Beatrice Halsaa: Book review in NORA

Beatrice Halsaa has reviewed Rauna Kuokkanen’s Restructuring Relations: Indigenous Self-Determination, Governance and Gender in the latest edition of NORA.

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Rauna Kuokkanen’s timely book, Restructuring Relations. Indigenous Self-Determination, Governance and Gender, offers an extensive analysis of Indigenous people’s struggle for survival recommendable for scholars and activists interested in topics such as (the intersection of) international law, post-colonial, feminist and Indigenous studies. Gender is Kuokkanen´s prism for discussing Indigenous struggles against colonialism. Whilst self-determination is definitely the aim of the struggles, it is everything but certain what it entails. Traditionally it has not been related to violence against women, but this is what Kuokkanen does. She compares self-determination issues among First Nations, Inuit and Sámi people from a feminist perspective, and criticizes established international law and human rights regimes for neglecting bodily rights in her exhaustive comparison of Indigenous peoples living in the federal state Canada, the autonomous territory of Greenland, and the unitary Scandinavian states Norway, Sweden and Finland.

Read the full review here.

Published Sep. 21, 2020 1:08 PM