“Justice Yet to Come”: The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in Colombia

• In Event: Human rights defenders in the Americas: strategies, challenges

Abstract


The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, a non-state forum of international opinion, held a set of hearings in Colombia in 2008. These hearings have been designed to poll popular opinion concerning the actions of transnational corporations on legally recognised indigenous land in Colombia. By serving as spaces for expressing and mobilising the pain and outrage that corporate incursions on indigenous lands have provoked, these hearings allowed participants to assert alternative forms of knowledge, and to establish networks in which these knowledges are negotiated, legitimised, and reinforced. By reading these hearings as sites of knowledge production, I re-conceptualize the dynamics of the interrelated practices that comprise knowledge-making in these justice-seeking processes. In this way, I attempt to highlight the efforts of activism to make certain knowledges visible.

Author

• Sandra Brunnegger, University of Cambridge