This article introduces the SoDIS process to identify ethical and social risks from software development in the context of designing software for the New Zealand Maori culture. In reviewing the SoDIS analysis for this project, the tensions between two cultures are explored with emphasis on the (in)compatibility between a Maori worldview and the values embedded in the SoDIS process. The article concludes with some reflections upon the key principles informing the professional development of software and ways in which cultural values are embedded in supposedly neutral technologies, and reviews the lessons learned about avoiding colonization while working on a bicultural project.

This study examines the concept of coloniality in relation to states' approach to indigenous people's rights, through the perspective of decoloniality. The two countries being compared are Bolivia and Sweden, two countries that differ in many ways. Indigenous peoples are living in the present time and have struggled since modern/Western interference in claiming their position and rights in the part of a reality of existing together. The states’ positioning towards indigenous peoples' rights is evidently contradicting depending on the context. Although international indigenous rights regimes are encouraging as well as setting new standards and norms, the challenges to fully implement them on a national level continue to exist.  Through a semi-systematic literature review, this study aims to analyze and compare how the two states (Bolivia and Sweden) position themselves towards indigenous rights. The theoretical framework for this study is based on decolonial reasoning and indigenous rights regimes, to determine what processes of coloniality are present. In Bolivia and Sweden, the context of indigenous challenges is markedly different, but this study strives to point to some similarities as also incongruencies and gaps when it comes to the state´s approach towards indigenous rights in the two countries.

This dissertation offers a history of the perilous American present. Through a series of timely case studies I investigate the constitutive force and present-day regeneration of political and racial violence in the United States. Drawing on a range of contemporary critical thought, "Afterlives of Violence" constellates scenes from recent works of memoir, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and film, my principal interest in each case being to excavate the temporalities, the effects, and the disavowals of American carnage—understood less as a damaging deviation from a “great” past than as precisely that past’s unceasing, pernicious fallout. Where often violence continues to be conceived of as an event, my research and readings draw on examples from twenty-first-century American literature, politics, law, and culture to present it instead as a haunting structure that is enduring at least in part because of the very illegibility and deliberate obscuring of its aftermaths under certain idioms of thought and norms of representation. Bookended by discussions of a white supremacist’s massacre at a Charleston church (in July 2015) and of the national memorial to racial terror lynching established in Montgomery (in April 2018), the dissertation offers a series of figures for thinking through history’s afterlives—both in the grim renewal of its violences in the U.S. today and in the imaginative arts of refusal which its inheritance inspires. In the first two chapters of the dissertation, I critically explore the ways that recent African American and Native American literature maps, respectively, the residual afterlives of slavery and ongoing menace of antiblack animus, and, the blind spots in settler colonial law that simultaneously conceal and extend the violence of occupation, in particular exposing the lives of Native women to harm across time. Through extended readings of texts including Saidiya Hartman’s "Lose Your Mother," Dionne Brand’s "A Map to the Door of No Return," Louise Erdrich’s "The Round House," and Layli Long Soldier’s "WHEREAS," I demonstrate how the wounding attachments of history and the longing for a different future they prompt are, in turn, exacerbated and thwarted by injurious mnemonic and political legacies that the authors present as essentially unfinished with their lives. I also show how these texts perform a fundamental critique of liberal gestures of redress and apology, as well as concomitant invocations of closure associated with the politics of recognition. Here, the present is celebrated for its being newly distanced from a past we have come to identify as imprudent, with the meaning or substance of race additionally believed to have been at long last left behind. Quite to the contrary, the texts I analyze have us understand that these efforts too often only seek to acknowledge the traumatic specters of history in order to more quickly forget the tenacious continuing hold of their traces on modern American life. In the work of Hartman and Brand, for instance, the physical and metaphorical abyss which is the Door of No Return ensures that the losses of history remain irreparable, while Erdrich and Long Soldier each demonstrate how the precedents and aporias of settler law guarantee that they survive. Where the opening chapters are in some fashion concerned with the aftereffects of a violence often interpreted as historical, the later chapters of the dissertation shift to examine two emergent technologies of state violence: the drone and the border wall. Beyond the immediately notable racial dimension that ties them to the preceding case studies, these forms of violence also have their own genealogies, too, which I read back into them. Further, I propose that their ominous afterlives are prospectively prefigured in our own destitute times, even as I also insist the future necessarily remains undecided. Concentrating, in the first case, on the visual and temporal regimes of extraterritorial drone killing—which I argue can be revealingly likened to the death penalty in the conception of “future dangerousness” each shares—and, in the second, on the brutalist aesthetics and political rhetoric of walling plans for the U.S.-Mexico border—which in specific ways derealize the lives that this architecture is intended to target—these chapters use primary legal documents to draw out the logic and justification of preemptive and protective violence. I pay particular attention to how these respective forms of harm are frequently legitimated on the basis of their being humanitarian in character. In an extended analysis of a trio of Hollywood “drone films” I show how they troublingly come to adopt this same frame, staging targeted execution as a regrettable necessity and lesser evil, while in readings of executive orders and government reports pertaining to the southern border I unweave the misleading mobilization of human rights discourse to justify wall construction. With the assistance of decidedly more critical texts, including Solmaz Sharif’s "LOOK" and, in the context of the militarized borderlands, Sara Uribe’s "Antígona González" and Valeria Luiselli’s "Tell Me How It Ends," I provide a distinct rejoinder to this mode of thinking. I highlight the authors’ formal efforts to bring back into view, first, the ways of seeing and types of narrating that make possible the conversion of calculated erasure and cruel destitution into ethical action, and, just as importantly, the bodies affected and existences wrought in the wake of political violence. Beside its sustained insistence on the need to truly reckon with the fact that everything which has happened will never not have happened, ultimately at stake in the symphony of reflections offered by "Afterlives of Violence" are questions of how we recognize, think, describe, and, perhaps finally, refuse or resist violence. Inspired in large part by the multitemporal geographies of loss and hope, of suffering and flourishing, traced in the work of American studies and feminist scholars including Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Colin Dayan, Avery Gordon, Patricia Williams, and Judith Butler, I wager to break the hold of the past—or to derail the perils of the present—in the service of a more just future, at minimum their multifarious and continuing afterimages of violence must first be properly pictured. Insofar as law, photography, and history must be understood as other names for the transmission of the past, I have found them useful instruments to think with in this endeavor, while literature, broadly conceived, I have interpreted as a site for the performance of thought’s suspension, its undoing, its reinauguration.

