The conclusion of the book calls for a renewed international law approach to minority rights and the question of statehood – one that takes into account the unique nature and background of postcolonial states and, at the same time, pays attention to minority perspectives going beyond state-centrism, liberal individualism, and neoliberal developmentalism. In this regard, I critically examine a wide range of possible ways out and reform agendas to propose a more humane interrelationship between minorities, postcolonial states, and international law. My reflections, offered as potential approaches to redefining international legal architectures to the advantage of minority groups, cover a wide range of avenues: from revisiting colonial boundaries in principled ways, to accommodating more robust protection for minorities within existing state structures, to radically reconceptualising the state itself through feminist and historiographic revision. I conclude that it is through these alternative approaches to minorities that international law can finally make sense of humanitarian catastrophes in postcolonial states and its involvement therein. Given that the book exposes the way in which international law advances the ideological making of the postcolonial state vis-à-vis minorities, this normative argument can also be replicated in cases beyond the Rohingya and the CHT hill people.

The introduction to the book presents the context, scope, normative framework, core arguments, and the general structure of the book. It identifies gaps in existing literature on statehood and minority rights and explains the way the book addresses those gaps. The introduction especially elaborates the background of case studies and their relevance for the book. My unique approach to the case studies that goes beyond the vulnerability framework and instead focuses on the ways minorities are marginalised through the ideological operation of postcolonial states, is also discussed in this part. To support my analysis throughout the book, I have relied mainly on primary materials and archival sources, whenever possible. The research is also informed by a series of interviews with national and international organisations working in Bangladesh. My analysis is influenced by critical, postcolonial, and TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) scholarship. Although the historical context is South Asia and the specific focus is on colonial India and present-day Bangladesh and Myanmar, many of the arguments, observations, and findings of the book should be equally relevant to other postcolonial states. The normative and pragmatic significance of the book beyond the Rohingya or the CHT crisis lies in this fact.

In order to discuss the legacy of MINUSTAH and the lack of accountability for civil and criminal wrongs, it is first necessary to understand the current system of immunities and of the UN and of its personnel. The system of immunities for the UN and its personnel was created in 1946, and as the Organisation has grown and its activities have developed, there have been increasing criticisms of and challenges to the application of those laws, particularly from a human rights perspective. In 1946 the system reflected understandings of state and diplomatic immunity, and those laws were enshrined in a Convention that has remained unchanged for more than seven decades despite state and diplomatic immunity evolving since that time. As such, the system is criticised for being unfit for purpose, particularly where it prevents individuals from being able to realise their fundamental rights to access a court and a remedy. In Haiti there have been many examples of when UN immunities have prevented justice for victims, including use of force and criminal wrongs perpetrated by peacekeepers.

The United Nations (UN) Stabilisation Mission in Haiti’s (MINUSTAH) official mandate as set out in UN Security Council Resolution 1542 (2004) is to ‘build state capacity’ by ‘extending state authority throughout Haiti’ and by ‘ensur[ing] a stable and secure environment’. In order to understand the state-building mandate, it is important first to understand the specific nature of the Haitian state. The Haitian state has long been considered a perennial ‘failed state’ and has been described variously as a nightmare, predator, collapsed, failed, failing, parasitic, kleptocratic, phantom, virtual, pariah state, or even ‘a basket-case’. This discourse of Haiti as a failed state is both reductive and simplistic, and more importantly passes over, through its silence, the role of international actors in the Haitian state-building process. While it may appear intuitive to label Haiti ‘failed’ – after all, everyone, local politicians included, recognises that the Haitian state is not up to the task – semantics has tangible implications and, maybe more importantly, specific limitations. We suggest four limitations here as applied to the specific case of Haiti, which will inform the theoretical stance of this book.

The UN’s involvement in Haiti will long-be remembered by the introduction of cholera by peacekeepers in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. To many Haitians and observers, the cholera crisis and UN failures to provide justice for victims is emblematic of the UN presence and legacy within the country. This may of course be unfair when considering the many positives for which the UN and its personnel are responsible, but the scale of the cholera crisis, and the refusal of the UN to clear up its own mess, is arguably one of peacekeeping’s starkest wrongs since the military failures to protect humans from genocide in Rwanda and in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia.

Peacekeeping today commonly involves large numbers of heavily armed troops mandated to use ‘all necessary means’ to carry out a wide range of tasks, often in densely populated and poorly resourced urban neighbourhoods. One function of international human rights law (IHRL) is to ensure that those who exercise power do so in accordance with the international standards established to protect human rights; however, it remains a relatively new development in international law that has advanced gradually, and as a result its integration into UN law and practice has been incremental and piecemeal. This chapter will discuss the development of human rights protection as a core UN goal and the Organisation’s inadequate attempts to entrench IHRL standards into peacekeeping theory and practice.

Global governance is transacted through the medium of language. This chapter scrutinizes the standing of agents of justice who rely on words: experts, public intellectuals, advocacy groups, and the media, all of which have played major roles in both the Sustainable Development Goals and climate governance. Democracy and expertise exist in tension. There are problem-solving benefits in the integration of lay and expert perspectives that deliberative democratization would enable. The partial perspectives that public intellectuals offer ought to be reconciled in deliberation involving a broad public whose situated knowledges may increase the quality of outcomes. Non-governmental organizations, advocacy groups, and activists have important roles, but when they implicitly claim to represent categories of people they become democratically problematic – potentially distorting the content of global justice. Advocacy groups (such as Oxfam) have special duties toward the poor they claim to represent, which should embed their representation in deliberative democracy. The role of old and new media alike has been troublesome on matters of global justice, for example in contributing to polarization and organized climate change denial. In the context of the expressive overload that now pervades social media, it is necessary to cultivate deliberative spaces of reflection.

