More than any other group that has been subject to systemic discrimination in the global pandemic,Footnote ¹ Indigenous Peoples stand distinct in their continuous assertion of their right to self-determination in both political and economic senses – e.g. the twin freedoms of a people ‘to determine their political status …  and to pursue their own economic, social and cultural development’.Footnote ² Professor Sergio Puig's latest book, At the Margins of Globalization: Indigenous Peoples and International Economic Law, depicts the distinctiveness of Indigenous Peoples as communities that are particularly mired in a ‘cycle of susceptibility and exclusion’,Footnote ³ but focuses primarily on examining the economic dimension of Indigenous Peoples’ rights to self-determination. Professor Puig makes a careful normative argument for the deepening of Indigenous Peoples’ participation in, and engagement of, international economic law, especially on issues involving Indigenous Peoples’ wealth, natural resources, and cultural expression.Footnote ⁴

Using eight significant case studies of various Indigenous Peoples that, in his view, have somewhat successfully straddled the competing interests of foreign markets, State regulators, and the private sectors in various countries, to reach outcomes that protected indigenous rights and indigenous culture,Footnote ⁵ Professor Puig invites reflection on the possibilities for further adapting international economic law to protect the rights of Indigenous Peoples. He believes this is possible because ‘the participation of Indigenous Peoples has granted a face that humanizes the distributional impacts of economic frameworks … international economic law is forced to acknowledge the growing concentration of wealth, the hidden externalities (e.g. climate change) … the lack of competitive conditions in many important markets’.Footnote ⁶ Indeed, Professor Puig observes that, over time, ‘the effects of [Indigenous Peoples’] iterative engagement within international economic institutions can be leveraged without creating an enforcement process for each human rights commitment’.Footnote ⁷ To some extent, Professor Puig holds a somewhat rose-colored view, given the many gridlocks and ongoing impasses in reforming international economic law towards respecting international human rights law (including Professor Puig's desired ‘international indigenous economic law’Footnote ⁸);Footnote ⁹ the persistent challenges of ensuring international human rights law protection in the age of proliferating authoritarian regimes (many of which target Indigenous Peoples);Footnote ¹⁰ and the enduring structural, policy-based, legal, and political impediments to ensuring the fullest respect for the self-determination rights of Indigenous Peoples.Footnote ¹¹

By omitting to explore the idiosyncratic complexities of Indigenous Peoples’ essential assertion of political self-determination throughout various scales of governance and political decision-making,Footnote ¹² Professor Puig's prescriptions sidestep the fact that the continuing monopoly of State sovereignty remains the main edifice on which international economic law is built, negotiated, contested, and implemented. The very same channels of international economic law-making, international economic institutional participation, and principle of mutual benefit towards which Professor Puig admirably seeks recalibration of international economic law still remain driven by the very same States against whom Indigenous Peoples have sought to exercise their collective rights to self-determination.

While there is much to agree with Professor Puig's observations regarding the significance of newer generations of international economic treaties (such as New Zealand's insistence on exceptions clauses that ensure every treaty's consistency with their Treaty of Waitangi protecting the rights of New Zealand's indigenous peoplesFootnote ¹³) that exhibit sensitivity towards indigenous rights, as well as Professor Puig's approval of well-established institutions such as the World Bank Inspection Panel to which indigenous peoples can also seek direct redress against the environmental and social impacts of World Bank-funded projects,Footnote ¹⁴ one is provoked to reflect if the book's enthusiasm for glacial, incipient, and overdue reforms in international economic law is simply an exercise of ‘glass half-full’ thinking. Other scholars have long pointed to the structural problems of colonization and inequality that arose from the creation of today's modern international economic law structures and processes.Footnote ¹⁵ Should we rejoice now that international economic law and its institutions are now making a few modest strides to consider the situation of Indigenous Peoples who have barely obtained any form of reparationsFootnote ¹⁶ from a global economic system of States that, for so long, have disempowered, disenfranchised, denied Indigenous Peoples their agency and autonomy to fully exercise their basic human rights to human dignity and self-determination?

When Professor Puig rightly proclaims that ‘what makes indigenous rights different is that they are recognized because of a political or economic status, often connected with the conditions of historically subjugated communities that have been dispossessed, brutalized, and discriminated against’,Footnote ¹⁷ it is baffling why his work appears content (rather than impatient) with the slow trajectory of ‘strategies of accommodation’Footnote ¹⁸ of indigenous rights within the existing modern international economic law. He favors a dialectical critique of international economic law as indigenous rights persist in making inroads in participation and consultation rights in global economic decision-making, with some unspecified avenues gradually opening for Indigenous Peoples’ autocthonous decision-making.Footnote ¹⁹ This critique could indeed inform the content of future international economic law treaties towards more consideration of indigenous interests, as Professor Puig argues.Footnote ²⁰ However, short of engaging the political dimension of the right to self-determination (e.g. the right to freely determine one's political status) and why this question is particularly fraught for Indigenous Peoples who antedate modern systems of governance and whose claim to legitimacy to govern themselves remains very pronounced in the international system,Footnote ²¹ incremental innovations in international economic law barely touch the surface of the key issues that undergird Indigenous Peoples’ chronic lack of voice and meaningful agency in the global economy.

How can complete faith in future international economic treaties be reposed, after all, in the very same States that write them while reaching political compromises and negotiations that often overlook indigenous rights and interests? How can Indigenous Peoples completely rely on access to meaningful justice and reparative redress from international institutions (whether it be the World Bank Inspection Panel or the World Trade Organization or investor-State arbitral tribunals) that open some space for narrow participation, when none of these State-driven international institutions are willing to commit that they are themselves legally bound to respect and protect international human rights law, more so indigenous rights?

Notwithstanding the above questions, Professor Puig's book is an important invitation to pause and reflect on the future of our international economic system and the place of the most vulnerable, most systemically discriminated, most threatened group – Indigenous Peoples – in it. It is also, in my view, a significant provocation to have us all ponder the role of the Right to Development in the dynamic between Indigenous Peoples and States. When the Right to Development speaks of an ‘inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized’,Footnote ²² how do our legal and juridical imaginaries translate this right with due regard to the positionality of Indigenous Peoples themselves? Beyond Professor Puig's noteworthy prescriptions and recommendations, perhaps one humbling insight is to listen to what Indigenous Peoples themselves have to say about what it means to self-determine, and how all future economic decision-making should flow from that initial discussion. As the Uluru Statement from the Heart by aboriginal peoples in Australia poignantly reminds, the persistently unresolved issue of political self-determination is inimitably intertwined with any decision that could be taken on aboriginal peoples’ economic, social, and cultural development: