Jonathan Liljeblad’s work, Indigenous Identity, Human Rights, and the Environment in Myanmar, is commendable for highlighting the many moving parts of indigenous struggles within his geographical womb, Myanmar, as well as how its dynamics transnationally inform, and in turn is informed by, a global discourse on indigeneity. By harnessing a Fourth World perspective advocated by scholars such as Manuel and Posluns (Reference Manuel and Posluns2019), Griggs (Reference Griggs1992), Bhatia (Reference Bhatia2012), LaDuke (Reference LaDuke and Churchill1983), and Fukurai (Reference Fukurai2018; Reference Fukurai2019), Liljeblad offers for readers access to ontological and epistemological concerns of the subaltern as they exhibit their agency, thus adding important insights into indigenous conceptions of stress, especially under duress if internal colonialism is involved. Liljeblad’s work evokes Ranajit Guha’s (Reference Guha, Desai and Nair1982) project of decolonizing history through the latter’s subaltern studies group—a post-colonial endeavour in which Guha himself first employed the term “subaltern” to refer to actors populating the liminal spaces of duress: the state. Although Guha deployed the term within the South Asian context to highlight subordinated populations intersected by “class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way” (p. 35), Liljeblad offers a broader panorama that encompasses the complex definitional properties and systemic advocacies of indigeneity. Pertaining to advocacies, our author carefully delineates a variety of United Nations procedures seized by indigenous civil society organizations (CSOs) to forward their discontents so as to acquire legitimation. The process is shown to exist at many levels within and without the United Nations, all of which serve to, in the views of our author, generate important transnational themes that benefit not only Myanmar’s tapestry of indigenous nations, but indigenous nations around the world.
Liljeblad’s work has much impetus for furthering scholarship in international relations and international law that goes beyond the efficaciousness of the state, perhaps an exhausted relic, an anachronism—if the author’s tone is any indication—harking back to the Occidental idealisms that birthed the seventeenth-century Peace of Westphalia, from which its treaties ensured the sovereignty of states and legitimated their mediations with one another. Moreover, it fundamentally altered how the world would be configured, with pride of place given to state dynamics as catalytic in ensuring domestic and geopolitical outcomes—attributes that are still operative in the present age. Yet it is within this view of an anachronistic state, however, that Liljeblad courageously pitches a “bottom-up” perspective for Fourth World revitalizations of indigenous identities through their decolonization of state-centrism and, arguably, any vestigial and oblique Orientalisms of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Tapping into the blind spots of unresolved state configurations, Liljeblad highlights the horizontalization of a shared humanity conveyed by indigenous nations that by the late twentieth century surfaced to proclaim their presence and relevance in the world order. He undertakes this effort to ensure that local and global communities do not neglect how Fourth World populations continue to retain what can only be conceptualized as ancestral capital, within and across states. Herein lies the raison d’être of Liljeblad’s work: to definitionally and systemically outline how indigenous actors had to circumvent or make more flexible the premise of the state so as to ensure that their conceptions of stress and self-determination efforts are heard. He documents efforts by those from Myanmar, as well as outcomes by those in CSOs that transnationally made visible their grievances in a variety of United Nations fora functioning as institutional interlocutors. Liljeblad also concedes that, at times, the process does sideline indigenous voices so as not to question the premise of their respective states while in other efforts, such interlocutors remained steadfast in fostering local and global linkages that amplified existential concerns of indigenous nations and their shared humanity.
