.
In response, Indian anticolonial thinkers launched a searching critique of the modern ideal of peoplehood. Waiting for the People is the first account of Indian answers to the question of peoplehood in political theory. From Surendranath Banerjea and Radhakamal Mukerjee to Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian political thinkers passionately explored the fraught theoretical space between sovereignty and government. In different ways, Indian anticolonial thinkers worked to address the developmental assumptions built into the modern problem of peoplehood, scrutinizing contemporary European definitions of “the people” and the assumption that a unified peoplehood was a prerequisite for self-government. Nazmul Sultan demonstrates how the anticolonial reckoning with the ideal of popular sovereignty fostered novel insights into the globalization of democracy and ultimately drove India’s twentieth-century political transformation.
Waiting for the People excavates, at once, the alternative forms and trajectories proposed for India’s path to popular sovereignty and the intellectual choices that laid the foundation for postcolonial democracy. In so doing, it uncovers largely unheralded Indian contributions to democratic theory at large. India’s effort to reconfigure the relationship between popular sovereignty and self-government proves a key event in the global history of political thought, one from which a great deal remains to be learned.
