The contemporary international system has historically been narrated as a world of sovereign states. Within this conceptual grammar, diplomacy is traditionally understood as the institutionalised management of relations among territorially bounded political units represented by authorised state officials. The diplomat speaks for the state; the ambassador embodies a national political community; the foreign ministry determines the parameters of external representation; and international recognition is mediated through membership in an international society principally constituted by states. Such assumptions have become so deeply embedded in International Relations (IR) that the state is often treated not as a historical and contingent political formation but as the natural unit of international agency.
Indigenous peoples expose the limits of this ontology. The central question is therefore not simply whether Indigenous peoples have historically been excluded from diplomacy. The consequential question is: what happens to the concept of diplomacy when those historically represented by states begin to represent themselves?
This shift from “being represented to representing ourselves” is more than a demand for political inclusion. It challenges the epistemic architecture of international politics. Indigenous peoples are neither only minorities within states nor conventional non-state actors. As the contemporary literature increasingly recognises, they possess distinctive political communities, institutions, histories, languages, territories, normative orders, and collective identities that the categories of citizen, minority, civil society organisation, or non-governmental organisation cannot adequately capture. Contemporary scholarship argues that Indigenous peoples should be studied as diplomatic actors in their own right rather than merely as NGOs, lobby groups, sub-state actors, or populations represented by states.
The question of representation is therefore foundational. Colonialism did not simply dispossess Indigenous peoples of land. It also reorganised political authority. Indigenous political orders were reclassified as customary, tribal, local, traditional, primitive, or domestic, while the colonial state acquired the authority to speak internationally in their name. This produced what might be termed a “representational enclosure,” which means Indigenous peoples could possess political identities, but the state claimed the authority to translate those identities into internationally legible forms.
The result was a peculiar paradox. Indigenous peoples were simultaneously treated as political communities and denied full political subjecthood. They were addressed by governments, administered through legal regimes, discussed within international institutions, and represented in international discourse, yet they were rarely recognised as autonomous diplomatic interlocutors.
The contemporary resurgence of Indigenous diplomacy disrupts this arrangement. The adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007 was significant because it affirmed Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination and collective political existence. Anaya’s (2004) account of Indigenous peoples in international law similarly demonstrates that self-determination has become a foundational principle through which Indigenous claims to political autonomy, cultural integrity, lands, resources, and self-government can be articulated within international law. Yet a conceptual problem remains. If Indigenous peoples exercise self-determination while remaining situated within states, how should their diplomacy be conceptualised?
This article argues that the answer cannot be found by simply inserting Indigenous representatives into existing state-centred diplomatic institutions. Such an approach risks reproducing what Coulthard (2014) calls the colonial politics of recognition, whereby Indigenous political aspirations become dependent upon recognition from the very state structures that historically constituted their marginalisation. Recognition can create political openings, but it can also reproduce the asymmetrical relationship between recogniser and recognised.
The alternative is to conceptualise Indigenous diplomacy as a practice of diplomatic self-determination: the capacity of Indigenous peoples to formulate political mandates, articulate collective interests, establish diplomatic relationships, mobilise international norms, construct transnational solidarities, and negotiate with states and international institutions without surrendering the authority to define themselves. This argument builds upon Lightfoot’s (2021) proposition that global Indigenous politics represents a subtle but potentially transformative shift in international politics, because Indigenous rights challenge conventional understandings of sovereignty, territoriality, liberalism, and human rights. It also develops the relational and Indigenous diplomatic approaches advanced by Graham and Brigg (2023), who observe that Indigenous political ordering offers conceptual resources for reconsidering diplomacy, political community, security, and multipolarity. The article proceeds from a simple but consequential proposition: Indigenous diplomacy is not only diplomacy conducted by Indigenous people; it is diplomacy that contests the political ontology through which diplomacy itself has been defined.
The Colonial Genealogy of Representation
To fathom Indigenous diplomacy, it is essential to historicise representation. The contemporary international order did not emerge in a political vacuum. Its consolidation coincided with European imperial expansion, colonial conquest, territorial appropriation, racial classification, and the transformation of diverse political communities into populations administered by imperial states. The development of international law was implicated in this process. Anaya (2004) shows that earlier forms of international law facilitated colonial domination, while the later development of international human rights law opened limited spaces for Indigenous peoples to challenge colonial patterns.
