My examination of court cases focused upon these three dimensions shows that judicial adjudication can contribute to the maintenance of settler-colonial power relations, and supports my contention that the judicial arena is essentially an inappropriate forum for achieving First Nations' decolonisation objective.
To assess the utility of the judicial arena as a forum for decolonisation, I examine selected court cases focused on three dimensions of Indigenous difference: First Nations' sovereignty, First Nations' cultural heritage and First Nations' Indigeneity. A brief historical overview reveals the long-standing nature of First Nations calls for Australia's decolonisation. Australia's First Nations have continued to call for decolonisation of the Australian nation-state, asserting their Indigenous difference and Indigenous rights, in the face of settler colonialism. Ultimately, my assessment of the utility of the judicial and political arenas as fora for decolonising the Australian nation-state is based on the ability of efforts in these arenas to satisfy the minimum rights affirmed to Indigenous peoples in UNDRIP.
In making this argument, I distinguish my research from much contemporary scholarship on Australia's First Nations' struggle to be free from settler colonialism, which has either not foregrounded UNDRIP as a supportive platform for decolonising the Australian nation-state or does so only in a limited way. UNDRIP, notably for instance, recognises First Nations peoples' inherent rights to self-determination and self-government. By recognising First Nations peoples' Indigenous difference and Indigenous rights, UNDRIP constitutes a direct challenge to settler colonialism, settler-colonial impositions, and the assimilationist forces of settler nationalism. I argue that these tripartite treaties should be premised upon the rights affirmed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). I favour the political realm because concerted efforts to pursue First Nations' decolonisation agenda to date via judicial adjudication on key aspects of First Nations' rights have been hampered by judicial constraints or settler-colonial impositions. I contend that the most effective way for First Nations peoples to achieve a decolonised relationship with (and within) the Australian nation-state is to negotiate comprehensive political settlements - by way of tripartite treaties - with the Commonwealth Government and State/Territory Governments.
Bringing into focus such explicit and implicit framings of cosmopolitics suggests that there is potential for partial and situated practices on the ground to rework un/common futures through the continual reimagining of pasts and the configuration of people-places to which these futures are tied.Īustralian First Nations have been pursuing the decolonisation of the Australian nation-state in the judicial and political arenas since the last century.
In doing so, we interrogate the relationship between commonness and uncommonness, not as an opposition, but as a series of situated efforts to find out and articulate what needs to be made un/common, for what purposes, and on what terms. We follow the chronological unfolding of our fieldwork in Germany and Australia, and trace politics across worlds by telling alternating stories about how commonness and uncommonness is achieved in specific parliamentary settings in Frankfurt, Berlin, Darwin and Milingimbi-a Yolngu community in the Northern Territory. Stemming from ethnographic research carried out as part of an ongoing collaboration called 'Landscapes of Democracy', we outline a study of democratic politics that extends beyond the politics of a single world and attend to landscapes of political practice which embed, and sometimes deny, 'shimmering' multiplicity. In this paper, we explore possibilities for reconceptualising cosmopolitics by focusing on sites and situations where the problem of un/commonness plays a central role.