Publications

Conventional political economy treats the state as the principal architect of resource-corridor development, steering capital through permitting regimes, tax incentives and public subsidy. This paper argues that in Canada the operative constraint on...

The rise of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), commonly known as drones, has created one of the most significant jurisdictional questions in Federal Indian Law: whether Tribal Nations possess sovereign authority over the airspace above reservation lands...

American Indian reservations face long-standing barriers to private-sector development. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, which enabled the establishment of casino operations on American Indian tribal lands is one of the most consequential...

Indigenous data sovereignty is often framed as ethical governance or system design. This article reframes it as a problem of public law: legal institutions recognize Indigenous sovereignty while allocating practical authority over data to agencies...

The Rohingya people of Myanmar represent the most extensively documented case of constructed statelessness in the contemporary world — the deliberate engineering of legal nonpersonhood as an instrument of ethnic persecution. Stripped of citizenship under...

This paper argues that communities should have a role not just in implementing development projects, but in deciding what counts as success in the first place. Today, that judgment is usually made elsewhere, by governments, donors, or researchers, using...

This paper examines Tamang self-determination in Nepal through the interconnected lenses of the politics of recognition, Indigenous resurgence, internal colonialism, decolonial thought, and epistemic justice. It argues that the Tamang struggle is not...

We have built a comprehensive dataset of settler/Indigenous violent encounters covering more than 200 tribes in 21 western states over the nineteenth century. During this period, Native American and settler deaths were concentrated in the Southwest and...

This chapter revisits Guillermo Bonfil Batalla's México Profundo (1987) through the lens of contemporary empirical historical economics. In that work, Bonfil Batalla argued that beneath a Westernized facade of modern Mexico lies a "Deep Mexico": a living...

A growing number of First Nations across Canada are entering into agreements with provincial governments to share revenues from natural resource extraction within their traditional territories. Yet, little guidance exists on the design of these Resource...

The national awards program Honoring Nations, flagship program of the Harvard Project, announces the recipients of the 2025 Honoring Nations Awards, recognizing 6 governmental initiatives for outstanding excellence in tribal self-governance.

Honoring...