Recursive Hypocrisy: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Unresolved Contradiction of the Westphalian Order from 1648 to Caracas

Abstract

This paper contends that the 2026 capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. special forces exposes not merely a contemporary breach of international law, but the unresolved foundational contradiction of the Westphalian states system itself: its constitutive suppression of plural and nested sovereignties. Through the critical lens of Indigenous Studies, the analysis re-frames sovereignty not as a monolithic property of the nation-state, but as a contested and relational field. It argues that the modern international order, born from the 1648 treaties that erased Indigenous political authority from European legal recognition, established a hypocritical logic that continues to reverberate. This logic simultaneously asserts the inviolability of state borders while rendering the inherent sovereignties of Indigenous nations within those borders invisible or contingent. The Venezuelan case serves as a potent exemplar of this recursive hypocrisy. The paper examines how the sovereignty of the Venezuelan state over territories like the Amazon, where nations such as the Yanomami, Pemón, and Warao exercise de facto autonomous governance, is itself a legacy of colonial imposition and remains actively contested. The U.S.-led intervention, while a flagrant violation of Venezuelan state sovereignty, was discursively justified in part by co-opting the narrative of Indigenous vulnerability, framing the action as a protection of these communities from state neglect and environmental predation. This instrumentalization reveals a cynical exploitation of the very colonial contradictions the Westphalian system created. The paper concludes that the organized hypocrisy of international relations is thus not simply a practice between states, but a deeply embedded structure originating in the original displacement of Indigenous political orders. Lasting stability requires moving beyond a system that can only see one sovereign per territory, and instead engaging with the plurinational realities that the system has always denied but never erased.