Indigenous Movements, Legacies of State Formation, and Land Governance in Argentina

• In Event: 403 - Regular Session. Infrastructures of Social Movements

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed a striking transformation in Latin America. Indigenous people became a formidable political force in their own right, something unthinkable even a generation ago. This paper pursues a subnational comparative analysis in Northwestern Argentina to explore how and when indigenous movements make a difference with respect to their core demands, the reconstitution of indigenous communal land rights. The three neighboring provinces of Tucumán, Salta, and Catamarca are surprisingly similar in their geography, political economy, and levels of human development. Yet, they vary dramatically in the implementation of a new national law, which requires all Argentine provinces to survey indigenous land claims, a crucial first step in establishing communal land rights. Based on this comparison the paper develops an innovative theoretical framework. By drawing on yet also moving beyond social movement theory it argues that indigenous movements are more likely to affect public policy if they have the organizational infrastructure to sustain collective action, and operate in a political space free of major veto players, which is in turn the historical outcome of distinct state institutions built in response to prior protest. In developing this argument the paper addresses the relative lack of attention to the consequences of indigenous mobilization in the current literature while also engaging broader scholarly debates around movement outcomes. Its claims are based on a qualitative methodology that combines a variety of data sources, most importantly more than 120 interviews with indigenous activists, non-activists, state officials and economic elites in the three provinces.

Author

• Matthias vom Hau, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI)