Indigeneity, law and terrain : the Bedouin citizens of Israel

Abstract

This study constitutes a socio-legal inquiry into the practice of international human rights law. Specifically, the study unpacks the ways in which the concept and category of indigenous peoples is made active and given effect among the Bedouin in the Negev desert in Israel, since before the turn of the new millennium. Drawing contextualized insights from Bedouin localities, the case studies demonstrate the various layers of intermediaries and actors involved and the processes by which the Bedouin have appropriated the international concept and category to make it into a Bedouin vernacular. Grounded in law and society and legal anthropology, this research deploys socio-legal and historical analyses and is supported by rich empirical fieldwork, including extensive interviews and ethnographic observation. In the process of reconstructing how the international concept and category of indigenous peoples came to be invoked in this particular context, this research sheds critical light on how local and global discourses and understandings of internationally-defined status and rights interact and produce tensions, hybridities, and new subjectivities as well as legal and political dynamics at the domestic and international level.