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Canada and New Zealand were two of only four countries which voted against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, before eventually moving to support. Since then, this declaration has influenced Canadian politics and practices, particularly the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 2015 'calls to action', legislation, and subsequent action plans on both the federal and provincial levels. Different political parties' priorities affect the implementation of indigenous rights policies. Nonetheless, Canada demonstrates the importance of normative change, outside of legislation or formal policy change. Norms of co-development, co-design and co-drafting create opportunities for indigenous peoples to have a say in policies that affect them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) recognises both Indigenous peoples' right to self-determination and simultaneously offers protections in regard to states' right to sovereignty and territorial integrity vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples' claims. Often, this is considered an internal inconsistency of the UNDRIP, and another common critique is that Indigenous peoples were only recognised as having a diminished right to self-determination, which is less than what everyone else enjoys. This article stands in contrast to these two lines of critique, arguing that the UNDRIP's articulation of self-determination is potentially ushering in a broadening, and possible reshaping, of self-determination, which has been increasingly decoupled from singular Westphalian notions of 'sovereignty' and 'territoriality' in ways that require ongoing negotiation between peoples and states. This case study of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's issuance and use of their passports, based on original fieldwork including a set of qualitative interviews with key informants, demonstrates how the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is pushing the practice and understanding of self-determination in multiple, new directions to include plural sovereignties in deeply significant ways concerning International Relations in both theory and in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An overcompliant state is one that paradoxically takes actions that recognize specific rights or a category of rights that go beyond or even against that state's international human rights treaty obligations or its normative international commitments. Since there is no existing JR literature that would explain why a state might paradoxically comply or "overcomply" with its stated commitments, there is also no theory to explain what would propel a state to "overcomply" with an emergent norm. Securing indigenous rights means that several critical changes in the international discourse must occur, including an alteration of the liberal international Westphalian system of state sovereignty toward a postliberal, plurinational sovereignty system that includes a separate nation-to-nation and consent-based shared sovereignty arrangement between states and indigenous peoples. "Overcompliance" in indigenous rights occurs under a particular set of conditions: (1) when there is a strong presence of the international indigenous-rights movement within the state; (2) when the state places high value on its reputation as a "good global citizen"; and (3) when change occurs in the state's domestic discourse as it seeks to locate its own postcolonial identity in a globalized world. By examining state "overcompliance," the author seeks to expose the limits of the current international discourse and the potential to push that discourse further to better accommodate the full spectrum of indigenous rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]