Studying the State

A Global South Perspective

Esteban Nicholls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000733471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Studying the State explores the results of governments in the Global South, particularly in Latin America, turning to the state as a vehicle for mobilizing people, resources and political change.

The book evaluates the results of this return to the state by looking at recent historical events to analyse the outcomes, processes, successes and failures of these projects. It also explores the role of China in affecting the margins of manoeuvrability of states, especially Latin American states. Finally, the book considers various perspectives on the theory of the state, contributing to theoretical approaches in the social sciences but in a way that is always grounded in their utility for addressing real-world problems.

Contributing to theoretical understandings of the state through grounded case studies, Studying the State will be of great interest to scholars of Latin America, the Global South and neoliberalism and the state.

This book was originally published as a special issue in Third World Thematics.

Ontological disputes between Indigenous communities and the state in Bolivia

Cristina Rojas

ABSTRACT

A broad consensus exists among scholars about the contributions of culture to both state formation and the legitimation of state rule. Historically, cultural homogeneity became the language of the state, couching ways of world making in a discourse of cultural diversity. Focusing on the disputes about territory in Bolivia, this article illustrates how the universalisation of modern territorial practises left no part for Indigenous practises of territory-making. Inspired by the work of Marisol de la Cadena, this article argues that the legitimation of state rule is ‘not only’ a cultural effect but is also associated with the partition of the sensible into a universal nature and culturally diversified humanity. Despite this, because Indigenous practises of territory making ‘exceed’ the limit of what the state recognises as legitimate, they challenge the limits imposed upon them, undoing the state and pluriversalising society. Some of these transformations were enshrined in the 2009 Political Constitution, whose preface reads that Bolivia ‘left the colonial, republican and neo-liberal state in the past’. Others, including the call to depatriarchalisation, did not have a place in the Constitution.

Introduction

A broad consensus exists among scholars about the contributions of culture to both state formation and the legitimation of state rule.¹ Historically, cultural homogeneity became the language of the state, couching ways of world making in a discourse of cultural diversity. Focusing on the disputes about territory in Bolivia, this article illustrates how the universalisation of modern territorial practises left no part for Indigenous practises of territory-making. Inspired by the work of Marisol de la Cadena, this article argues that the legitimation of state rule is ‘not only’ a cultural effect, but instead is also associated with the partition of the sensible into a universal nature and culturally diversified humanity.² Despite this, Indigenous practises of territory making ‘exceed’ the limit of what the state recognises as legitimate, and from this excess they challenge the limits imposed upon them, undoing the state and pluriversalising society. Some of these transformations were enshrined in the 2009 Political Constitution whose preface reads that Bolivia ‘left the colonial, republican and neo-liberal state in the past’. Others, including the call to depatriarchalisation, did not have a place in the Constitution. This article explores secondary literature in order to see trends in disputes over territory.

The story of the relations between the state and Indigenous communities is told in five sections relying on secondary literature, especially the work of Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Zulema Lehm. The first summarises how the colonial and republican state legitimated its rule by blurring the links between territory and culture. The second tells the history of how Quechuas and Aymaras communities living in Bolivia’s highland and Moxos communities living in the lowland challenged the limits of the state in defence of their existence. The third narrative tells how the ‘Unity Pact’ (PU),³ formed in 2004 by Indigenous organisations from the highland and lowland communities, in a ‘cosmopolitical moment’⁴ interrupted the state’s monopoly on territorial rule and pluriversalised society. The fourth section focuses on the ways in which President Evo Morales’ government employs a strategy to reverse ontological gains into cultural differences through ‘ontological containment’. This strategy is detailed in the government’s response to the 2010 Indigenous opposition to the government project to construct a road that crossed the Indigenous Territory of the Isiboro-Sécure Park (TIPNIS), located in the Moxos territory. The paper concludes that ontological politics, understood as negotiations between worlds, have existed since the times of the colonial occupation. The novelty of the disputes that erupted in the 1990s was the capacity to interrupt the modern concept of territory and to undo the coloniality of state rule. The outcome was not guaranteed and its intended and unintended consequences are on the table.

Colonialism and the universalisation of territorial rule

This section illustrates how the modern understanding of territory has its foundation in the nature and culture divide. The imperial expansion into the Americas called for a new universalism to extend European legal claims to territories beyond European jurisdiction.⁵ Posing differences in humans as cultural and separate from territory facilitated this expansion. This quest for a universal legislation appears in the sixteenth-century theologian and jurist Francisco de Vitoria’s proposal for an international law encompassing the Spanish and Indigenous worlds.⁶ Specifically, he argued that Indians’ use of reason and government made them bound by the jus gentium.⁷ At the same time, he declared Spain a universal culture, as it derived from Christian doctrine. For Vitoria, the human potential of Indigenous people could only be realised if they adopted, by force if necessary, the ‘universally applicable practises of the Spaniards’.⁸ An encompassing legal universality granted Spain the right to intervene and appropriate Indigenous territories. He concluded that sovereignty, and waging war, was a Spanish prerogative, and any attempt to prevent Spain’s penetration of Indigenous territories was an act of war.

Thomas Hobbes’ and Hugo Grotius’ contributions to state formation deepened the nature-culture divide. The concept of ‘state of nature’ associated progress with the presence of a culture that dominates nature, as it happened in Europe.⁹ Subsequently, the distance from nature justified European’s claim to Indigenous territories and bodies; those who do not distance and profit from nature were viewed as failing to be human, and as such, Europe had the right to wage war against them,¹⁰ dispossessing them from their territory.

Indigenous practises of world making, branded by Hobbes as living in a ‘state of nature’, were represented as ‘brutish’ and ‘nasty’ as a reminder of the permanent threat that their lives pose to modern existence. This again justified the use of violence to contain this threat, to the point that John Locke recommended that the Indigenous people ‘be destroyed as a Lion or a Tiger, one of those wild Savage beasts, with whom Men can have no Society nor Security’.¹¹

Congruent with the modern partition of the sensible, the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) granted European states free reign over the non-European territories. The Independence, which in the Americas took place in the early nineteenth century, put an end to political domination, but left intact the partition of the sensible, as reflected in the programmes to assimilate Indigenous communities into the European civilisation in the nineteenth century,¹² and into development¹³ in the twentieth century. The quest to homogenise the nation, establish state sovereignty over the territory, and provide the state with a monopoly over the common good were founded on cultural differences between humans and their ontological discontinuity from non-humans’.¹⁴

The politics of enacting Indigenous worlds

Indigenous communities’ response to state rule vary according to the practises pursued by the colonial and republican states and the ways communities built their own history before and during colonial occupation including territory mak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Studying the state: a Global South perspective
• 1 Ontological disputes between Indigenous communities and the state in Bolivia
• 2 The strategic use of radical indigenous narratives by the Ecuadorian state
• 3 Hegemonic power networks and institutional configuration for illicit purposes
• 4 Chinese engagement in Africa and Latin America: does it matter for state capacity?
• 5 China and the decaying of socialist rentierism in Venezuela: instability and the prevalence of non-interventionism
• 6 Polycentric hierarchies and institutional complementarities in the semi-periphery: state capacities and energy policies in the BRIC countries
• Index