Globalisation and the Return to Empire: an Indigenous Response = Te torino whakahaere, whakamuri

Abstract

This thesis may be regarded as both a history of the present and a signifier for the future. Developed during a time of dramatic global upheavals and transformations, it is concerned with the political economy of world order and the ontologies of being upon which world order is predicated. As the framework for the world order of nation states, international law was the means whereby indigenous peoples within colonised territories reconstructed from sovereign nations to dependent populations. Undperpinning this body of law and the political formations of world order were sets of social and political ontologies which continue to be contested. These ontologies are frequently at variance with those of indigenous peoples and shape the arena within which the struggle for self-determination and the validation of indigenous knowledge, values and subjectivities is played out. Contextualised within the international political and juridical framework, the thesis utilises critical theoretical traditions to examine the participation of indigenous peoples in the construction of world order and new global formations. Positioned from a Maori perspective, the thesis also tracks the historical role of education in the development of world order and considers the role and form of Maori educational resistance. In engaging with these issues across macro and micro levels, the thesis identifies the international arena, the national state and forms of regionalism as sites for the reshaping of the global politico/economic order and the emergence of Empire. Allied to this are the reconstruction of hierarchies of knowledge and subjectivities within new Manichean divides. Key questions raised in the thesis concern the positioning of indigenous ontologies and epistemologies within the emergent global order, and the nature of resistance or response. Calls for a new ontology of world order are increasingly being articulated in response to the multiple and increasing crises of globalisation. This thesis argues that, far from irrelevant, traditional indigenous social, political and cosmological ontologies are profoundly important to the development of transformative alternative frameworks for global order.