Project description
Redefining legal inclusion for indigenous rights
Indigenous peoples’ rights are increasingly recognised worldwide, yet true inclusion in laws and societies remains uneven. Many indigenous groups face marginalisation, limited legal representation and historical injustices that still shape their lives today. Understanding how national and international laws interact to create and address these issues is complex but crucial. New approaches are needed to fully understand legal inclusion and exclusion mechanisms. To tackle this challenge, the ERC-funded MARCEN project will develop a legal inclusion theory. Using the Sámi people in Sweden, Norway and Finland and the contemporary truth commissions as a case study, MARCEN will explore how laws, governance and history shape indigeneity. Its findings aim to transform approaches to inclusion globally.
Objective
Globally, indigenous peoples’ rights appear to become recognised to a greater extent, but are indigenous groups more included in settler states’ laws and societies? Built on the strong foundation of legal mobilisation, rights development and transitional justice theories, MARCEN aims to inaugurate a paradigm-shifting legal inclusion theory with broad implementation possibilities.
With the goal of establishing a new scientific foundation to understand the interplay between supranational and national legal frameworks, governance practices, and the socio-legal position of indigenous groups, the first contours of this legal inclusion theory will be outlined using the most prominent indigenous group in Europe – the Sámi in the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway and Finland) as a comparative case study. With the Sámi under scrutiny, MARCEN will address:
1) How supranational and national legal regulation and rights developments affect the governance of indigeneity;
2) The historical (1920s–2020s) perspective of indigeneity framing and governance;
3) The impetuses, scopes, and effects of indigenous truth and reconciliation commissions;
4) How indigenous groups have used law and global rights discourses to mobilise, voice claims and improve their position.
Using an innovative methodology, MARCEN is uniquely positioned to bridge the interdisciplinary gaps in the interplay between international and national laws, policies, legal cultures, theory and practice.
The legal inclusion theory will be the starting point of a prominent research field, with extensive applicability within and beyond indigenous rights. As such, the findings of the project extend to the fields of integration, migration, marginalisation, inequality and discrimination.
Building on my 10-year track record covering socio-legal scholarship, MARCEN will give me the opportunity to enable the urgently needed shift towards greater understanding of legal inclusion and exclusion.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- social sciencessociologygovernance
- social sciencessociologysocial issuessocial inequalities
- social scienceslaw
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
20014 Turku
Finland