This chapter will analyse the right of self-determination in respect of its external and internal dimension, the rights of minorities and the rights of indigenous peoples. Self-determination is the point of reference for any discussion of indigenous and minority rights, although it is far broader than both of these. Minority rights in turn are not considered collective entitlements in relevant international human rights instruments. None the less, as the reader will come to appreciate, they are not devoid of a collective character altogether. Indigenous rights are largely based on soft law and some of their fundamental premises (for example, land rights) are hotly disputed by interested states. Yet, it is indisputable that the international community recognises that the vulnerable status of indigenous peoples necessitates a distinctive approach based on the adoption of measures that allow the preservation of their culture and traditions, while on the other hand helping them to develop, whether technologically, financially, educationally or otherwise. Group rights are controversial primarily because they give rise to questions of ‘us’ and ‘others’ in addition to challenging traditional notions of state sovereignty.

Faced with the challenge of accommodating diversity, liberal justice and human rights promise to provide an adequate normative framework for securing equal liberties and rights for all. However, despite great advancements in theory and law, discrimination endures, and these promises have not been fulfilled for enduring minorities, especially in places of ethno-national conflict. The problem this chapter aims to highlight is that while liberal democracy and human rights frameworks provide us with a desirable ideal, they fail to provide useful guidance for progress, from a situation of ethno-national conflict – which often involves political exclusion, sharp inequalities, low mutual trust, and high animosity – to more just and peaceful societies that respect the human rights of all. Self-determination is currently blocked as a legal remedy; states are reluctant to grant minority rights, especially in cases where majority–minority relations are in conflict; and scholars of equality law, asserting that any real advancement is blocked because of the individualist orientation of the law, send us back to collective measures.

In many countries, the idea of minority autonomy is a taboo topic, rejected out of hand as a threat to the state. Yet the desire for some degree of self-government runs deep in many ethnic and religious communities. Some people have suggested that a generalized scheme of decentralization or devolution, understood as a country-wide process that shifts power from the central state to lower levels of government, can de facto enable minority autonomy without invoking any idea of group rights or ethnic autonomy. This chapter argues that this proposal is unlikely to work. Generalized decentralization can be implemented in ways that disempower and fragment minorities, and has often been adopted precisely with this intention. Decentralization is only likely to benefit minorities if and when it is designed with minority aspirations in mind. And this in turn requires that minority aspirations be moved out of the taboo category into the category of normal democratic politics: minority aspirations must be “normalized” and “desecuritized.” This is likely to require changes both in the broader geopolitics of the region and in the local self-understandings of nationhood and peoplehood.

Chapter 1 sets the stage for our study, introducing both the political violence and repression endemic to Xinjiang. We provide a brief account of the recent history of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs to contextualize the current situation before introducing the book’s motivations, arguments, and structure.

Multiculturalism has been turned upside down. Stated in the 1990s as a political theory and public policy of cultural minority rights, its language of cultural victimhood, oppression, and alienation has been hijacked by politicians speaking on behalf of national majorities. Some scholars have argued that liberal arguments for cultural group rights must apply to majorities as well as to minorities. I object that the notion of cultural majority rights is incoherent on empirical and conceptual grounds, and indefensible on normative grounds. The chapter suggests an alternative approach that relies on the core values of freedom, equality, and self-government. These values serve to justify cultural freedom rights for everybody, cultural rights for minorities, and powers and duties to establish a pluralistic public culture that includes all citizens. I claim that this framework covers all cultural rights that can be defended on grounds of liberal and democratic principles. There is no space left for special rights of cultural majorities.

Liberal democracy arguably requires a sense of equal membership in a shared society, and in today’s world, this “shared society” is inextricably linked with ideas of nationhood. Defenders of majoritarian nationalism worry that this sense of membership in a shared national society is being eroded by multiculturalism, and argue that we must instead reaffirm the centrality of shared national identities, perhaps through “majority rights.” In this chapter, I argue that while the idea of a shared society is indeed important for liberal democracy, and that it will inevitably reflect ideas of nationhood, this is in fact an argument for strengthening, not weakening, multiculturalism and minority rights. The fact that membership claims are filtered through the lens of nationhood creates a series of formidable “membership penalties” for minorities. A robust commitment to multiculturalism and minority rights can be seen, not as a threat to the ideal of equal membership in a shared society, but as a remedy for membership penalties, and as a way of building a more inclusive ethics of membership.

Koopmans and Orgad argue that multiculturalism has taken a life of its own, swinging too far in one direction. The authors assert that the rapidly changing reality calls for a new majority–minority theory and argue that the moral justifications for cultural minority rights should also apply to majority groups. They present two areas in which majorities may become culturally vulnerable and need legal protection: immigration control and domestic affairs. The core of the argument is rooted in a unique framework to address majority–minority constellations. This “intergroup differentiation approach” distinguishes between “homeland majorities” and “migratory majorities,” alongside the traditional distinction of indigenous/national and migratory minorities. In doing so, they criticize the tendency in the multiculturalism literature to gloss over differences between the Anglo-Saxon classical immigration countries, where majorities are of migratory origin, and the countries of the Old World, where new minorities of immigrant origin face indigenous majorities. Koopmans and Orgad provide practical examples for the implementation of their approach and explain the different meanings of cultural majority rights. Only by a contextualized and relational consideration of groups, they conclude, can competing demands of majorities and minorities be fairly evaluated.

This chapter covers how the debate over multiculturalism has evolved over the past fifty years (1970–2020). While the twentieth century was marked by fear of minorities, the twenty-first century is marked by growing fears of majorities. The panic hovering over Europe is not concentrated on the political arrangements of the present but on a deep concern for the future of liberalism. This perception of the future turns social and cultural relationships into a zero-sum game. But is there a way out? The chapter ends with a discussion of contemporary majority and minority tensions in liberal societies and offers a common moral ground that allows managing these tensions, reaching a political compromise that is likely to leave both sides dissatisfied, but it is the most one can achieve. Perhaps the most important lesson of the last fifty years of rights-talk, the chapter argues, is that the expansion of the notion of rights offers an inclusive tool of social discourse but cannot offer a receipt for how societies should handle themselves. That remains the role of democratic process and for that they should be cherished and protected.

Chapter 14 addresses the relationships between translation and gender and sexuality, which began to be discussed in translation studies in the 1980 by scholars often informed by feminist theory and by the minority rights and independence movements of the time. The chapter deals with translation and gender and with sexuality and translation in separate sections, to reflect the fact that gender identity and sexual orientation are not mutually determining. It surveys current research within those discrete but intersecting categories, before discussing emerging themes and future directions.

In this chapter I explore how Irish unification may affect the attitude of the Irish courts towards minority rights adjudication. First I examine minority rights protection under the current Constitution of Ireland. I show that the Irish judiciary have not developed an understanding that their constitutional function includes a particular role in ensuring the rights of minorities specifically are protected against attack. I then consider how unification, and the incorporation into the Irish constitutional order of a large and politically significant minority - the Ulster Scots/Ulster British population of Northern Ireland – could affect judicial attitudes towards minority rights. I ground this analysis on comparative constitutional research, particularly of American and Canadian jurisprudence. In this, building on the contribution of Doyle, Kenny, and McCrudden in this volume, I also consider how maintaining consociationalism for what is presently Northern Ireland upon unification may also inform the judiciary’s understanding of their role in adjudicating upon minority rights claims.

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.

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.