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Indigenous peoples across the Global South continue to face political exclusion, insecure rights, livelihood pressures, and unequal access to state institutions. Although many states formally recognize Indigenous citizenship and participation, such recognition does not always provide communities with meaningful influence over decisions that affect their territories, resources, cultures, and futures. Development policies, conservation initiatives, extractive industries, and climate interventions can create new opportunities while also reproducing older patterns of dispossession and marginalization.
This panel will explore how Indigenous peoples exercise political agency within these unequal and changing conditions. It argues how Indigenous communities engage with state institutions, electoral politics, customary authorities, civil society organizations, and private actors. It also considers when these engagements promote democratic inclusion and when they create new forms of dependency, exclusion, or control. Rather than portraying Indigenous peoples only as victims of political and economic change, the panel approaches them as political actors who negotiate institutions, build alliances, mobilize collective identities, and develop alternative visions of governance and development.
The panel invites theoretical, empirical, and comparative papers from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other regions of the Global South. Contributions may explore political representation, customary governance, land and territorial rights, natural-resource conflicts, livelihood transformation, environmental politics, women's leadership, youth participation, legal pluralism, social movements, civil society, public policy, and development interventions. Particular attention will be given to how locally grounded struggles interact with national institutions, global development agendas, and transnational networks.
By bringing these perspectives into dialogue, the panel will explore how Indigenous political agency can influence institutional change and expand democratic participation. It approaches democratic inclusion as more than formal recognition or occasional consultation. Meaningful inclusion depends on institutions that value Indigenous knowledge, respond to community priorities, and give Indigenous peoples genuine influence over decisions that affect their lives. Viewing governance from Indigenous perspectives can therefore reveal both the limitations of existing democratic systems and possible pathways towards more inclusive institutional change. The panel will therefore contribute to wider debates on how uncertain democracies can confront historical injustice, reduce institutional inequality, and negotiate competing visions of development while enabling Indigenous communities to shape their own futures.