From cultural genocide to cultural integrity: indigenous rights and the co-optation of international norms

There lies a hidden history beneath the official language of Article 8 of the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which defines the right to cultural integrity. The genealogy of this norm goes back to the lost concept of “cultural genocide,” or the destruction of a group’s unique characteristics. This latter concept was originally stillborn while drafting the 1948 Genocide Convention because a majority of countries assumed that assimilation, or the absorption of outsiders into dominant structures, was something normal and desirable in the construction of modern nation-states. Yet this old assumption fell out of date by the 1970s, as evidenced by the shift in the International Labor Organization from the 1957 Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention (No. 107) to the 1989 Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (No. 169). The abandoned norm of “cultural genocide” (also perplexingly referred to as “ethnocide”) was revived in this broader intellectual context. These two keywords were actually used in the original draft of what became Article 8 of the 2007 Declaration, but they were explicitly redacted from the final text due once again to more powerful interests. This hidden history exposes a paradox in international norm dynamics between competing currents of continuity and change. On the one hand, the 2007 Declaration is the outcome of what I describe as settler colonial globalism, or the logics of sovereignty and capitalism in the contemporary era of neoliberalism. Such an ideological filter was responsible for the carefully scripted wording of this international legal instrument. On the other hand, even with its textual redactions, Article 8 remains rooted in a spirit of Indigenous survival and resistance, not to mention the productive capacity of non-state actors to affect change in global affairs. The articulation of cultural integrity as a human right symbolizes a definitive break with the historical patterns that I identify as the normalcy of assimilation. In order to problematize the apparent “progress” of international norms in relation to certain continuities of power in global governance, however, I employ a theory of co-optation, defined as the incorporation of resistant elements into a dominant structure.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Jeffrey Benvenut