"Reclaiming Indigenous Sovereignty through Postcolonial Discourse in the Global South: Land, Knowledge, and Self-Determination Beyond Colonial Modernity
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between postcolonial discourse and indigenous sovereignty reclamation in the Global South, with historical attention to the Indian subcontinent. It argues that political independence from colonial rule did not resolve the structural dispossession of indigenous communities, most acutely the Adivasi populations of India, from their lands, epistemologies, and customary governance systems. The colonial legal architecture inaugurated by British forest and land legislation in the nineteenth century was substantially preserved within the postcolonial Indian state, perpetuating historical injustice in new administrative forms. Drawing on postcolonial theory (Fanon, Spivak), decolonial thought (Mignolo, Quijano), subaltern studies (Guha, Chakrabarty), and indigenous sovereignty scholarship (Smith, Coulthard), the paper proposes a three-dimensional sovereignty reclamation model comprising territorial, epistemic, and cultural-governance dimensions. This framework is applied comparatively across four Global South cases: the Adivasi movement in India, the Maori struggle in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Maasai land rights contestation in East Africa, and the Latin American plurinational movements in Bolivia and Ecuador. The analysis demonstrates that colonial modernity continues to operate through postcolonial state structures, legal regimes, and epistemic hierarchies. Postcolonial discourse enables indigenous communities to contest these structures by rewriting history, challenging colonial legality, recovering suppressed epistemologies, and asserting alternative governance identities. The paper concludes that epistemic justice is non-negotiable for meaningful sovereignty reclamation, and that indigenous sovereignty is not a nostalgic regression but a contemporary decolonial political project of enduring historical legitimacy.
Author: Ms. Aditi
Institution: KR Mangalam University
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7214053388