European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Paul Keal is a Fellow of the Department of International Relations at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University. He is the author of Unspoken Rules and Super Power Dominance (1983), editor of Ethics and Foreign Policy (1992), and with Andrew Mack, co-editor of Security and Arms Control in the North Pacific (1988).

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Bringing 'peoples' into international society; 2. Wild 'men' and other tales; 3. Dispossession and the purposes of international law; 4. Recovering rights: land, self-determination and sovereignty; 5. The political and moral legacy of conquest; 6. Dealing with difference; Conclusion; Appendix; Select bibliography; Index.

'Keal has written an important book that has been long overdue in the study of International Relations. Until now, the concerns of indigenous peoples have been present in the postcolonial literature but largely ignored in IR ( with a few exceptions). No doubt one of the reasons for this is the stupefying tendency to refer to such political movements as 'domestic'. Keal elegantly reveals the hollow basis of this argument.' International Affairs