Valerie Philips (Tulsa) posted “Indigenous Rights, Traditional Knowledge, and Access to Genetic Resources: New Participants in International Law Making” on SSRN. Here’s the abstract:
Being able at least to imagine the demise of the nation-state is critical to understanding how the contemporary nation-state relates to indigenous peoples. Neither Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) nor Critical Race Theory (CRT) has effectively analyzed the impact of indigenous peoples concerns on international law, although both have tried to incorporate indigenous peoples into their respective modes of thinking. This is because TWAIL and CRT continue to focus fundamentally on the goals and advocacy of nationalist elites formed during the so-called post-colonial era. Indigenous peoples are lumped into social movements as if their interests cannot be distinguished from those of the mass of civil society. Scholars who take a grassroots, decolonizing approach, such as Maori professor Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, are much better suited to the task of analyzing the relationships among the nation-state, international laws surrounding traditional knowledge, and the rights of indigenous peoples.