CAPITULO II DERECHO DE SUPERFICIE
LA ACTUACION POR UNIDADES DE EJECUCION Sección Primera Disposiciones generales
The following theoretical framings of the concept of sovereignty are probably more familiar to social scientists. Although sovereignty has been defined in multiple ways, most commonly, as Brown (2007: 173) has argued:
[S]overeignty came to signify the autonomy and independence of the nation-state vis-à-vis other similar polities. Sovereign nations, in other words, were seen to enjoy an unrestricted right to govern their own internal affairs.
At its simplest, sovereignty refers to the unrestricted powers of the state to rule and govern its internal affairs within a specific territory (ibid.). In empirical use in contemporary Bolivia, the notion of sovereignty often tends to emerge in relation to struggles to regain
24 Numerous criticisms have been directed at Foucault’s concept of governmentality (see Clegg et al. 2006: 247–58).
policy and decision-making capacities on the part of the state vis-à-vis IFIs, international development agencies, and global capital.
At the same time, another empirically-derived meaning of sovereignty circulates. It can be argued that one of the central political goals of indigenous movements worldwide has indisputably been related to indigenous sovereignty, self-determination and autonomy (Bowen 2000; Brown 2007; O’Malley 1996). The origins of the notion of indigenous sovereignty lie in the history of relationships between US federal governments and Native American nations, as well as related experiences in Canada (Brown 2007: 175–6). Established as government-to-government relations, federal governments have various obligations to protect legally recognized tribes, whereas tribes are entitled to such elements as Tribal Sovereignty, right to self-government and right to reservation lands: these issues are all part of the discourses of indigenous sovereignty that have been globally disseminated through indigenous rights advocacy (Brysk 2000). Brown asserts that “sovereignty is reimagined as a condition of autonomy from other cultures and political entities – an autonomy inseparable from a hoped-for return to primal authenticity” (2007: 173).
The notion of self-determination has been an important part of international law since World War II, when it was first and foremost launched in regards to processes of decolonization. The right to self-determination on the part of “peoples” is recognized in all of the most important UN declarations and, from the 1970s, the concept started to circulate among indigenous movements and other minority groups that used it to demand rights and recognition from their respective states. With the shift from redistributive politics to the politics of recognition, and “out of a postmodern skepticism toward the institution of territorial sovereignty”, argue Henley and Davidson, “indigenous rights campaigners have stopped short of advocating separate statehoods…but they have [rather] called for forms of ‘self-determination’ and ‘autonomy’…within the existing framework of states” (2008: 819). Currently, Articles 3 and 4 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) declare that:
Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development…Indigenous peoples, in exercising their right to self-determination, have the right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions.
However, it has been noted that “the question of whether the right of self-determination has been recognized under international law outside the context of traditional de-colonization is still a very controversial matter” (Henriksen 2001: 7). The term has become a major source of conflict between indigenous peoples and states, and a reason why many states do not recognize and categorize indigenous populations as “peoples”
(Erni and Jensen 2001: 4). The political goal of achieving indigenous self-determination is closely linked to struggles over lands and territories and the natural resources contained therein (Bowen 2000; Brown 2007).
The term autonomy, or self-government, represents the concrete manifestation of self- determination. Indigenous self-governance also refers to the de facto condition of many indigenous communities when they practice self-government through their own cultural principles and their own traditional social, political, and economic systems, whether or not these have been legally recognized by their respective states. Throughout the text I also use the term indigenous self-governance in order to describe this condition, while I use the terms indigenous sovereignty and self-determination to refer to indigenous political discourses, and autonomy as a concrete legal and administrative term.
Although the goal of indigenous self-determination is based on the idea of confrontation between a liberal form of rule and colonized subjects, the promotion of more moderate forms of autonomy and self-governance is, surprisingly, compatible with neoliberal agendas aimed at reducing the role of the state in economic and social affairs. Many contemporary academics have drawn attention to the relationship between indigenous peoples, and neoliberal policies and forms of governing (Henley and Davidson 2008; Li 2007; O’Malley 1996; Ong 2005; Tsing 2007). Hale (2002) has argued that what has often been seen as an empowering act of indigenous uprising during the last few decades, is, in fact, intimately linked to changes in the global political economy; they have shifted the attention from class-based conflicts over redistribution of resources to struggles for recognition on the basis of cultural difference (Fraser 1997; Hale 2002; Postero 2007).
At the level of state policy, there has emerged what he calls ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ (for Bolivia, see Postero 2007): a tendency to recognize cultural differences in the name of indigeneity. Yet this is accompanied by an outright neglect of structural inequalities causing the marginalization of indigenous peoples in the first place: “Since the culturally oppressed, at least in the case of Latin America’s indigenous people, also occupy the bottom rung of the class hierarchy in disproportionate numbers, they confront the paradox of simultaneous cultural affirmation and economic marginalisation” (Hale 2002: 493). Fraser (1997) has phrased this as a shift from redistribution to recognition; an innate feature of the shift from Keynesian welfare politics to the era of neoliberal globalization. At the level of state policies, the politics of recognition of indigenous identity does not imply changes in the political economic structures of the country (Hale 2002; Postero 2007).
However, in the name of cultural recognition and cultural difference, indigenous peoples have been able to promote their long-term goals for the recognition of their de facto self-governance. In Latin America, these discourses have been prevalent to an extent that has led to the image of “indigenous movements as direct attacks upon the
so-called ‘sovereign nation-state model’” (Warren and Jackson 2002; quoted in Albro 2005: 448). Instead of the state interventions so feared in orthodox neoliberal doctrine, indigenous NGOs, organizations, and communities are disciplined to govern and control themselves, thereby encouraging a situation whereby “the state does not merely ‘recognise’ community, civil society, indigenous culture and the like, but actively re-constitutes them in its own image, sheering them of radical excesses, inciting them to do the work of subject-formation that otherwise would fall to the state itself” (Hale 2002: 496). Rose (1999) has framed this as ‘government through community’. Hale concludes that the effects of neoliberal policies enhance the political agency of indigenous groups, allowing them either “to respond to threats or seize opportunities” (2002: 506). Thus, even if unintentionally, neoliberal reforms have opened forums for social movement action and indigenous political participation.
Sovereignty is understood and used throughout the pages of this study in multiple ways with various meanings not solely empirical but theoretical as well. As part of the overall analysis of the notion of vivir bien, my analysis examines the contested articulations between state sovereignty and indigenous self-governing arrangements, that is, indigenous sovereignties.