Indigenous peoples and traditional local communities in the UNDROP

This chapter explores the human right to land from both a historical and a normative perspective. It analyzes the key developments that have led to the recognition of the human right to land in international human rights law. The first part of the chapter explores land as a key component of other human rights, such as the rights to food, housing, property, and other economic, social, and cultural rights. The second part then describes how various international legal instruments came to recognize land as a self-standing human right. It discusses the various dimensions of the right to land and what this right means for different groups, with a focus on Indigenous Peoples, peasants, and other people working in rural areas. Finally, the third part explores current challenges for the implementation of the right to land, with an emphasis on forced evictions and displacements, the gender and intersectional dimensions, and the impacts of transnational corporations. The overall objective is to highlight the benefits of adopting a human rights approach to land issues, seeing land, not as a mere commodity, but as central to the realization of human rights.

show abstract

The discourse of the Anthropocene and posthumanism: Mining-induced loss of traditional land and the Mongolian nomadic herders

Dovchin,

Dovchin

2023

Ethnicities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

For over five millennia, Mongolia has been home to a remarkably resilient, land-connected, pastoral nomadic way of life and cultural heritage. Traditional local communities of Mongolian nomadic herders are custodians of the land. Since Mongolia’s transition to a democracy and neoliberal capitalist economy in the 1990s, an unprecedented mining boom has set in as large deposits of mineral resources were discovered. The mining boom and climate change impacts have put mounting pressure on herders’ ability to access their traditional land. Drawing on ethnographic research through storywork with Mongolian nomadic herders ( malchid) in their traditional land ( nutag) in the Gobi Desert region in Mongolia, this study aims to expand the discourse of the Anthropocene by engaging with the concept of posthumanism. We unpack the predominant discourse among Mongolian nomadic herders – loss of traditional land – induced by mining. In the Anthropocene – the epoch of human-induced planetary change – herders have become victims of both human-induced global environmental and climate change and the neoliberal capitalist extractive economy. Driven by mining-induced forced displacement from their traditional land and the natural resources on which they depend, herders are marginalised, resulting in the loss of their livelihood and severing of their special relationship and spiritual connection with their traditional land. We conclude that Mongolian nomadic herders’ voices urge us that it is crucial to expand and pluralise the discourse of the Anthropocene by relearning our ancestral ways of knowing, being and doing, and reconnecting to our holistic, spiritually and physically entwined, reciprocal and symbiotic relationship with land, non-human beings and the natural world that are all regarded as living and sentient entities with identity, agency and intentionality. Mongolian nomadic herders’ ancestral cosmology and onto-epistemology turn us to posthuman or more-than-human ways of understanding and interacting with the world, which decentre human exceptionalism and dominant position in the Anthropocene.

show abstract

Indigenous peoples and traditional local communities in the UNDROP

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The Nagoya Protocol and International Human Rights Law

The Nagoya Protocol and International Human Rights Law

Land Is a Human Right

The discourse of the Anthropocene and posthumanism: Mining-induced loss of traditional land and the Mongolian nomadic herders

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About