Is gender violence considered a part of advancing Indigenous self-determination in Alaska? What are the key jurisdictional, institutional, infrastructural, and community level challenges in combating violence against Alaska Native women? Few studies have considered the relationship between gender violence and Alaska Native sovereignty. I address this gap by employing the theory of relational Indigenous self-determination and drawing on research interviews with Indigenous women in Alaska and analyzing the data in light of two recent legislative changes: the 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, and the legislation that formally recognizes Alaska Native tribes in the state of Alaska. The findings demonstrate that persistent questions about Alaska Native jurisdiction stemming from the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) limit considering violence against Indigenous women and Indigenous self-determination as issues that need to be addressed in tandem.

Declarations of independence continue to be commonplace in international affairs, yet their efficacy as means towards statehood remains disputed in traditional international legal and political thinking and conduct. Consequently, recent scholarship on state recognition and emerging statehood suggests that the international persistence of such declarations should be understood in the context of broader international processes, narratives, and assemblages of state creation. Such suggestions, however, risk reifying declarations’ effectiveness more in relation to international structure(s) than to independence movement's own agency. This article, therefore, calls for a reframing of declarations of independence as a ritual in international relations. It argues that participating in the international ritual of independence declaration forms an attempt to ‘fuse’ the movement's political practice with international recognition, serves to express an internal belief in ‘redemption’ through the ‘ascension’ into the ‘celestial’ existence of recognised statehood, and offers an opportunity to internally bolster political community through political performance. Ritual theory, thus, uncovers how the global persistence of independence declarations cannot be explained merely through discrete oppositions of non-recognition versus recognition, belief versus reality, and/or non-state versus state community, and instead opens up new space for understanding the contradictions characterising the international political (in)significance and persistence of statehood declarations.

This paper assesses state recognition, the practice historically employed to regulate membership in international society, since the United States–led recognition of Kosovo and the Russian-led recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Its main goal is to succinctly examine the question of whether these two controversial episodes have signaled change in the existing norms of recognition of new states. The paper argues that there is not enough evidence for the claims of some observers and governments that unilateral secession is, as such, becoming legitimate internationally. The leading recognizing powers took great care in all three cases to reject the applicability of their decision to other situations of unilateral secession, and they have since approached those other situations as if no acknowledgment of the three territories had taken place. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that the deeply contested nature of these cases has introduced confusion and uncertainty into the practice and that this has had, and will have, important implications elsewhere in the world, in terms of both re-invigorated claims of statehood and the potential for unilateral recognition decisions by powerful outsiders. In fact, it is extremely unlikely that Russia's recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in August 2008 would have ever occurred without the prior US-led recognition of Kosovo in February 2008.

Due to the pressures of urbanization, the urban poor often find themselves trapped in illegal settlements and informal employment. As housing is not affordable and formal employment is inaccessible to them because of their lack of education and skills, they live a precarious existence with insecure land tenure and employment. Discriminated against by the state on the grounds of their illegal status, the urban poor are unable to establish their identity and personhood rights as urban citizens, and so cannot access basic rights such as health care and social security. This article is based on fieldwork in Surakarta in Indonesia which studied the impact of a land-titling programme in an area previously characterized by informal tenure. It finds that the legitimation provided by land titles had a significant impact upon the lives of the residents, enabling them to access other personhood rights.

On December 8, 2011, the Japanese Supreme Court decided that the accession to a multilateral treaty by a state not recognized by Japan cannot create obligations between Japan and that state except with respect to obligations of universal value under general international law. The case arose in the specific context of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (Berne Convention) but has broader implications for the operation of multilateral treaties in general.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate from a legal and critical perspective the recognition of regional languages by the introduction, in July 2008, of article 75-1 in the French Constitution of 1958. The author evaluates the impact of the reference to regional languages; the contributions of this state recognition; its symbolic, psychological, and legal effects; and also its limits. Without calling into question the benefits of the state recognition process, the author concludes that a simultaneous self-recognition by the speakers themselves and by the non-speaker members of local communities is also necessary.

This article focuses on state recognition in the European context and on the admission of states to the Council of Europe after the end of the Cold War. It argues that two global trends identified by John Dugard in the 1980s have continued since then: a common approach to state recognition has been adopted and the criteria for state recognition have increasingly been given normative content. This reflects that the constitutive theory of state recognition continued to be popular. The two trends have not automatically resulted in a more legal approach to the issues, as the case study of Bosnia and Herzegovina illustrates.