This history matters because the exclusion of Indigenous peoples from diplomacy was not merely an institutional oversight. It was part of a broader process by which Indigenous political orders were subordinated. Colonial representation therefore operated through at least three mechanisms. First, colonial governments claimed territorial representation. Once Indigenous territories were incorporated into colonial jurisdiction, the colonial state asserted that it represented all peoples residing within the territory. Second, colonial governments claimed international representation. Treaties, agreements, and external political relations were increasingly monopolised by states that asserted the right to speak for Indigenous peoples. Third, colonial regimes produced epistemic representation. Anthropologists, administrators, missionaries, legal officials, and state institutions constructed authoritative descriptions of Indigenous peoples, often reducing living political communities to objects of knowledge.
Smith’s (2021) critique is important here because she shows that knowledge production itself was entangled with imperial power. The colonial problem was therefore not only that Indigenous people were excluded from decision-making; it was that colonial institutions acquired the authority to define who Indigenous peoples were and what their political aspirations meant. Representation consequently became a technology of governance. The colonial state could claim: we speak for them because we govern them. The Indigenous diplomatic response reverses this logic: We speak for ourselves because political authority does not originate in the state. This distinction is fundamental. Self-representation is not simply a demand to be included in the existing diplomatic conversation. It is a demand to participate in determining the terms of that conversation.
The State-Centric Ontology of International Relations
Mainstream IR has traditionally privileged the sovereign state because the discipline emerged alongside the consolidation of modern statehood. Realist approaches emphasise sovereign survival and power; liberal approaches focus on institutions and interdependence among states; English School approaches conceptualise international society largely through relations among sovereign states; and even many critical approaches have retained the state as a central analytical category. The problem is not that the state is irrelevant. It is that state-centrism becomes theoretically restrictive when it is treated as exhaustive.
Indigenous political theory reveals this limitation with particular force. Lightfoot (2021) argues that mainstream IR’s assumptions concerning the state, Westphalian sovereignty, liberalism, diplomacy, and decolonisation are insufficient for understanding Indigenous political agency. Indigenous political theory, she contends, can help IR imagine alternative political arrangements beyond conventional Westphalian frameworks. This is more than an empirical correction. It is an ontological intervention. The fundamental question is: How do Indigenous peoples participate in international politics? A decolonial Indigenous question is: Why was international politics constructed in such a way that Indigenous peoples had to participate through someone else’s political category? The first question presumes the system. The second interrogates it. The distinction is analytically decisive.
If Indigenous peoples are understood merely as non-state actors, their political existence is defined negatively: they are important because they are not states. Their agency becomes derivative of a state-centred conceptual order. But Indigenous peoples are not simply failed states, proto-states, or civil society organisations. They are political communities whose relationships with land, authority, kinship, memory, and collective responsibility often predate the territorial states that subsequently incorporated them. This is why the category of the non-state actor is insufficient. It describes what Indigenous peoples are not rather than what they are. The conceptual challenge is therefore to move from negative ontology to positive political subjecthood.
The politics of recognition has been one of the influential frameworks for understanding Indigenous-state relations. Recognition can provide legal status, cultural rights, institutional mechanisms, and political visibility. Coulthard (2014) offers a critique: recognition can reproduce colonial power when Indigenous peoples become dependent upon the state for validation of their political identity.
This problem is especially visible in diplomacy. When Indigenous participation is permitted only after the state recognises Indigenous representatives, the state retains the power to determine: who counts as Indigenous; who is authorised to speak; which institutions are legitimate; which claims are politically acceptable; which representatives may enter diplomatic spaces; and whether Indigenous political authority is understood as inherent or delegated.
This produces what may be called recognition-dependent diplomacy. Recognition-dependent diplomacy remains asymmetrical because the state occupies the position of the sovereign authoriser. The alternative is self-authorising diplomacy. Self-authorisation does not mean that Indigenous diplomatic actors refuse all engagement with states. On the contrary, Indigenous diplomacy often requires sustained engagement with states, international organisations, courts, corporations, neighbouring communities, and other Indigenous nations. The distinction lies in who determines the diplomatic mandate.
