Indigenous international relations: old peoples and new pragmatism

Abstract

This lightly edited transcript of the inaugural (2023) Coral Bell School Lecture on Indigenous Diplomacy sketches the foundations of Aboriginal Australian socio-political ordering and inter-nation relations while issuing a challenge to dominant International Relations (IR) scholarship and the settler-derived Australian political order. For many millennia the original peoples of the Australian continent engaged in a long-term process of evolutionary political design using landscape as a template for political ordering. The resulting relationalist system enables the interconnected autonomy of individuals and groups, facilitates inter-group diplomacy, and provides long-term stability and security while managing survivalist human tendencies. Aboriginal political ordering and diplomacy are largely unknown in IR scholarship per settler-colonial dominance and the discipline’s institutionalisation of survivalism. Aboriginal relational approaches nonetheless offer resources for expanding mainstream understandings of international relations and ameliorating dominant political practice, including by reconceptualising approaches to multipolarity and diplomacy. While there are no easy or immediate equivalences between Aboriginal inter-polity relations and contemporary political and international affairs, the civilisational culture of Australia’s original owners and runners of Country provides openings for supporting modern nation-building and advancing diplomatic relations in our region. Headings in the text indicate sections of the lecture delivered by Mary Graham and Morgan Brigg.