La présente recherche porte sur l’identification d’éléments pouvant permettre la création d’un environnement favorable à la protection de la sécurité humaine des communautés arctiques canadiennes. Cette étude se concentre sur le Nunavik, dont les communautés souffrent de mal-être et de nombreux risques liés au concept de sécurité humaine issus de traumatismes passés. Afin de déterminer s’il existe des utilisations de ce concept dans la politique arctique canadienne, cette recherche analyse les dynamiques relationnelles au sein des patrouilles de Rangers canadiens. Composées de réservistes presque exclusivement Autochtones, ces patrouilles sont un lieu de rencontre entre militaires et Inuit. Cette recherche exploratoire est le résultat de l’analyse d’un corpus de vingt-et-un entretiens et d’observations de terrains conduits en 2016 et 2017 au Québec. Selon nos données, les patrouilles de Rangers et de Rangers Juniors fonctionnent en se reposant notamment, et de façon importante, sur des relations équilibrées et respectueuses de la culture autochtone. Ce sont ces relations et cet équilibre qui permettent le renforcement de la sécurité humaine des communautés arctiques. D’après cette étude exploratoire, ce renforcement résulte des dynamiques relationnelles et du soutien apporté par les communautés arctiques à ces patrouilles. Le gouvernement canadien, via les patrouilles de Rangers canadiens et de Rangers Juniors canadiens, contribue donc indirectement au renforcement de la sécurité humaine de ses communautés arctiques québécoises. / This research focuses on identifying elements that can create an enabling environment for the protection of human security in Canada's Arctic communities. This study focuses on Nunavik, whose communities suffer from malaise and from many risks related to the concept of human security. To determine if this concept is applied in Canadian Arctic domestic policy, this research analyzes relational dynamics within Canadian Ranger patrols. Canadian Rangers’ patrols are composed mainly of indigenous under the responsibility of non-indigenous instructors. This exploratory research result of an analysis of a corpus of twenty-one interviews and field observations conducted in 2016 and 2017 in Quebec. According to our data, Rangers and Junior Ranger patrols function thanks to balanced relationships respecting Aboriginal culture. These balanced relationships help strengthening the human security of Arctic communities. According to this exploratory study, this reinforcement results from the relational dynamics and the support provided by the Arctic communities to these patrols. The Canadian government, through Canadian Ranger and Canadian Junior Ranger patrols, is thus indirectly contributing to the enhancement of human security in its Arctic communities in Quebec.

