Seeing like a people: Indigenous diplomacies and struggles for self-determination under the United Nations system

Since the beginning of the League of Nations and the United Nations (UN), Indigenous Peoples have been frequently denied participation in the formal meetings of the UN as representatives of their Peoples, constituted by their respective governments. Instead, they have been participating formally under the UN System under the auspices of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), or through Member States as substate actors. Accordingly, International Relations (IR) literature has broadly studied Indigenous Peoples under the UN System under the guises of transnational actors, lobby groups, civil society, experts, and most notably, NGOs, or simply assumed to be represented under the mantle of States in which they live. Accordingly, it pays little attention to how Indigenous Peoples’ right to self-determination is constituted in their practices directly under the UN System. This paper will illustrate Indigenous Peoples’ diplomacies and argue that their diplomacies constitute distinct agencies and practices of self-determination in the UN System which are aimed to challenge the dominance of sovereign States under the UN System and international order, but not without practical constraints. Nevertheless, I argue that Indigenous Peoples should be studied as distinct diplomatic actors under the UN System and in IR.