The incessant demand for more lands and natural resources to feed the neoliberal economic needs resulted in the development-led forced displacement of many minority groups from their ancestral lands. Such violent expulsions are a global phenomenon. Thus, development-induced persecutions of the minority, and the legal and institutional framework to protect them, cannot be fully addressed in isolation from the existing hegemonic neoliberal economic structure at the global scale. The reckless exploitation of natural resources is also disastrous for the climate, as is now well accepted. Here again, minorities and indigenous peoples are also the primary victims of the damaging impact of environmental catastrophe. Minority rights discourse should, therefore, build on the global momentum for climate justice, and offer a powerful narrative to articulate the point that issues of climate justice cannot be separated from justice for minorities in both political and economic domains. In this regard, it is also essential to problematise and challenge the dominant idea of ‘development’ as the teleological end of human progress, to counterbalance its tendency to commodify, and to expose its capacity to articulate state power in terms of economic growth rather than welfare. (4) Beyond the Vulnerability Framework: The dominant discourse on the future direction of minority rights in international law largely revolves around the integration of minorities within the state they live in. At the same time, the majoritarian suspicion about the minority’s allegiance to the state remains unabated, as minorities keep challenging the legitimacy of the existing territorial, political, and economic structures of the state. Since the birth of modern statehood in Westphalia, whenever states have been reorganised, the minority question re-appeared in relation to the very political organisation of the state: how to deal with the leftover population (minorities), who have been denied their own ‘state’? This underscores the sui generis nature of minorities, compared to other vulnerable social groups – based on gender, sex, or age – that too routinely face discrimination but generally do not question the legitimacy of the state itself. Within the traditional vulnerability framework minorities are generally understood as mere subjects of oppression; this in turn makes them the individual objects of international human rights discourse along with other oppressed social group members. 3