Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei and Bophuthatswana: four African countries that, though existing in a literal sense, were, in each case, considered by the international community to be a component part of a larger sovereign state through which all official communications and interactions were still conducted. This book is concerned with the intertwined histories of these four right-wing secessionist states in Southern Africa as they fought for but ultimately failed to win sovereign recognition. Along the way, Katanga, Rhodesia, Transkei, and Bophuthatswana each invented new national symbols and traditions, created all the trappings of independent statehood, and each proclaimed that their movements were legitimate expressions of national self-determination. Josiah Brownell provides a unique comparison between these states, viewed together as a common reaction to decolonization and the triumph of anticolonial African nationalism. Describing the ideological stakes of their struggles for sovereignty, Brownell explores the international political controversies that their drives for independence initiated inside and outside Africa. By combining their stories, this book draws out the relationships between the emergence of these four pseudo-states and the fragility of the entire postcolonial African state structure.

Drawing on meticulous archival research and a close working relationship with the Menominee Historic Preservation Department, David R. M. Beck picks up where his earlier work, Siege and Survival: History of the Menominee Indians, 1634?1856, ended. The Struggle for Self-Determination begins with the establishment of a small reservation in the Menominee homeland in northeastern Wisconsin at a time when the Menominee economic, political, and social structure came under aggressive assault. For the next hundred years the tribe attempted to regain control of its destiny, enduring successive policy attacks by governmental, religious, and local business sources. ø The Menominee?s rich forests became a battleground on which they refused to cede control to the U.S. government. The struggle climaxed in the mid-twentieth century when the federal government terminated its relationship with the tribe. Throughout this time the Menominee fought to maintain their connection to their past and to regain control of their future. The lessons they learned helped them through their greatest modern disaster?termination?and enabled them to reconstruct a government and a reservation as the twentieth century drew to a close. The Struggle for Self-Determination reinterprets that story and includes the viewpoint of the Menominee in the telling of it.

This book is an interdisciplinary study of struggles for indigenous self-determination and the recognition of indigenous’ territorial rights in Latin America. Studies of indigenous peoples’ opposition to extractive industries have tended to focus on its economic, political or social aspects, as if these were discrete dimensions of the conflict. In contrast, this book offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of the tensions between indigenous peoples’ territorial rights and the governance of extractive industries and related state developmental policies. Analysing the contentious process pushed by indigenous peoples for implementing pluri-nationality against extractive projects and pro-extractive policies, the book compares the struggle for territorial rights in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Centrally, it argues that indigenous territorial defenses against the extractive industries articulate a politics of self-determination that challenges coloniality as the foundation of the nation-state. The resource governance of the nation-state assumes that indigenous peoples must be integrated or assimilated within multicultural arrangements as ethnic minorities with proprietary entitlements, so they can participate in the benefits of development. As the struggle for indigenous self-determination in Latin America maintains that indigenous peoples must not be considered as ethnic communities with property rights, but as nations with territorial rights, this book argues that it offers a radical re-imagination of politics, development, and constitutional arrangements. Drawing on detailed case studies, this book’s multidisciplinary account of indigenous movements in Latin America will appeal to those with relevant interests in politics, law, sociology and development studies.

Sovereignty Matters investigates the multiple perspectives that exist within indigenous communities regarding the significance of sovereignty as a category of intellectual, political, and cultural work. Much scholarship to date has treated sovereignty in geographical and political matters solely in terms of relationships between indigenous groups and their colonial states or with a bias toward American contexts. This groundbreaking anthology of essays by indigenous peoples from the Americas and the Pacific offers multiple perspectives on the significance of sovereignty.

La Gente traces the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento and the role of everyday people in galvanizing a collective to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s. In their efforts to be self-determined, la gente contested multiple forms of oppression at school, at work sites, and in their communities. Though diverse in their cultural and generational backgrounds, la gente were constantly negotiating acts of resistance, especially when their lives, the lives of their children, their livelihoods, or their households were at risk. Historian Lorena V. Márquez documents early community interventions to challenge the prevailing notions of desegregation by barrio residents, providing a look at one of the first cases of outright resistance to desegregation efforts by ethnic Mexicans. She also shares the story of workers in the Sacramento area who initiated and won the first legal victory against canneries for discriminating against brown and black workers and women, and demonstrates how the community crossed ethnic barriers when it established the first accredited Chicana/o and Native American community college in the nation. Márquez shows that the Chicana/o Movement was not solely limited to a handful of organizations or charismatic leaders. Rather, it encouraged those that were the most marginalized—the working poor, immigrants and/or the undocumented, and the undereducated—to fight for their rights on the premise that they too were contributing and deserving members of society.

The importance of Indigenous self-determination was enhanced when the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. Yet, as this volume's contributors suggest, much more work is needed in terms of understanding what Indigenous self-determination means in theory and how it is to be achieved in practice.

Dov Ronen proposes in this interpretive essay that ethnic nationalism is simply the newest form of a basic human drive for self-determination that has been manifested in four other movements since the French Revolution: nineteenth-century nationalism, Marxist-Leninist class self-determination, self-determination for minorities as espoused by Wilson, and decolonization. Ronen's intention in this book is to explain what self-determination is, why people fight for it, and what the implications of the struggle may be. Though Ronen's approach is primarily analytical and philosophical, he uses four cases (the Scots, Biafra, the Palestinians, and South Africa) to illustrate the application of his thesis to current events.