This is where the movement from representation to self-representation becomes politically transformative. Self-representation means that Indigenous communities determine: who speaks; what is spoken; to whom it is spoken; through which institutional channels; according to which political norms; and with what accountability to the community. The diplomat therefore turns not merely an emissary but a custodian of collective political authority.
Indigenous Diplomacy as Diplomatic Self-Determination
The concept of self-determination is usually associated with political independence, territorial autonomy, or constitutional self-government. Yet Indigenous political practice suggests a broader conception. Anaya (2004) argues that Indigenous self-determination should not be reduced to secession. International norms increasingly recognise forms of self-government, cultural integrity, participation, land rights, and political autonomy. This provides the foundation for what we call diplomatic self-determination. Diplomatic self-determination is the capacity of an Indigenous people to act as a collective political subject in external relations while maintaining its own internal sources of authority.
It contains five dimensions. Constitutive authority: Indigenous peoples possess the authority to constitute their own political representation. Representation does not begin with state recognition; it begins with community authorisation. Narrative authority: Indigenous diplomatic actors possess the authority to narrate their history, dispossession, territorial claims, cultural practices, and political aspirations without allowing state institutions to monopolise interpretation. Relational authority: Diplomacy is not merely strategic bargaining. It is also the maintenance of relationships among peoples, territories, ancestors, communities, and political institutions. Normative authority: Indigenous diplomacy does not simply invoke existing international law. It can also contribute to the transformation of international norms. The history of the Indigenous rights movement shows this capacity precisely. Lightfoot (2016) opines that global Indigenous politics has altered debates over sovereignty, territoriality, human rights, and international order. Institutional authority: Indigenous peoples increasingly create organisations, councils, networks, international forums, advocacy structures, research institutions, cultural institutions, and diplomatic channels through which they sustain political relations independently of state foreign ministries.
Diplomatic self-determination therefore transforms diplomacy from an activity delegated by sovereignty into a practice through which sovereignty itself is continually negotiated.
An Alternative to Westphalian Sovereignty
The language of sovereignty presents a conceptual dilemma. If Indigenous peoples claim sovereignty in precisely the same Westphalian sense as states, Indigenous diplomacy risks reproducing the political ontology that produced their exclusion. Yet abandoning sovereignty altogether may leave Indigenous peoples vulnerable to state domination. A more productive concept is relational sovereignty. Relational sovereignty does not understand political authority as absolute control over bounded territory. Instead, it understands authority as embedded in relationships, that is, between people and land, generations and ancestors, communities and neighbouring peoples, human beings and more-than-human worlds. Brigg and Graham (2023) illustrate Indigenous political ordering in terms of relationality rather than the competitive survivalism associated with dominant IR. They argue that Aboriginal political systems historically enabled interconnected autonomy while facilitating inter-group relations and diplomacy.
Westphalian thought reveals sovereignty → territory → jurisdiction → exclusion. In relational Indigenous political thought assumes relationship → responsibility → authority → coexistence. These are not simply different policy preferences. They represent different political ontologies. The Westphalian imagines territory as an object over which authority is exercised.
The relational Indigenous envisions territory as a relation within which authority is constituted. Blackwell’s (2023) discussion of Wiradyuri approaches relationality as something derived from and existing through country, shaping behaviour, identity, and political relationships. Relational sovereignty therefore enables us to imagine Indigenous diplomacy without requiring Indigenous peoples to reproduce state sovereignty.
Indigenous Diplomacy as Pluriversal Diplomacy
A novel conceptual innovation follows from relational sovereignty: pluriversal diplomacy. The dominant international system imagines that there is one international order populated by states. Indigenous diplomacy reveals the possibility that multiple political worlds coexist within the same geographical and institutional space. The concept of the pluriverse, associated with decolonial and Indigenous thought, challenges the assumption that political modernity has a single universal form. The world may contain multiple legitimate ways of organising political life. Indigenous diplomacy is pluriversal because it operates across different normative worlds.
An Indigenous diplomat may simultaneously engage: customary law; community authority; national constitutional law; international human rights law; Indigenous transnational networks; environmental governance; religious or cultural institutions; and intergovernmental organisations. These worlds do not necessarily converge into a single normative order. Rather, Indigenous diplomacy often involves translation without assimilation. The diplomat translates Indigenous political claims into international legal language while attempting not to surrender the underlying Indigenous ontology.