This thesis considers some conflicts involving indigenous peoples that arise from the universal standardization of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) over Plant Genetic Resources (PGR). My study presents the research problem of how to include indigenous peoples in dialogue as a prerequisite for conflict transformation. To better understand this problem, and potential solutions, I conducted participatory action research (PAR) through an ethnographic case study of Himalayan farmers working with the grassroots network Navdanya. The study explores the research question: how do Garhwali farmers experience grassroots mobilization for biodiversity and indigenous knowledge (IK) conservation? This question is intended to generate data for conflict resolution analysis on how to engage indigenous peoples in dialogue on the subject of IPRs over PGR. I discuss five themes that emerge from the data collected including: experiences and strategies in grassroots mobilization, culture and sharing, the seed, climate change and women. My research is divided into three separate, but interrelated elements. Firstly, I discuss my methodological choices and experiences. Secondly, I present the ethnographic research, thematic data analysis and draw conclusions. Finally, I frame the literature in the context of the theory of structural violence to explain the significance of conflicts arising from IPRs over PGR in the context of the erosion of IK systems and biodiversity.

This thesis examines the relationship between the forestry industry and indigenous Sámi peoplein northern Sweden, focusing on institutional mechanisms for resolving land-use conflictsregarding forest logging on reindeer herding lands. Sámi reindeer herding communities andforestry companies have overlapping usage rights, making Swedish forests a common poolresource. Clear-cut forestry is damaging the reindeers’ access to lichen and the long-termsurvival of traditional reindeer herding, creating a need for effective Sámi influence in localforest decision-making. This study analyzes the recently reformed institutional framework forparticipatory planning and consultations, as well as participants’ experiences of Sámi influence.Interviews were conducted with three Sámi RHCs, two Sveaskog employees and one ForestAgency official. The theoretical framework draws from literature on co-management, commonpool resources and free, prior and informed consent to analyze Sámi space for influence. Resultsshow that the changes in regulations and practices have enabled RHCs space to withdrawconsent to specific logging plans under specific conditions, but influence is still limited. TheForest Agency has not consulted RHCs despite the new law, indicating continued difficultiesfor Sámi people to influence logging decisions on a local level. The main contribution of thisstudy is showcasing remaining barriers and positive developments based on original empiricalinterview material.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the representation of the Sámi population as constructed in the official political discourses of the Swedish and Norwegian Governments and the Sámi Parliaments. As Sámi policies and Sámi political action have historically been limited by the dominating postcolonial conception of the Sámi by the nation-state, this thesis evaluates how the Governments of Sweden and Norway construct a representation of the Sámi in comparison to the representation offered by elected Sámi representatives to ascertain how the sociohistorical perspectives of the majority population reflect the conception of the Sámi population today. In addition, this comparison is made to draw inferences about the efficacy of ratifying ILO:169 for Sámi representation in political forums.Foucauldian Discourse Analysis was conducted on 370 official government documents through Hall´s framework of representation. The results indicated that the overarching representation of Sámi as presented by the Norwegian and Swedish Governments was of a static people that are vulnerable and inferior compared to the dominant group, with a specific representation of Sámi residing in Sweden portrayed as a minority group and the Sámi residing in Norway portrayed as a diverse population distinct from the state. The overarching representation as presented by the Sámi Parliaments in contrast portrayed a progressive and motivated people with customs and practices that aim to regain and create a Sami identity. These contrasting representations of the Sámi population indicate that both the Norwegian and Swedish Governments still operate with the sociohistorical perspective that formed prior conceptualization of Sámi and "Sáminess".

