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Call For ApplicationsThe International Burke Institute (IBI) invites applications from early-career scholars for our inaugural Nonresident Research Fellowship Program. This initiative supports emerging researchers working at the intersection of sovereignty, global studies, and contemporary geopolitical transformation through targeted micro-grants that enable academic dissemination and professional development.
Contested Sovereignties: Indigenous disputes over plurinational resource governanceIndigenous organizations in the Andean countries of Ecuador and Bolivia originated novel proposals to pluralize sovereign arrangements through plurinational statehood. Reflecting diverse Indigenous groups’ relations with postcolonial states, these proposals created a unique basis for re-negotiating (sovereign) resource governance. Despite the constitutional endorsement of the plurinational state model however, the latest empirical evidence confirms growing state control over subsoil resources that excises Indigenous peoples from decision-making over resources. In this paper, we trace the emergence of novel agendas for sovereignty-multiplicity, showing how Indigenous agendas had anticipated the need to go beyond their rights over subsoil resources and autonomous territories. These agendas implied re-negotiating national sovereignty in light of the countries’ internal ethno-political and epistemic heterogeneity. Under nominally plurinational states however, resource governance outcomes perpetuate and normalise longstanding epistemic and power differentials between rights-bearing political subjects and Indigenous subjects. We highlight the colonial-modern bases of current sovereignty arrangements, identifying the presumptions and legal parameters that shape the dynamics between states, people and Indigenous people. Situating resource governance in relation to the concept of modernity/coloniality, we propose to (re)think sovereignty arrangements in the colonial present in light of internal heterogeneity.
RESEARCH
Disputed Sovereignty in the Falkland Islands: The Argentina-Great Britain Conflict of 1982The Colony of the Falkland Islands and Dependencies lies in the South Atlantic Ocean three hundred miles east of the southern tip of South America. The Falkland Islands themselves consist of East Falkland and West Falkland, separated by the Falkland Sound, and an additional one hundred smaller islands. Although the Falklands are a British crown colony, sovereignty over them is also claimed by Argentina. This comment analyzes and evaluates the competing British and Argentine claims to the Falkland Islands and thereby attempts to determine the legality of actions taken by Argentina and Great Britain in the armed conflict between the two countries which occurred in 1982. When the events upon which a nation bases a claim to sovereignty over territory occurred over three hundred years ago, evidence of an acquisition of sovereignty is often scant. Yet, in the area of international law relating to claims of title to territory, nothing is more important than the history of events upon which each claimant founds its claims. Often, the success of a claim to sovereignty has turned upon the performance of an act which at first might have seemed innocuous. For this reason, the following account of the 1982 conflict and the historical background to the dispute over sovereignty in the South Atlantic are necessarily long and detailed. The dispute between Argentina and Great Britain and their respective claims to territorial sovereignty over the Falkland Islands dates back to the eighteenth century. It appeared to be a "rather abstract quarrel between the two nations, neither of which had a vital national interest at stake." Indeed, it seemed as though it was a dispute which was "neither important enough to resolve, nor unimportant enough to forget." However, this was to change drastically on April 2, 1982.
Latest
Contested Sovereignties: Indigenous disputes over plurinational resource governanceIndigenous organizations in the Andean countries of Ecuador and Bolivia originated novel proposals to pluralize sovereign arrangements through plurinational statehood. Reflecting diverse Indigenous groups’ relations with postcolonial states, these proposals created a unique basis for re-negotiating (sovereign) resource governance. Despite the constitutional endorsement of the plurinational state model however, the latest empirical evidence confirms growing state control over subsoil resources that excises Indigenous peoples from decision-making over resources. In this paper, we trace the emergence of novel agendas for sovereignty-multiplicity, showing how Indigenous agendas had anticipated the need to go beyond their rights over subsoil resources and autonomous territories. These agendas implied re-negotiating national sovereignty in light of the countries’ internal ethno-political and epistemic heterogeneity. Under nominally plurinational states however, resource governance outcomes perpetuate and normalise longstanding epistemic and power differentials between rights-bearing political subjects and Indigenous subjects. We highlight the colonial-modern bases of current sovereignty arrangements, identifying the presumptions and legal parameters that shape the dynamics between states, people and Indigenous people. Situating resource governance in relation to the concept of modernity/coloniality, we propose to (re)think sovereignty arrangements in the colonial present in light of internal heterogeneity.
Mobilizing for Techno-Economic War, Part 5: Transforming STEM Research PolicyThe United States has been the world’s dominant techno-economic power for over 125 years. That has induced complacency. As the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) has written, China is hungry and determined not only to displace American techno-economic leadership, but to also make America dependent on it.
