Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development

In The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development Karen Engle considers the strategies used by indigenous rights advocates as they have organized around, lobbied for, and deployed international legal models in their various pursuits of justice since the 1970s. She describes the ongoing tension between the right to self-determination and the right to culture as rubrics for indigenous organization, and the emergence of the cultural rights model as the dominant framework for international indigenous rights advocacy in the 1990s. Foregrounding the unintended consequences of the uses of culture in indigenous rights advocacy, she examines the appeal of the right to culture model, and its replication in many claims by Afro-descendant peoples in Latin America, specifically in Colombia. Engle argues that the cultural rights paradigm has largely displaced or deferred the issues that initially motivated much indigenous advocacy, including issues of economic dependency, structural discrimination, and lack of autonomy. Cautioning against compromising critique for the sake of pragmatism, she calls for attention to the nuances of indigenous identity, politics, and economic needs and desires that advocates often believe they must ignore to achieve success. The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development suggests that by eliding complexity, indigenous rights advocates have made concessions that threaten to exclude many rights claimants, force others to perform their cultural cohesion, and ultimately limit indigenous economic, political, and territorial autonomy.