This is a subtle but important distinction. Translation can be emancipatory when it makes Indigenous claims legible. But translation can also become colonial when Indigenous political concepts are forced into categories that erase their distinctiveness. The task of Indigenous diplomacy is therefore not simply to become legible to international institutions. It is also to transform the institutions’ understanding of political legitimacy.
Diplomacy Beyond the State: Indigenous Internationalism
Indigenous diplomacy is frequently transnational because Indigenous political communities do not necessarily coincide with contemporary state boundaries. Colonial borders divided peoples, territories, kinship networks, and historical political relationships. Consequently, Indigenous diplomacy frequently crosses borders that states regard as fixed. This generates a paradox. The state assumes borders as lines separating political communities. Indigenous diplomacy may understand borders as historically imposed interruptions within older relational geographies.
Resultantly, Indigenous internationalism is not necessarily an attempt to create a new state-based international system. It can instead represent a networked political order in which Indigenous peoples cooperate across state boundaries while maintaining distinct identities.
The literature on Indigenous diplomacy increasingly focuses on this transnational character. Robles (2017), for example, conceptualises Indigenous diplomacy through a transdiplomatic approach, arguing that Indigenous diplomatic practices challenge traditional conceptions of diplomacy and participate in broader counter-hegemonic struggles.
This transnationalism is particularly visible in Indigenous participation within the United Nations (UN) system. Yet the UN itself reveals both the possibilities and limits of Indigenous diplomacy. Indigenous peoples have historically had to navigate an institutional structure designed primarily around states. Harada (2026) argues that Indigenous peoples have often entered UN processes through NGOs or state delegations, while arguing that their diplomatic practices should instead be understood as distinctive forms of self-determination. This indicates that Indigenous diplomacy is not simply occurring inside international institutions. It is simultaneously occurring against the institutional assumptions that define those institutions.
The UN system represents one of the most important arenas for Indigenous diplomatic transformation. The adoption of UNDRIP in 2007 marked a key normative achievement. Its significance lies not only in the rights it articulates but in the political process through which Indigenous peoples helped transform international discourse. Indigenous peoples moved from being objects of international concern to becoming participants in the production of international norms. This represents a shift from norm reception to norm entrepreneurship. Indigenous peoples did not merely ask states to implement existing international principles. They contributed to the emergence of a distinct international normative framework concerning collective rights, culture, land, self-determination, participation, and free, prior and informed consent.
Lightfoot (2016) interprets this broader transformation as a subtle revolution in international politics. The Indigenous rights movement, she argues, challenges the Westphalian assumptions underlying sovereignty and international order. International diplomacy has traditionally been understood as the negotiation of interests among states. Indigenous diplomacy adds another dimension of the negotiation and transformation of the norms through which political interests themselves are constituted. Indigenous diplomacy therefore operates at both the interest level and the constitutive level of international politics.
The Politics of Voice: Who Speaks for Whom?
The transition from representation to self-representation also raises a fundamental internal question: who speaks for Indigenous peoples? It would be analytically naïve to romanticise Indigenous communities as internally homogeneous. Indigenous peoples contain class differences, generational differences, gendered political experiences, ideological disagreements, territorial divisions, competing institutions, and divergent visions of political futures. Consequently, self-representation cannot mean the existence of a single authentic Indigenous voice. Rather, it should be understood as a political process through which authority is debated, negotiated, and renewed. This is where Indigenous diplomacy must be distinguished from representational populism. A diplomat who claims to embody “the Indigenous voice” without accountable community institutions may simply reproduce another hierarchy of representation.
The more democratic model is accountable diplomatic pluralism. Under this model: representatives receive mandates from communities; diplomatic positions are subject to internal deliberation; representatives remain accountable to their constituencies; diplomatic authority can be withdrawn; differences within Indigenous communities are acknowledged; and diplomacy remains connected to local political institutions. Self-representation therefore does not eliminate representation. It repoliticises representation. The challenge is not whether representation exists but whether the represented possess the authority to define, authorise, contest, and revoke the representative relationship.
