The new imperial order: indigenous responses to globalization

Developed during a time of dramatic global upheavals and transformations, The New Imperial Order is concerned with the political economy of world order and the ontologies of being upon which the emergent global order is predicated. Positioned from a Maori perspective and contextualized within the international political and juridical framework, this book examines the political and juridical ontologies that shaped the development of international law and the world order of nation states. In engaging with these issues across macro and micro levels, the book identifies the nation state and new forms of regionalism as sites for the reshaping of the global politico/economic order and the re-emergence of Empire. Stewart-Harawira also tracks the role of education and the reconstruction of sovereign indigenous nations into dependent populations in the development of world order, and the profound impact of indigenous peoples’ proactive global and local responses in the reshaping of international law. In this work, the problematics of globalization are made visible through the privatization of services, the restructuring and commodification of knowledge and the creation of new categories of the dispossessed. Overarching these issues is a new form of global domination in which the connecting roles of militarism and the economy, and the increase in technologies of surveillance and control have acquired overt significance. In the first chapter of the book, the author identifies ontological and cosmological principles that are shared by many indigenous peoples as key signifiers of an alternative framework for socio/politico/economic order. In the final chapter she draws these principles together within the context of the fragmentation and integration which characterize the globalizing process, and proffers them as central to the revisioning of a transformed global order.