Review of Indigenous Peoples and Borders by Sheryl Lightfoot and Elsa Stamatopoulou (eds.)

Through the imposition of borders nation states attempt to inscribe their sovereignty over territory.However, by their very existence Indigenous people confront and disrupt these declarations of sovereignty which are often based on ideas like terra nullius and "civilization."Consequently, Indigenous people often find themselves in the cross-hairs of border politics and techniques.The result is frequently displacement, a denial of original presence, and disruption of traditional ways of life-which might include migration.In this respect, the territorial integrity of nation state, a concept at the heart of modern international political theory, sits awkwardly with historical and cultural existence of Indigenous people's inhabitation of territory.As a result, Indigenous people's sense of territoriality and borders is rarely acknowledged and even more rarely understood.This book, Indigenous Peoples and Borders, examines how borders are tied to the legacy of colonialism and settler colonialism.Post-colonial critique has long pointed out that borders are part of claiming land often at the expense of Indigenous people's way of life and even identity.Expanding upon this concept, as multiple essays in this collection point out, to recognize the rights of Indigenous Peoples means confronting normative ideas of territorial integrity.Furthermore, in recent years the resistance and activism of Indigenous peoples is transforming how borders work and are understood.Consequently this book represents an effort to explore how borders impact Indigenous People and how Indigenous People are impacting borders.The collection draws together scholars from a range of disciplines, including law, international relations, political science, sociology, and others, as well as activists engaged in supporting Indigenous peoples as they resist and continue their ways of life in the context of constrictive colonial territoriality.It emerged from a conference held at Columbia university in 2019.The introduction written by Tone Bleie, Sheryl Lightfoot, and Elsa Stamatopoulou offers a compelling and informative overview of how the international community is increasingly interested in how borders impact to Indigenous peoples.They make a case for international relations to pay more attention to Indigenous issues.The authors show that the international legal system and human rights in particular forms the background for the later chapters and current discussions.As the description of the UN expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (18-21) explains "movement has been a way of life since time immemorial" and that this movement often transcends the settled nation state.This sets the stage for an argument that there is a robust body of international law, norms and case law in which the rights of Indigenous Peoples is challenging state attempts to normalize the dispossession of Indigenous People from their lands.The book is divided into four parts.The first aims at "re-thinking" borders and power; the second, titled "borders as obstructions," presents the limits of the Westphalian state system with respect to Indigenous ways of life; the third examines how globalization and economic integration have negative impacts on Indigenous Peoples; the fourth explores self-determination across borders and how resistance to the normalization of borders is part of self-determination.Sovereignty, obstruction of self-determination, globalization and environmental concerns are examined in chapters that range from militarily imposed borders in Bangladesh, to resource extraction in the Russian Artic and the Columbia-Ecuador border, to the sale of toxic pesticides from the US to Mexico.It is ambitious.There is not room in this review to discuss each chapter, but some essays are stronger than others.The book would have benefited from coordinating between the authors to explore the key issues at the heart of the book.The impressive geographic range will be immediately observed by the reader.For instance, the first section contains chapters