##Conference Program Download the NWNS Conference Programme ##Keynote Speaker Abstracts **Tony Anghie:** ***‘Western discourses of sovereignty'*** Western sovereignty and its others: Traditional accounts of western sovereignty focus on a particular set of issues such as the power of the sovereign in relation to its subjects, and the means by which sovereigns acquire their legitimacy. These inquiries explore what might be termed the `internal’ dimensions of sovereignty. The external dimensions of sovereignty, that is, the reach of the sovereign outside its own territory-is governed, theoretically, by international law. This aspect of sovereignty is traditionally accounted for by adopting a theoretical paradigm in which equal and sovereign states agree to establish a set of rules that regulate relations amongst themselves. This paper seeks to sketch an alternative approach to understanding the character of Western sovereignty, one that focuses on its relationship to entities that are variously postulated as being `savage’ and `uncivilized’. **Larissa Behrendt:** ***‘Overlapping and coexistent sovereignties: Natives, minorities and the nation-state’*** If we take as our starting point the recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty the way that Aboriginal Australians have defined the term, we are taken to a different agenda than that under international law. This paper will argue that the aspiration for the recognition of sovereignty within Australia is much easier to achieve than the anti-rights brigade would have us believe. The potential for such recognition is both practical and, while at times ambitious, has the potential to transform the dominant legal system and Australian society to enable them to deliver greater justice and socio-economic equality to Aboriginal people. Finally, this paper will ponder why, if the recognition of sovereignty is achievable in theory, barriers always put up to stop it from becoming a reality. **Ghassan Hage:** ***‘From recognition to negotiation: On the self-sovereignty of the other’*** This paper begins with a critique of the paradigm of recognition which forms the philosophical backdrop to most liberal Western anti-racist and anti-colonial thinking. It will be argued that the problematic of recognition remains rooted in, and dependent on, a continuing colonial perspective on 'otherness' which at its core involves a negation of the other's autonomy and self sovereignty. Taking a 'Leninist' dialectical perspective, it can be said that multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism represent the highest stage of colonial consciousness, but at the same time they also represent the condition of possibility of going beyond it. The paper concludes by arguing prescriptively for a move towards a paradigm of negotiation which embodies a commitment to fostering the self-sovereignty of the colonised other. **Paul James:** ***‘Sovereignty and the new global order’ ‘Waiting for the Barbarians, and civilizing the savages’. (Based on a paper written with Gareth Knapman)*** One of the effects of the contemporary intensifications of globalization has been to accentuate the layering process of cultural difference, bringing different cultural understandings into the same space, and linking the local and the global in ways that sometimes brings conflict and violence. This is not the ‘clash of civilizations’, however it is a matrix of ontological tensions that needs careful attention. It has consequences for the nature of sovereignty and for increasing conflict in the world today. The first argument of this paper is that we have arrived at a point when the ways in which we construct others as barbarians—even those persons who are dangerous, oppressive or commit acts of barbarism—involve such basic misrecognition as to violently misrepresent both who they are and the nature of their response to us. Secondly, we argue that the dominant nature of this misrecognition has changed in the transition from the dominance of traditional to modern and postmodern forms of politics. As illustrated by Cavafy’s ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (1904), barbarians were traditionally treated as threatening peoples with whom we had a relationship, peoples with whom we engaged in a dialogue in translation. Modern politics in one early phase came to treat barbarianism as the primordialism-within, a heritage needing to be civilized but linked to the sovereign energy of the emergent nation. However, in the context of the nineteenth-century New World colonizations, threatening others came to be as seen as degenerate barbarians—worst than savages, who were at least still able to be civilized. They became the ever-present threat coming from outside our territorial boundaries as described by J.M. Coetzee novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) set in the African periphery of a European Empire. More recently, a contradictory modern-postmodern politics has come to treat barbarianism as always everywhere. Our third argument is that under conditions of the tensions of contemporary globalization and a fear of a loss of sovereignty this misrecognition sometimes leads us to engage in acts of barbarism ourselves. **Marilyn Lake:** ***‘White Australia as the declaration of Australian sovereignty: an investigation of the gendered and racial subjectivities of the self-governing male subject’*** This paper will discuss the Victorian Supreme Court case of Chung Teong Toy v. Musgrove of 1888 and the subsequent Appeal to the Privy Council. It concerned the power of the Victorian government to exclude Chinese immigrants and more broadly the extent of the power of self-government in the colony of Victoria. Leading liberal politicians spurred on by popular pressure from the labor movement and the radical press argued against British authorities that the issue at stake was