Another underdeveloped dimension of Indigenous diplomacy is memory. Contemporary diplomacy tends to be oriented toward the present and future: treaties, negotiations, strategic interests, security, development, and cooperation. Indigenous diplomacy often incorporates a different temporal structure in which historical memory is constitutive of contemporary political authority. Land dispossession, broken treaties, forced displacement, cultural suppression, violence, and resistance are not simply historical events. They remain politically active memories. This produces what can be termed diplomatic memory work. Indigenous diplomats frequently enter international forums carrying not only policy claims but historical archives.
They make memory diplomatic. The diplomatic encounter therefore becomes a struggle over historical meaning. Who defines the past? Who determines whether dispossession was conquest, settlement, occupation, integration, or injustice? Who decides whether a treaty remains politically meaningful? Who has authority to narrate historical continuity?
The politics of Indigenous diplomacy consequently involves a struggle against what might be called temporal colonialism; the process through which colonial states attempt to place Indigenous political claims permanently in the past. The state says: Your people were once politically distinct. Indigenous diplomacy responds: Our political existence is continuous. This temporal continuity is central to self-determination. Political subjecthood depends not only upon territorial presence but upon historical continuity and collective memory.
Indigenous Diplomacy and the Question of Territory
Territory occupies a central place in conventional diplomacy. States negotiate borders, resources, maritime zones, military access, and jurisdiction. Indigenous diplomacy complicates this territorial grammar. For many Indigenous peoples, land is not merely a territorial possession. It is a source of identity, law, responsibility, memory, spirituality, livelihood, and social reproduction. This does not mean that Indigenous peoples have no territorial claims in the conventional sense. Rather, territorial claims may contain a deeper relational ontology.
Thus, the struggle over land is simultaneously a struggle over political authority. Extractive industries reveal this particularly clearly. A mining concession may be legally authorised by the state but politically contested by an Indigenous community whose authority is grounded in ancestral relationships with the territory. This generates competing jurisdictional claims: state legality versus Indigenous legitimacy. The diplomatic problem is therefore not only how to distribute resources. It is how to recognise multiple sources of authority concerning the same territory. Indigenous diplomacy can thus be understood as a form of jurisdictional diplomacy: the negotiation of overlapping systems of authority.
An important extension of the argument is that Indigenous diplomacy increasingly operates beyond state-to-state relations because corporations have become major political actors. Mining companies, energy corporations, infrastructure developers, financial institutions, technology companies, and conservation organisations frequently operate within Indigenous territories. Thereupon, Indigenous diplomats may negotiate simultaneously with: states; corporations; international financial institutions; NGOs; courts; UN bodies; neighbouring communities; and other Indigenous peoples. This makes Indigenous diplomacy polycentric.
The diplomatic field is no longer simply state-Indigenous. It becomes: Indigenous peoples ↔ states ↔ corporations ↔ international institutions ↔ civil society ↔ other Indigenous nations.
This polycentric structure creates opportunities for Indigenous peoples to exploit institutional fragmentation. If a state refuses recognition, an Indigenous community may seek international legal mechanisms. If a corporation refuses negotiation, communities may mobilise investors, consumers, courts, international organisations, or transnational allies.
Such practices reveal a sophisticated form of jurisdictional arbitrage: the strategic movement of political claims across multiple institutional arenas in search of leverage. Indigenous diplomacy is hence not necessarily weak because Indigenous peoples lack conventional military or economic power. It can operate through normative power, reputational power, legal mobilisation, transnational solidarity, epistemic authority, and strategic network-building.
Indigenous Diplomacy as Counter-Hegemonic Knowledge Production
Diplomacy is also a struggle over knowledge. The diplomat must know the language of international institutions, understand legal frameworks, interpret geopolitical interests, produce policy documents, build coalitions, and construct persuasive narratives. Indigenous diplomacy therefore requires epistemic capacity. But the epistemic challenge is double-sided. Indigenous diplomats must learn the dominant diplomatic language while simultaneously defending Indigenous knowledge systems from assimilation. Smith’s (2021) critique of colonial knowledge production is relevant because it demonstrates how academic categories can reproduce imperial relations.
