Indigenous Peoples, numbering more than 476 million in some 90 countries and about 5000 groups and representing a great part of the world’s human diversity and cultural heritage, continue to raise major controversies and to face threats to their physical and cultural existence.

We will analyze the achievements, challenges, and potential of the dynamic interface between the Indigenous People’s movement—one of the strongest social movements of our time—and the international community, especially the UN system. Centered on the themes laid out in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), the course will examine how Indigenous Peoples have been contesting and reshaping norms, institutions and global debates in the past 50 years, re-shaping and gradually decolonizing international institutions and how they have contributed to some of the most important contemporary debates, including human rights, development, law—specifically the concepts of self-determination, governance, group rights, inter-culturality and pluriculturality, and cultural rights.