Small-state Constitutionalism and Legal Pluralism – Natural Resource management in Suriname’s tribal habitats

Ine Apapoe & Janine Ubink

Ine Apapoe is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Anton de Kom University of Suriname.
Janine Ubink is Professor of Law, Governance and Development at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society, Leiden University.

Constitutionalism is the principle that the authority of government derives from and is limited by a body of fundamental law. Tribal and Indigenous groups, however, have their own fundamental laws, and often contest claims of state supremacy in their territories. This poses inherently constitutional questions regarding the governance of legal pluralism.

In many countries, the state claims the ultimate authority to recognise other legal systems, or not to do so. This does not change the fact that the empirical reality in many countries is one of strong legal pluralism. In countries with strong legal pluralism, various legal systems are in dialogue with each other and have authority over different groups of people, who engage with them via complex processes of negotiation, positioning, and creation. Irrespective of the presence or absence of state recognition, groups of people may perceive other normative registers as more authoritative than state law in certain fields. The extent to which states have the power to impose norms and determine the normative hierarchy is an empirical question, one that may be impacted by the size of a country’s population as well as its territory. The case of Suriname provides an illustrative example here.

Suriname’s 1987 Constitution has no provisions that indicate the presence or recognition of law and governance structures of Indigenous people and tribal groups, the latter also known as maroons. The state does not officially recognise or regulate legal pluralism. Indigenous people and maroon groups, however, largely perceive customary normative registers and traditional authority structures as more legitimate and authoritative than those of the state, and continue to claim authority to govern their own territories. Suriname’s history has explanatory power here. During the colonial period, runaway enslaved people, called maroons, were able to establish themselves in the interior, far away from the plantations controlled by the Colonial authorities. Peace Treaties concluded between the Dutch colonizers and maroon groups guaranteed that those groups would be left in peace, while such instruments also formed part of an isolationist colonial policy that aimed to keep the maroons separated from the colonial state. While this policy was reversed in the second half of the nineteenth century, the interest of the state in the interior remained limited and was for a long time largely confined to the extraction of natural resources available in the tribal habitats. The interior’s inhabitants continued to be governed by their own traditional authorities, and the state held limited relevance and legitimacy for them. This factual isolationism lingers in the present, with multinational corporations invading tribal habitats to exploit natural resources, and revenues mainly flowing to international companies and the state. These occurrences give endurance to the predatory image of the state, and communities continuing their struggle to hold on to (or regain) the authority and power to govern the natural resources in their habitats.

Almost 90 per cent of Suriname’s natural resources are located in the residential areas of the tribal maroon groups of Suriname. The existence of valuable natural resources in tribal habitats, and the question of who has governance and decision-making power over them, are the main sources of conflict between state authorities and the tribal groups. The answers to that question differ significantly depending on the source of law applied to it. Surinamese constitutional law, specifically article 41 of the Constitution, places the power to govern natural resources squarely with the state’s governance institutions; unwritten, orally-transmitted customary law, on the other hand, entitles tribal communities and governance institutions to make decisions about and reap the benefits from natural resources in tribal habitats. This latter position is supported by international law. In two important decisions, Saramaka People v Suriname (2007) and Kaliña and Lokoño Peoples v Suriname (2015), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognized the special relationship that tribal and Indigenous peoples have with their ancestral territories. The Court ordered the Surinamese state to delimit, demarcate, and grant collective title over the territory of the members of these Indigenous and tribal peoples, in accordance with their customary laws, and through previous, effective and fully informed consultations. Despite these rulings and the tireless efforts of tribal and Indigenous groups, the Surinamese state still has not legally acknowledged tribal and Indigenous land rights.

Ultimately, this raises a constitutional question about the governance of legal pluralism and whether it is based on ‘a conversation among equals’ or results from a situation where state authorities, laws, and courts determine the breadth, scope, and validity of customary law and governance. The state and traditional leaders each make their own ‘internally plausible claim to ultimate authority’ to regulate the use and commercial exploitation of natural resources in tribal habitats, each referring to a different ultimate point of reference: the Constitution or customary law.

State size plays a paradoxical role in the relationship between the state and its governance institutions and tribal communities. The large geographic size of Suriname partly explains the decision of the government to de facto cede regulatory authority to traditional leaders in more remote areas. The physical distance between the centre and the periphery complicates state regulation and reach and gives more leeway for local self-regulation. Furthermore, the lack of infrastructure in the more remote interior of the country significantly reduces the likelihood of viable business opportunities, which decreases interest in beneficial cooperation on both sides. But it is also the small size of the population and the tax base this generates that explains the state’s dependency on the revenues generated by natural resource extraction. This dependency – as well as personal interests of state officials in extractive activities – forms the basis for the state’s continued denial of Indigenous and tribal land rights. Combined with the historicity of the governance of Suriname’s interior and the challenges of post-coloniality, geographical and cultural distance between the tribal groups and the government and the continuing exploitation of natural resources in the interior of the country explain the enduring relevance of traditional forms of authority and the continuation of strong legal pluralism in the country.

Struggles between indigenous and maroon communities and the national government (and multinational corporations) are not, however, confined to the national domain. International law and organisations increasingly play a pivotal role. While the state of Suriname still seems to be striving to complete the journey from separate groups with their own legal systems to a unitary interconnected nation with one overarching legal system (determined by the state), the world – and Indigenous and tribal groups within it – has moved on, in two main ways. First, it has moved towards an increasing perception of the legal ordering of states and the world in general as inherently legally pluralistic; and second, towards a growing recognition of the rights of Indigenous and tribal communities to manage and control their own territories in accordance with their customary law and tenure systems. The limited implementation capacity of the international legal system, however, enables states to ignore, or drag their feet in relation to the implementation of, progressive decisions of international courts. The fight for legal recognition of the pluralist character of the state and for protection of tribal and Indigenous land rights in Suriname thus continues in the national legislative arena.

This blog post is part of the IACL Blog symposium Small State Constitutionalism, which presents some of the key arguments made in chapters of the newly-published edited collection: Elisabeth Perham, Maartje De Visser and Rosalind Dixon (eds) Small State Constitutionalism (Hart Publishing, 2026).

Ine Apapoe is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Anton de Kom University of Suriname.

Janine Ubink is Professor of Law, Governance and Development at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society, Leiden University.