Children’s Rights or Settler Sovereignty? Rights Declarations, Curriculum Policy, and Settler Colonial Governance

Abstract

This paper interrogates the coloniality of (human) rights and inclusion by tracing their function within Aotearoa New Zealand’s education policy. Beginning from the global frame of Gaza, where human rights instruments are mobilised to obscure rather than prevent mass violence, the analysis demonstrates that rights frameworks are never neutral. In settler-colonial contexts, they operate as technologies of governance that both promise protection and reproduce dispossession. In Aotearoa, curricular and policy discourses of diversity, biculturalism, and inclusion similarly depoliticise the foundational violence of colonisation. By collapsing the distinct realities of Māori, Pasifika, refugee, and immigrant communities into state-managed categories, the education system sustains the hierarchies it claims to redress. For immigrant children, rights are extended only conditionally, tied to neoliberal benchmarks of economic utility and assimilation, while Māori rights remain constrained within Crown-defined parameters. Drawing on Wolfe’s theorisation of settler colonialism as a structure of elimination and decolonial theory, the paper argues that both Māori dispossession and immigrant conditionality are relational components of a single settler-colonial project. Education, rights, and inclusion thus function less as emancipatory frameworks than as instruments for managing populations and consolidating white settler sovereignty.