The aim of this dissertation is to assess the political ecology of conservation governance and management of Sagarmatha (Mount Everest) National Park (SNP), SNP Buffer Zone (BZ) and the Buffer Zone Community Forest User Groups (BZCFUG) in Pharak in northeastern Nepal. It evaluates their performance in two adjacent regions (Khumbu and Pharak) from multiple perspectives, including the views of the residents (indigenous Sherpa people and minority immigrant community members), and the standards of current international conservation and human rights policies. This research is important because it relates to global, regional, national and local level conservation policies and practices, which have direct impacts on biodiversity conservation, climate change adaptation, the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and local communities, and rights. The discussion of buffer zone community forest in the Pharak region follows my M.Sc. thesis completed at the University of Wales, UK in 2000. This dissertation draws on my 2011 fieldwork and my long-time experience growing up in this region and working there for conservation and development organizations. I conducted qualitative research adopting field observation, semi-structured and focus group interviews and participating in BZ and BZCFUGs' meetings. I observe that implementation of CFUG, BZCFUG and buffer zone management programs (BZMP) in Pharak and BZMP in Khumbu have made significant progress towards achieving conservation of forests, habitats, wildlife species and sustainable production of forest products while reinstituting forest and natural resource use and improving management and governance rights. This suggests that community participation in forest commons and natural resource management and governance through devolution and decentralization of decision-making rights can achieve biodiversity conservation goals. By integrating indigenous peoples' and local communities' cultural and religious perspectives with scientific knowledge, a synergy can be achieved that benefits conservation. For this the free, prior and informed consent of the concerned indigenous peoples and local communities is prerequisite. Conservation goals need to consider the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities and meet their aspirations and international conservation standards of self-determination and autonomy.

This research delves into the complex nexus between sustainable development and the participation of Indigenous Peoples (IPs), with a specific emphasis on Amerindians in Guyana. While sustainable development increasingly integrates into global policy, IPs have historically faced marginalisation, often finding their rights overlooked in discussions on climate change and sustainability. The inherent connection of IPs to their territories, marked by their role as stewards of the environment, showcases their critical importance in global sustainable practices. However, mainstream development often disregards the rich mosaic of Indigenous cultures, experiences, and worldviews. Utilising the Guyana-European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance, and Trade Voluntary Partnership Agreements (FLEGT VPA) as a case study, this research probes the intricate dynamics of a solution acclaimed for addressing deforestation and illegal logging. Central to the study is the exploration of participatory communication within this development intervention. By highlighting the potential of this communication approach, the study posits that IPs can actively engage, empowering them to reclaim their narrative and enhance their self-determination. Theoretical insights, which include postcolonial and subaltern studies, are complemented by several frameworks such as Communication for Development (C4D) and Communication for Social Change (CSC), among others. By employing a mixed-method approach encompassing individual interviews and focus group discussions, the research presents a comprehensive portrayal of IPs' perspectives on communication processes. The findings aim to augment academic discourse on the communication dynamics around sustainable initiatives, spotlighting avenues for more inclusive, patient, and equitable strategies in support of IPs and local communities. In essence, this thesis calls for an enduring commitment to bridge the chasm between vision and reality in sustainable development.

Sustainability in the tourism industry necessitates ongoing development. This thesis investigates the interrelations between indigenous and sustainable tourism in relation to sustainability definitions and specifically examines the contributions of indigenous values and knowledge to sustainability within the tourism industry. Through a qualitative methodology, two case studies were conducted with semi-structured interviews of two tourist organizations in Sweden and Canada, accompanied by a discourse analysis. The results show that the sustainability outcomes of indigenous tourism practices corresponded to sustainability in sustainable tourism and is in many ways aligned with the UNs global framework. Differences were identified in how sustainability was initiated and achieved. Possible improvements in sustainable tourism could be inspired by indigenous tourism. Key themes were connectedness and appreciation of the land and keeping operations localized. In a broader perspective indigenous knowledge could provide complementary approaches to the global framework of sustainable development in tourism which would lead to a more diversified, localized and authenticity-based development. The thesis contributes to the ongoing discourse on sustainable development in the tourism industry and emphasizes the importance of reflecting on the contested concept of sustainability.