The thesis presented here constructs a challenge to our understanding of the society we live in. It confronts our capacity to revise and re-interpret our history in such a way as to obscure, if not eliminate, that which we deem inappropriate, uncomfortable, or expendable. It is further contended that this tendency to ahistoricism is a feature of official discourse. The state is complicit in the process and a principal architect of the structure of knowledge that imbues the process with authority. This thesis contributes to our knowledge and understanding of the discursive strategies of the state by creating a theoretical framework that facilitates the critical analysis of official documents. By locating the authors, their textual productions, and their readers in time and space, it becomes possible, as it were, to read between the lines and recognise the retum effect on domestic govemance of the technologies of domination developed abroad. The purpose here is not to liberate the subjugated knowledges of the welfare recipient, the immigrant, or the raCially oppressed, but 5 to critique the creativity of state power in producing, annexing, and eliminating identity within the context of the nation-state. Three documents have been selected as exemplars of the extent to which a colonising mentality, a way of understanding social relations born of colonial rule, continues to permeate social policy in both its formulation and documentation. The Scarman report (1981), the Griffiths report (1988), and the Macpherson report (1999) taken together articulate a post-modern thematic of difference. By focusing, as they do. on the Other within the body politic, these documents reveal a great deal about the Self that organises English social reality.

Using case studies from Australia, Sweden and Finland, and also drawing on examples from parts of Asia, including Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Thailand, the thesis explores how state and market actors respond to Indigenous claims and how Indigenous claims are themselves reconstituted through those particular responses. While the duty of protecting Indigenous rights might nominally fall upon the state, we are increasingly witness to the enfolding of market actors and market rationalities in debates concerning Indigenous claims. The research contained in the thesis highlights how a practice of 'passing the buck', or passing of responsibility onto others, is constituted through both market and government relations whereby responsibility for addressing Indigenous claims is shifted from states to corporations, from corporations to states, and from states back to Indigenous peoples themselves. The thesis consists of four articles. Article 1, titled 'Obliging Indigenous Citizens: Shared Responsibility Agreements in Australian Aboriginal Communities' provides a critique of the governmental provision of services to remote Australian Aboriginal communities through quasi-market arrangements. Article 2, titled 'Corporate Social Responsibility, Supply-chains and Saami Claims: Tracing the Political in the Finnish Forestry Industry' explores conflicts over state logging in Saami territories and the construction of the state/market divide in CSR debates over the rights of Indigenous peoples. Article 3, titled 'NGO Campaigns and Banks: Constituting Risk and Uncertainty' studies the negotiated and contested boundaries of markets through debates over the governance of social and environmental risks in the investment banking sector. Article 4, titled 'The Last Frontier? Windpower developments on traditional Saami lands' considers how colonial rationalities constituting the state-Saami relationship are reproduced in new debates over windpower developments in Saami mountain areas. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 4: In progress.</p>