Colonisation at the Poles, Incomplete Decolonisation and the Creation of Indigenous Peoples

This chapter examines the colonisation of the polar regions by States and the legal arguments created and modified to justify State claims to territory, including over territories in the Arctic over which Indigenous Peoples have much stronger and longer evidence of occupation. It then turns to the decolonisation process of the second half of the 20th century to explain the origins of Indigenous rights in international law and argues that they are a substitute for the self-determination offered to certain colonised Peoples left behind by the decolonisation process according to the “salt-water thesis.”