their status as a self-governing community. The majority Supreme Court decision affirmed that Victoria was not a sovereign state, but this decision was over-turned, ironically, on appeal to the Privy Council. In 1888, the Victorian government passed legislation to comprehensively exclude Chinese immigrants including British subjects. The British government chose not to disallow the legislation. In 1901, White Australia declared its racial identity to the world, asserting its sovereignty in the domain that mattered most. **Saree Makdisi:** ***‘Sovereignty, self-determination and the future of Palestine/Israel’*** ABSTRACT MISSING **Kent McNeil:** ***‘Factual and legal sovereignty in North America: Indigenous realities and European pretensions’*** The Indigenous peoples were independent nations, with their own systems of government and law, prior to European colonization of North America. Today, however, there can be no doubt that the United States and Canada exercise factual sovereignty on the continent. But how was this sovereignty acquired? And what impact did its acquisition have on the governmental authority of the Indigenous nations? In Canada in particular, these questions have never been adequately answered, even though they go to the root of the current relationship between the Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. This paper will analyze this issue of sovereignty from a broad theoretical perspective by distinguishing de facto and de jure sovereignty, and then examine the consequences of this analysis historically and in the present-day. I will conclude that, for a European nation to have acquired factual sovereignty over a particular geographical area, it would have had to exercise effective jurisdiction there. Recourse to a legal system, such as the so-called law of nations, could only validate its claims in relation to nations that acknowledged that system’s authority. So in the absence of a universally acknowledged legal system, de jure claims to sovereignty would always be relative, and could not determine the matter of sovereignty in relation to Indigenous nations that did not acknowledge the authority of the system in question. **Bob Miller:** ***‘The doctrine of discovery, international law, and Indigenous people'*** North America, Australia, and New Zealand were colonized under an international legal principle that is known today as the Doctrine of Discovery. Europeans justified their sovereign and property claims over these territories and the Indigenous people with Discovery. This legal principle was justified by religious and ethnocentric ideas of European and Christian superiority, and provided that newly-arrived Europeans automatically acquired property rights in the lands of Native people and gained political and commercial rights over them. The evidence about Discovery helps to explain the current state of United States, Australian, and New Zealand law relating to their Indigenous peoples. **Henry Reynolds:** ***‘The question of sovereignty lies at the very heart of the relationship between settler and Indigenous Australia’*** The question of sovereignty lies at the very heart of the relationship between settler and indigenous Australia. Despite the importance of the question there has been little serious discussion of the issue in Australia. The Conventional view remains that Britain gained sovereignty over Australia in a series of annexations and that the Aborigines either did not exercise sovereignty at all or it was lost at the moment of annexation. The paper will examine the validity and the timing of the acquisition of internal sovereignty and argue for a totally new assessment of the historical record. **Ella Shohat:** ***‘Eurocentrism and the denial of Indigenous Agency’*** This paper will offer an anatomy of Eurocentric Discourse as a dominant system of thought, and second, an articulation of how Eurocentric discourse – from Columbus to Hegel to George Bush -- has served to deny the cultural and intellectual agency of indigenous people, and thus to deny their sovereignty. Our examples will largely be taken from the history of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. **Nin Tomas:** ***'Native concepts and practices of sovereignty'*** For Maori people the concept of “tino rangatiratanga”, included in Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi, is a symbolic reference to collective hapu (sub-tribe) and iwi (tribe) overlordship in their traditional territories. It articulates the entitlement of Maori to maintain their authority over territory, natural resources, culture, and all other things essential to survival as a “Maori” people. My paper will question the ongoing application of “Sovereignty” as an absolute principle that accurately describes an Aotearoa/New Zealand society that is rapidly changing, and assert that “tino rangatiratanga” is the more apt phrase for a society that is reliant on “Maoriness” for its ongoing identity. Throughout the process of colonisation Maori have remained determined to live and be externally assessed according to Maori values, while appropriating what they need from colonial society and discarding outdated traditions. At some stage this process will tip New Zealand toward an indigenous-based society that draws upon Maori as its original foundation. My paper is speculative, and posits a rapidly changing Aotearoa/New Zealand society in which Maori are set to take a major role in determining the shape and nature of our future. Central to that future will be the strengthening of the indigenous viewpoint and its wider acceptance as part of New Zealand’s identity. The emergence of hapu and iwi as a third order of governance in Aotearoa New Zealand will be part of that process, as will be the development of a system of law based on Tikanga Maori (Maori Law).

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