What are the Limits of Social Inclusion? Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Governance in Canada and the United States

ABSTRACT

Contemporary debates about poverty and its mitigation often invoke the idea of social inclusion: the effort to increase the capacities and opportunities of disadvantaged populations to participate more fully in the economy, polity, and institutions of developed societies. While practical outcomes have been inconsistent, this idea has been prominent in the social policies of both Canada and the United States. Both generally see themselves as liberal democracies committed to building socially inclusive societies, and both have adopted policies in support of that goal. However, we argue in this article that social inclusion, as presently conceived, fails to comprehend or address the distinctive situation of Indigenous peoples in both of these countries. Our critique focuses on four aspects of social inclusion as applied to Indigenous peoples: the external conception of needs, the individualization of both problems and solutions, the favoring of distributional politics over positional politics, and the conditionality of inclusion. We argue that both Canada and the United States need to reconceive social inclusion in ways that address these issues and that a more capacious conception of federalism may hold the key.     

Indigenous Peoples and Indigenous Movements in Latin America and the World

Marvin Harris. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. New York: Random House, 1974. 276 pp. References. $7.95 (cloth).     

联合国与丝绸之路

联合国开发计划署2006年6月1日宣布在中国设立丝绸之路投资论坛,以促进丝绸之路沿线各国的发展,并将首次会议定在丝绸之路的起点城市西安举行。联合国开发计划署推出这个论坛,得到了联合国和中国一些机构的支持。论坛的设立促进了丝绸之路沿线国家和地区的经济文化发展,为推动世界和平与发展做出了重要贡献。     

美国与1966年联合国中国代表权问题

1964年以后,国际社会支持中国恢复在联合国席位的力量日益增强。在1966年联合国关于中国代表权问题的讨论中,为阻止中国进入联合国,美国投入了极大的精力。在这一过程中,美国及其盟国和蒋介石集团发生了尖锐的矛盾,经过讨价还价,美国在盟国的压力下作了相应的让步,美蒋最终达成妥协,中国仍然被排除在联合国之外。     

Christianity and Indigenous Peoples: A Personal Overview

This article summarizes its author's response over more than 30 years to the various arguments advanced against the possibility of the appropriation of Christianity by indigenous peoples. It sets out the intellectual and evidential reasons for rejecting these arguments. However, it admits that while indigenous appropriation of Christianity is always possible, under some circumstances it has been improbable. Many indigenous peoples have made use of Christianity but in the past there has been comparatively little appropriation by Native Americans or Australian Aborigines. This article explores the reasons for this. When the factors that have accounted for resistance and rejection rather than adaption no longer exist, it may be expected that Aborigines will indeed appropriate Christianity. The article concludes with a brief examination of academic work on African appropriations and suggests that new developments in Aboriginal Christianity will reveal how far comparisons can be made.     

The United Nations: past and present

The UN is approaching its seventieth birthday in 2015. Kofi Annan, its seventh secretary general, and the only incumbent not to have come from a national government, has written the most honest and insightful memoir of any occupant of the thirty‐eighth floor, Interventions. Despite terrible setbacks in Bosnia and Rwanda, the United Nations remains the most representative and successful international organization in history. As Mark Mazower points out in his Governing the world, an acutely penetrating history of international governance, the successes of the UN are more than the founders of the ill‐fated League of Nations could have dreamt of. Mazower's tour de force combines a history of the intellectual ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their eventual realization in the League of Nations and the UN. While his conclusions question whether faith in international institutions has been lost, the reality of universal membership of the UN and establishment of an International Criminal Court might suggest otherwise.