Indigenous diplomacy requires what might be called epistemic bilingualism. The ability to operate within dominant international institutions while retaining the capacity to think from Indigenous conceptual worlds. This is important because international law and diplomacy often require Indigenous claims to be translated into categories such as human rights, minority rights, property, autonomy, environmental protection, cultural heritage, and constitutional recognition. These categories can be useful, but they are never politically innocent. An Indigenous diplomat who invokes international law is engaged in a form of strategic translation.
The objective should not be total translation. It should be translation with ontological remainder; the deliberate preservation of Indigenous concepts that cannot be completely absorbed into state-centred legal language. The emergence of Indigenous diplomacy requires IR scholars to reconsider the discipline itself. If Indigenous diplomacy is treated only as a new empirical case, the theoretical implications remain limited. The stronger possibility is that Indigenous diplomacy can contribute to decolonising the conceptual foundations of IR.
This requires at least four intellectual shifts. First, from states to political communities. International politics should not automatically be equated with the interstate. Second, from sovereignty to relational authority. Political authority should not be assumed to be territorially absolute. Third, from representation to self-authorisation. Political legitimacy should not be understood as flowing exclusively from states. Fourth, from one international order to multiple political worlds
International politics should be analysed as a field of overlapping political ontologies. This resonates with recent scholarship arguing that decolonising IR requires sustained interrogation of the discipline’s colonial foundations rather than simply adding Indigenous cases to an otherwise unchanged curriculum. Davis and Blackwell (2023) argue that decolonisation should be understood as an ongoing struggle rather than a completed endpoint. Indigenous diplomacy therefore challenges not merely what IR studies but how IR decides what counts as international politics.
From Survivalism to Relationality
An important conceptual contribution lies in the distinction between survivalism and relationalism. Graham and Brigg (2023) argue that mainstream international politics is heavily shaped by survivalist assumptions, whereas Indigenous political ordering can offer relational alternatives. Survivalism holds that political entities exist in conditions of insecurity and must protect themselves against external threats. Relationalism begins elsewhere. It asks what relationships make collective existence possible. This distinction transforms the meaning of diplomacy. Under survivalism, diplomacy is often a mechanism for managing competition. Under relationalism, diplomacy is a mechanism for maintaining relationships.
Brigg and Graham (2023) advocate a form of “principled pragmatism” for Indigenous diplomacy: an approach that recognises the practical constraints of contemporary foreign policy while refusing to abandon Indigenous normative foundations. This is perhaps one of the most productive theoretical contributions of Indigenous diplomacy to contemporary IR. Yet Indigenous diplomacy faces a significant danger, including institutional domestication. States may embrace Indigenous symbolism while leaving underlying power relations unchanged. Governments may appoint Indigenous diplomats without transferring decision-making authority. They may incorporate Indigenous cultural practices into foreign policy branding while continuing extractive policies at home.
They may use Indigenous participation to improve international reputation without addressing territorial dispossession. This is what Carter and Fry (2023) warn against when discussing the possibility that Indigenous diplomacy may become either a transformative “game changer” or merely “flawed window dressing” within Pacific diplomacy.
The problem can be described as representational incorporation. The Indigenous person becomes visible. The Indigenous ontology does not. This distinction is crucial. Symbolic inclusion is not equivalent to structural transformation. The presence of Indigenous diplomats in foreign ministries, embassies, international conferences, or state delegations should therefore not automatically be interpreted as decolonisation. The relevant question is: has the distribution of diplomatic authority changed? If not, representation may simply have become more diverse without becoming less colonial.
Toward a Theory of Indigenous Diplomatic Agency
Indigenous diplomatic agency can be conceptualised as having six mutually reinforcing dimensions, such as ontological agency, constitutive agency, representational agency, normative agency, networked agency, and temporal agency. These dimensions together produce what can be called decolonial diplomatic agency. It differs from conventional diplomatic agency because its legitimacy does not derive primarily from state sovereignty. Its legitimacy derives from collective continuity, community authorisation, relational responsibility, and political self-determination.
This insight invites a re-reading of world politics. Diplomatic history should include Indigenous treaty-making. International political theory should engage Indigenous political philosophy. International law should examine Indigenous normative contributions. Security studies should consider Indigenous conceptions of collective survival. Political geography should interrogate the colonial production of territorial boundaries. Development studies should examine Indigenous alternatives to extractivist political economy. Environmental politics should take seriously Indigenous jurisdiction and ecological knowledge.
