Dr Aslak-Antti Oksanen

My research interests include decolonial and Marxist IR theories, the indigenous peoples' issues in global politics and indigenous peoples' nationalism. These interests overlap, as my efforts to innovate theoretically in the fields of IR and nationalism studies aim to incorporate the political agency of indigenous peoples in theoretically systematic ways. My contribution to decolonial IR and Marxist theory is to synthesise Enrique Dussel's liberation philosophy with the IR adaptation of Leon Trotsky's idea of uneven and combined development into an IR theory capable of illuminating stateless social formations like indigenous peoples as agents of global politics. My contribution to nationalism studies is to explain the emergence of indigenous peoples' nationalism as enabled by a combination of indigenous anti-colonial resistance modelled in part on modern nationalism and permissive structural conditions through international norms and laws affirming minority rights.