"To See What State We Are In":First Years of the Greenland Self-Government Act and the Pursuit of Inuit Sovereignty

• Published in: Ethnopolitics
• Main Author: Kuokkanen, Rauna Johanna
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: /dk/atira/pure/person/fieldofscience2010/5/14/2; name=Social policy; Arctic; Greenland; inuit
• Online Access: https://research.ulapland.fi/fi/publications/3a10776d-c9f2-4512-848b-6cf898ee27a8; https://doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2015.1074393; https://lacris.ulapland.fi/ws/files/5992987/Greenland_Ethnopolitics_revised_final.pdf

This article examines the implementation of Greenland's self-government (commonly referred to as self-rule) through an analysis of the Greenland government in the first four years of the Greenland Self-Government Act (SGA). Greenland and its government are numerically dominated by the Inuit, one of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic. The article begins with an overview of Greenland as a country and its political development, from a Danish colony to the 2009 Greenland SGA. After explaining Greenland's governance structure and the role of Inuit governance in Greenland's parliamentary system, it analyses the implementation process of the self-government agreement. It is argued that the SGA with its main focus on modern nation-building within the framework of Western institutionalism constitutes a unique means of implementing indigenous self-government. It revisits the norm of the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination understood primarily as a collective human right and sets a precedent within the framework of indigenous rights in international law.