The ultimate significance of Indigenous diplomacy lies in its implications for the future of international order. The contemporary world is already moving away from the assumption of a perfectly state-centric system. Cities, corporations, transnational movements, international organisations, religious communities, epistemic networks, and civil society organisations exercise varying degrees of global influence. Indigenous diplomacy adds a distinctive dimension because Indigenous peoples possess collective political identities that cannot be reduced to conventional non-state actors.
They challenge the binary of state or non-state. A more adequate model would recognise: state/Indigenous polity/international organisation/corporation/transnational network/civil society/local community as overlapping political actors. Such an order would not necessarily abolish states. Rather, it would de-absolutise state sovereignty. This is arguably the important contribution of Indigenous diplomacy. It does not necessarily seek to replace the state with Indigenous nations. It challenges the assumption that the state should possess exclusive political authority. Lightfoot’s (2016) argument is especially relevant here: the implementation of Indigenous rights requires a rethinking of sovereignty, territoriality, liberalism, and human rights. Indigenous diplomacy thus offers a pathway toward a more plural international order in which political authority is distributed rather than monopolised.
Conclusion
The movement from being represented to representing ourselves is ultimately a movement from political objecthood to political authorship. Indigenous diplomacy challenges the historical assumption that Indigenous peoples can only appear internationally through the representational machinery of the state. It shows that Indigenous peoples are not simply populations seeking protection, minorities seeking recognition, or civil society actors lobbying governments. They are political communities capable of generating diplomatic mandates, building international relationships, producing norms, mobilising law, constructing transnational networks, and reshaping the international political imagination.
The theoretical significance of this transformation is substantial. First, Indigenous diplomacy reveals the colonial genealogy of state-centred international politics. The exclusion of Indigenous peoples from diplomacy was not an accidental omission but part of a broader political process through which states monopolised legitimate international representation. Second, Indigenous diplomacy challenges recognition-based models of political legitimacy. Third, Indigenous diplomacy expands the meaning of self-determination. Self-determination is not simply the creation of a state; it can be exercised through diplomatic self-authorisation, relational sovereignty, institutional autonomy, and transnational political participation. Fourth, Indigenous diplomacy introduces relationality into international political theory. It challenges the survivalist ontology of states by foregrounding relationships, responsibilities, territory, memory, kinship, and coexistence. Fifth, Indigenous diplomacy reveals that the international is pluriversal. Multiple political communities and normative orders coexist within and across state territories. Finally, Indigenous diplomacy invites a fundamental rethinking of representation itself.
The critical question is no longer simply whether Indigenous peoples are represented. It is, who possesses the authority to represent whom, according to which political ontology, through which institutions, and with what accountability? The answer has profound consequences. If Indigenous peoples remain represented primarily through states, decolonisation will remain incomplete. If Indigenous peoples become capable of representing themselves while also transforming the institutions through which international politics is conducted, diplomacy can become a site of decolonisation.
The future of Indigenous diplomacy therefore lies neither in complete withdrawal from state institutions nor in passive incorporation into them. Its transformative possibility lies in occupying, negotiating, contesting, and reconstituting multiple diplomatic spaces simultaneously. Indigenous diplomacy is thus best understood not as diplomacy outside the state, but as diplomacy beyond the state’s monopoly over political representation. That distinction matters. For the decisive political transformation is not simply from exclusion to inclusion. It is from being spoken for to speaking in one’s own political name; from recognition to self-authorisation; from representation to political authorship; and from a singular international order to a plural field of Indigenous and state political relations.
In this sense, Indigenous diplomacy is not merely asking for a seat at the diplomatic table. It is asking a more radical question: who built the table, who decided who could sit at it, and what would international politics look like if Indigenous peoples were among those authorised to redesign it? That is the deeper promise of Indigenous diplomacy beyond the state.
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About the Author
Dr Pamreihor Khashimwo is an International Relations Scholar, German Foreign Policy & India-German Relations Specialist, academician, and Indian Politics & Indigenous & Ethnic Politics Analyst.
