Indigenous Self-Determination: Why Institutional Capacity and Efficiency Don’t Need to be Affected by Size

One common argument in order to delimit indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination is that they have too small a population to be able to create viable institutions to guarantee the normative values that justified indigenous self-determination in the first place. In this paper I argue that this view rests on a misinterpretation of the meaning of self-determination. If indigenous self-determination is understood procedurally – in which the first step is recognition of indigenous peoples as if sovereigns, i.e. as political equals – many of the practical problems of having a small population (institutional capacity and efficiency) could be solved by negotiations between an indigenous people and the nation-state in which they live. Taking my starting-point in Robert Dahl’s classical book Size and Democracy, I claim that “outsourcing” of some of these viable institutions (e.g. the national defence) is a realistic solution to the problem of size.