Liljeblad also elaborates on the notion of indigeneity as inflected by its peoples’ relationship to the environment. Liljeblad’s additional foci further nuances indigenous worldviews by revealing the limits of nation-construction when it neglects the material consequences of internally colonized ecologies. By highlighting environmental racism meted out toward indigenous nations as yet another unresolved issue inherent in nation-state construction, he reveals how the legal concerns of the Fourth World are shaped not only by political dynamics but by dynamics that have violated the sacralization of indigenous lands. With the Myanmar state functioning as an analytical centre of gravity, he extrapolates toward more internationalized processes of voicing indigenous concerns to disclose the inefficacies and progress of indigenous grievances as voiced through the Earth Jurisprudence perspective—one that contests an anthropocentric (and exploitative) approach toward terra firma. Indeed, the Earth Jurisprudence approach is pivotal for reminding readers that colonialism is not exclusively limited to the subjugation of peoples, but includes the subjugation of the lands, megafauna, and resources on which indigenous peoples depend. Here the discontents of a shared indigenous humanity proclaim themselves: one only has to look at the US to see how the largest radioactive spill in its history, borne from uranium mining during World War II and the Cold War, occurred on Navajo lands in 1979 via the Church Rock spill, and how this can be tied to Tatmadaw offshore drilling in the Andaman Sea that entailed pipeline constructions through Karen lands, forcing a response from the Karen National Liberation Army to attack such construction projects—indeed, at the time of this writing, Tatmadaw troops guarding pipelines cutting through the Shan State toward China have been attacked as well.
In spite of Liljeblad’s commendable efforts to delineate Fourth World themes for our audience, some attributes of the text will befuddle readers. First, although many moving parts were identified by Liljeblad to make visible transnational discourses that engage the global with local indigenous discontents, a process that evinces the complexities of non-state actors working for their respective nations, a coherent assembly of the elements was made difficult by the numerous organizations and fora that were referred to by their acronyms and initialisms. An appendix that lists all the acronyms and initialisms of the work would have aided readers undertaking such an assembly. Given the amount of agency seen through numerous institutions and organizations sympathetic to and advocating for indigenous causes, the mental gymnastics required to recall all acronyms and initialisms employed in the work will ultimately slow readers. Second, although Liljeblad mentions that fieldwork and interviews were conducted over a five-year period between 2015 and 2020, only three interviewees’ sentiments were ever conveyed, and these were drawn from only one year of his research.
Finally, given that Liljeblad employs Myanmar’s complex indigenous terrain to extrapolate toward the plight of indigenous nations elsewhere, serious considerations should have been directed toward operationalizing some notion of failed state governance (given Myanmar’s many decades of militarized rule that in 2021 stymied Aung San Suu Kyi’s efforts at democratizing the country when she was once more placed under house arrest). Indeed, Aung San Suu Kyi’s wherewithal to legalistically advocate for Myanmar’s indigenous nations and her failure to address the plight of the Rohingya were not mentioned in the work even though much of her legacy attempted to realize the ideals of the Panglong Agreement of 1947—an agreement that intended to grant autonomy and self-determination to Myanmar’s many indigenous nations. Liljeblad’s analyses did not fully consider to what degree a state can realize its social contract as a function of the type of governance within which indigenous nations adjudicate their bottom-up political and ecological lives. Analyses proceeded as if the systemic vagaries of governance were controlled for. That is, the plight of Scandinavia’s Sami people, for example, and those of the Pa’Oh, the nation from which our author hails, cannot be fully appreciated unless the purview of a non-militarized governance of Sweden, Norway, and Finland is seen on a continuum toward the militarized governance of Myanmar.
Although the aforementioned concerns detracted somewhat from Liljeblad’s analytical acumen, where his work continues to be hopeful and useful can be seen in its projection of agency by indigenous non-state actors—a process that reminds readers that indigeneity is not a concept that can be relegated to books and museums with tropish language (as in how group X was “wiped out” by colonialism). Liljeblad reveals, instead, the creative and dynamic presence of Fourth World nations engaging with local and international communities through a variety of channels across the present and across time. The non-state actors are rightfully presented as creating their post-colonial narratives in real time, with full situational awareness of how to proliferate their thematic concerns through institutions at the local and global that amplify their political and environmental discontents. Thus, indigenous nations are rightfully seen to be authoring their empowerment in the present, thus indelibly embedding their relevance in the fabric of today’s humanity. In this regard, Liljeblad’s celebration of a Fourth World and their bottom-up agency absolves him from the text’s few shortcomings. He convincingly makes visible thriving communities that can frequently exist beyond the dynamics and duress generated by the state and demonstrates the staying and continuing nascence of Fourth World empowerment and self-determination.