Chapter 2 develops the theoretical framework of the book and the conceptual categories that will be used. Onora O’Neill’s classic account of ‘agents of justice’ is incomplete, failing to acknowledge the obstacles that agents of justice meet when trying to apply abstract theories and principles of justice to the real world. The agents involved in this essential moral task can be conceptualized as formative agents of global justice. Formative agency is best channelled through democratic deliberation. Debates in the philosophy of practical reason already emphasize the need for moral deliberation to render moral principles action-guiding. There, moral deliberation is conceived as an internal, solitary activity taking place in each person’s head. We argue that external, collective deliberative processes are better able to support this moral activity. The chapter also introduces a distinction between different agents of justice (formative agents of justice, global justice entrepreneurs, and effectors of global justice) and discusses the roles that they play in global governance.

Citizens are central in any account of democracy. Any limitations on the capacity of citizens to exercise formative agency on complex matters of global justice can be overcome in inclusive deliberative settings. The citizen consultations conducted in the connection with the Sustainable Development Goals are assessed in this light. While pioneering, these consultations proved problematic in deliberative terms. We show how citizen deliberation could be promoted through transnational and global forums – most ambitiously, a Deliberative Global Citizens’ Assembly. We argue on both ethical and problem-solving grounds for the agency of the poor, currently often missing in global governance – though again the process for the Sustainable Development Goals tried to reach them more than did any previous global process. The agency of the poor can be promoted by poor-led social movements and institutional design to deliver on the need for the poor to act as a global community of interest. The poor from different parts of the world should deliberate together on what global justice requires on the ground, in contrast to national exercises that are limited in both democratic and epistemic terms.

Peacekeepers have been implicated in sex scandals since the early 1990s when cases were reported in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, the DRC, East Timor, Eritrea, Haiti, Kosovo, Liberia, South Sudan, and West Africa. This issue continues today, as has most recently been exposed in relation to peacekeepers in the Central African Republic. As peacekeeping operations have evolved and grown, there have been greater numbers of victims of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA). Since 2001 the United Nation (UN) has sought to implement reforms and policies to address, prevent, and remedy the perpetration of those harms, with varying degrees of success.

Chapter 5 explains how the ideology of the postcolonial ‘developmental’ state relies on the language of economic progress and development to undermine the minority question. I offer a critical, in-depth, and multi-layered analysis of the complex interrelationship between minorities, postcolonial states, and dominant international actors with reference to ‘development’ and international law. The analysis is organised under two major rubrics: I first examine the treatment of minorities in the international law of development and then examine how international law discourse on minority and group rights addresses the issue of economic development. In both cases, critically engaging with central themes in the discourse on both ‘development’ and ‘minority rights’ under international law, I argue that international law provides a framework within which international actors and postcolonial states suppress minority interests in the name of economic development and that politically marginalised minorities suffer the most due to such development activities. In this way, international law involvement in the ideological function of the postcolonial ‘developmental’ state not only results in further marginalisation of already vulnerable minorities but also serves to legitimise and gloss over asymmetric power relations that produce such marginalisation. Case studies on the Rohingya and the CHT hill people substantiate my arguments.

Chapter one analyses the geneses of ethno-nationalism in postcolonial states by highlighting the three key elements of ethno-nationalist politics: the modernist response to primordial attachments in the process of nation-building, the active role and passive consequences of colonialism, and the influence of bourgeois and petty bourgeois classes under capitalism. Critically engaging with seminal scholarship in relevant fields by Clifford Geertz, Donald Horowitz, Antonio Gramsci, and Partha Chatterjee, my analysis in this chapter underscores that ethno-nationalism in postcolonial states is, to a great extent, the outcome of a combined force of all three elements. While the three elements highlighted in my analysis of ethno-nationalism are not exclusive aspects, ethno-nationalism in postcolonial states primarily draws on the elements of nation-building, colonialism, and capitalism. I substantiate this claim with the case of anticolonial nationalist movements in India. I demonstrate how conditions created by colonialism, capitalism, and the modernist vision of the nascent Indian state gave the nationalist movement an ethno-nationalist character that ultimately led to the partition of the country along religious lines.

The exercise of formative agency in global justice cannot be entrusted to any single category of agents exclusively, be it states, advocacy groups, or citizens. However, interactions across categories can compensate for the deficiencies of all of them. A systemic account of deliberative governance shows how formative agency can be distributed and cultivated across multiple sites, actors, and institutions. It is the deliberative capacity of the entire system that matters most. The process that yielded the Sustainable Development Goals implicitly recognized this by establishing multiple venues, decision-making groups, and negotiation tracks, infused with participatory norms. Yet there was no logic to their interaction – and links were often simply absent. This chapter supplies the logic and the links. Specific shortcomings can then be identified and corrected. For example, the absence of citizens in the interstate negotiations of the Open Working Group could be corrected by links with deliberative citizens’ assemblies. It is important to cultivate the agency of citizens and the global poor, in nodes, sites, and interactions in the system. Deliberative systems in global justice governance should develop reflexive capacity in order to reflect on and improve their own performance.

Global justice must be deliberated rather than just analysed, asserted, and advocated. The concluding chapter recapitulates the main arguments of the book, then reflects critically on the feasibility of democratizing global justice, especially when it comes to the practical proposals for institutional design developed in earlier chapters. An important shift toward more inclusive global governance processes has occurred in recent years and this may pave the way for a more defensible global order. This shift is in contrast to the democratic retreats that have occurred in many national governments. Global governance processes, while still far from deliberative and democratic ideals, have become more inclusive and participatory over time, as we have seen in the case of the Sustainable Development Goals. Promoting global deliberative democracy would be the natural next step. The pursuit of global justice requires deliberative global democratization.