Globalization, Law & Justice Workshop Series
presents
Karen Engle
University of Texas at Austin School of Law
The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development:
Rights, Culture, Strategy
4:10 – 6:00 PM
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Solarium (room FA2) – Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
Across the world, indigenous peoples use international law to make claims for heritage, territory, and economic development. In her recently published book, The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development, Karen Engle traces the history of these claims, considering the prevalence of particular legal frameworks and their costs and benefits for indigenous groups. The book highlights the dilemmas that accompany each legal strategy, as well as the persistent elusiveness of economic development for indigenous peoples. Focusing primarily on the Americas, the book describes how cultural rights emerged over self-determination as the dominant framework for indigenous advocacy in the late twentieth century, bringing unfortunate, if unintended, consequences. Conceiving of indigenous rights as cultural rights, the book argues, has largely displaced or deferred many of the economic and political issues that initially motivated much indigenous advocacy. That is, by asserting static, essentialized notions of indigenous culture, indigenous rights advocates have often made concessions that threaten to exclude many claimants, force others into norms of cultural cohesion, and limit indigenous economic, political, and territorial autonomy. The book explores one use of the right to culture outside the context of indigenous rights, through a discussion of a 1993 Colombian law granting collective land title to certain Afro-descendant communities. Following the aspirations for and disappointments in this law, it cautions advocates for marginalized communities against learning the wrong lessons from the recent struggles of indigenous peoples at the international level.
Engles talk will be based on the book, and will focus on historical and contemporary tensions and alliances between advocates for development, the environment and indigenous rights to culture.
KAREN ENGLE is Cecil D. Redford Professor in Law at The University of Texas School of Law, and founding director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. She is also an affiliated faculty member of Latin American Studies and of Gender and Women's Studies. She teaches courses and specialized seminars in public international law, international human rights law and employment discrimination. Professor Engle writes and lectures extensively on international human rights law. Her recent works include The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (Duke University Press, 2010), The Force of Shame (in Rethinking Rape Law, Routledge 2010)(with Annelies Lottmann), Indigenous Roads to Development (in Handbook of International Law, Routledge 2009), Judging Sex in War (Michigan Law Review, 2008), Calling in the Troops: The Uneasy Relationship Among Human Rights, Women's Rights and Humanitarian Intervention (Harvard Human Rights Journal, 2007), and Feminism and Its (Dis)contents: Criminalizing War-Time Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina (American Journal of International Law, 2005. Among her awards, Professor Engle received a Bellagio Residency Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2009 and a Fulbright Senior Specialist assignment to Bogot,Colombia in 2010.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
