UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

"Reclaiming Indigenous Sovereignty through Postcolonial Discourse in the Global South: Land, Knowledge, and Self-Determination Beyond Colonial Modernity

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.66871/ihj.v1i1.001

Authors

Ms. Aditi

Reported year

2026

Reported language

en

Source type

article

First detected

2026-11-09T19:04:47.793192+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:04:47.793192+00:00

Last HTTP verification

Not checked

Institutions reported by the source

KR Mangalam University

Reported affiliation countries

IN

Documentary abstract — original language

This paper examines the relationship between postcolonial discourse and indigenous sovereignty reclamation in the Global South, with historical attention to the Indian subcontinent. It argues that political independence from colonial rule did not resolve the structural dispossession of indigenous communities, most acutely the Adivasi populations of India, from their lands, epistemologies, and customary governance systems. The colonial legal architecture inaugurated by British forest and land legislation in the nineteenth century was substantially preserved within the postcolonial Indian state, perpetuating historical injustice in new administrative forms. Drawing on postcolonial theory (Fanon, Spivak), decolonial thought (Mignolo, Quijano), subaltern studies (Guha, Chakrabarty), and indigenous sovereignty scholarship (Smith, Coulthard), the paper proposes a three-dimensional sovereignty reclamation model comprising territorial, epistemic, and cultural-governance dimensions. This framework is applied comparatively across four Global South cases: the Adivasi movement in India, the Maori struggle in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Maasai land rights contestation in East Africa, and the Latin American plurinational movements in Bolivia and Ecuador. The analysis demonstrates that colonial modernity continues to operate through postcolonial state structures, legal regimes, and epistemic hierarchies. Postcolonial discourse enables indigenous communities to contest these structures by rewriting history, challenging colonial legality, recovering suppressed epistemologies, and asserting alternative governance identities. The paper concludes that epistemic justice is non-negotiable for meaningful sovereignty reclamation, and that indigenous sovereignty is not a nostalgic regression but a contemporary decolonial political project of enduring historical legitimacy.

Identifiers

OPENALEX

W7214053388

DOI

10.66871/ihj.v1i1.001

Documentary context

Documentary family

Scholarship

Source-reported types

article

Natural entities mentioned

Forest · Territory

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.66871/ihj.v1i1.001
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W7214053388

Documented bibliographic relations

Source-declared references and links; they do not establish legal support or UGLC qualification. Up to 20 outgoing references are displayed.

• openalex:w1968223252 · CITES
• openalex:w2015411663 · CITES
• openalex:w2018276495 · CITES
• openalex:w2041486751 · CITES

0 incoming references within the detected corpus

Documentary status

Relevance pending

Library

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