Decolonising Minority Rights Discourse

Mainstream discourse on minority rights embodies a series of normative biases and assumptions, which ignore the colonial underpinning of some of the core concepts such as the definition of minority and the notion of minority protection. In this paper, I argue that contemporary minority rights discourse needs to engage closely with relations of power and subaltern agency to ‘decolonise’ conventional thinking within the discipline. I unpack this decolonising agenda and map out what such an agenda would entail by critically analysing five key areas of relevance: reconceptualising the minority to expose ‘otherness’ embedded in the concept; scrutinising the reification of the state as a prerequisite for decolonising minority rights discourse; mainstreaming subaltern resistance; reevaluating a priori assumptions about the need for legal interventions; and finally, taking seriously the political economy of neo-colonial violence. Thus, the paper offers a framework for systematically thinking about decolonial promises of minority rights discourse.