When Rights Embrace Responsibilities


Book Description

The conservation of environment and the protection of human rights are two of the most compelling needs of our time. Unfortunately, they are not always easy to combine and too often result in mutual harm. This book analyses the idea of biocultural rights as a proposal for harmonizing the needs of environmental and human rights. These rights, considered as a basket of group rights, are those deemed necessary to protect the stewardship role that certain indigenous peoples and local communities have played towards the environment. With a view to understanding the value and merits, as well as the threats that biocultural rights entail, the book critically assesses their foundations, content, and implications, and develops new perspectives and ideas concerning their potential applicability for promoting the socio-economic interests of indigenous people and local communities. It further explores the controversial relationship of interdependence and conflict between conservation of environment and protection of human rights.




Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation


Book Description

A detailed study of the engagement of state law with indigenous rights to water in comparative legal and policy contexts.




A Decolonial Philosophy of Indigenous Colombia


Book Description

Philosophically addressing three fundamental aspects of the Kamëntsá, an indigenous culture located in the Southwest of Colombia, this book is an investigation of how a native culture creates meaning. Time, beauty and spirit are key philosophical experiences within the Kamëntsá Culture which should be interpreted both as constituting and as constituted symbols because of their historicity and actuality and their potential power of transformation. The book addresses these living symbols that take hold of the past but whose significance goes beyond their antiquity through the traditions of storytelling and dance, ritual, healing and ceremony as well as the fraught political histories of colonialism and the ownership of the land. The author, raised within Kamëntsá Culture, weaves personal experience with philosophical insights and significance of the Kamentsa culture, presented through its own frameworks and narratives. The philosophical dimensions of Kamentsa culture are articulated and contextualized within a legacy of colonial domination by long-term Spanish and Catholic rule that enacts the necessary separation of Kamentsa ideas from their representations through Catholic hermeneutic approaches. However, the book also embraces intercultural philosophical engagement, as the methodological approach is formed partly through some modern and contemporary Western thinkers as well as indigenous writers and figures like Carlos Tamabioy and N. Scott Momaday.




Managing Multiculturalism


Book Description

Indigenous people in Colombia constitute a mere three percent of the national population. Colombian indigenous communities' success in gaining collective control of almost thirty percent of the national territory is nothing short of extraordinary. In Managing Multiculturalism, Jean E. Jackson examines the evolution of the Colombian indigenous movement over the course of her forty-plus years of research and fieldwork, offering unusually developed and nuanced insight into how indigenous communities and activists changed over time, as well as how she the ethnographer and scholar evolved in turn. The story of how indigenous organizing began, found its voice, established alliances, and won battles against the government and the Catholic Church has important implications for the indigenous cause internationally and for understanding all manner of rights organizing. Integrating case studies with commentaries on the movement's development, Jackson explores the politicization and deployment of multiculturalism, indigenous identity, and neoliberalism, as well as changing conceptions of cultural value and authenticity—including issues such as patrimony, heritage, and ethnic tourism. Both ethnography and recent history of the Latin American indigenous movement, this works traces the ideas motivating indigenous movements in regional and global relief, and with unprecedented breadth and depth.




Colombian Constitutional Law


Book Description

Introduction to the Colombian constitution of 1991 and the Constitutional Court -- The role of the Constitutional Court -- Dignity and autonomy -- Equality -- Freedom of speech and freedom of religion -- Social rights -- The rights of victims and transitional justice -- The rights of indigenous peoples -- The president : problems of executive overreach -- The congress : problems of abdication and deliberation -- Constitutional amendment and the substitution of the constitution doctrine.




Multiple InJustices


Book Description

R. Aída Hernández Castillo synthesizes twenty-four years of research and activism among indigenous women's organizations in Latin America, offering a critical new contribution to the field of activist anthropology and for anyone interested in social justice.




Legal Rights for Rivers


Book Description

In 2017 four rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, India, and Colombia were given the status of legal persons, and there was a recent attempt to extend these rights to the Colorado River in the USA. Understanding the implications of creating legal rights for rivers is an urgent challenge for both water resource management and environmental law. Giving rivers legal rights means the law can see rivers as legal persons, thus creating new legal rights which can then be enforced. When rivers are legally people, does that encourage collaboration and partnership between humans and rivers, or establish rivers as another competitor for scarce resources? To assess what it means to give rivers legal rights and legal personality, this book examines the form and function of environmental water managers (EWMs). These organisations have legal personality, and have been active in water resource management for over two decades. EWMs operate by acquiring water rights from irrigators in rivers where there is insufficient water to maintain ecological health. EWMs can compete with farmers for access to water, but they can also strengthen collaboration between traditionally divergent users of the aquatic environment, such as environmentalists, recreational fishers, hunters, farmers, and hydropower. This book explores how EWMs use the opportunities created by giving nature legal rights, such as the ability to participate in markets, enter contracts, hold property, and enforce those rights in court. However, examination of the EWMs unearths a crucial and unexpected paradox: giving legal rights to nature may increase its legal power, but in doing so it can weaken community support for protecting the environment in the first place. The book develops a new conceptual framework to identify the multiple constructions of the environment in law, and how these constructions can interact to generate these unexpected outcomes. It explores EWMs in the USA and Australia as examples, and assesses the implications of creating legal rights for rivers for water governance. Lessons from the EWMs, as well as early lessons from the new ‘river persons,’ show how to use the law to improve river protection and how to begin to mitigate the problems of the paradox.




Creating Indigenous Property


Book Description

While colonial imposition of the Canadian legal order has undermined Indigenous law, creating gaps and sometimes distortions, Indigenous peoples have taken up the challenge of rebuilding their laws, governance, and economies. Indigenous conceptions of land and property are central to this project. Creating Indigenous Property identifies how contemporary Indigenous conceptions of property are rooted in and informed by their societally specific norms, meanings, and ethics. Through detailed analysis, the authors illustrate that unexamined and unresolved contradictions between the historic and the present have created powerful competing versions of Indigenous law, legal authorities, and practices that reverberate through Indigenous communities. They have identified the contradictions and conflicts within Indigenous communities about relationships to land and non-human life forms, about responsibilities to one another, about environmental decisions, and about wealth distribution. Creating Indigenous Property contributes to identifying the way that Indigenous discourses, processes, and institutions can empower the use of Indigenous law. The book explores different questions generated by these dynamics, including: Where is the public/private divide in Indigenous and Canadian law, and why should it matter? How do land and property shape local economies? Whose voices are heard in debates over property and why are certain voices missing? How does gender matter to the conceptualization of property and the Indigenous legal imagination? What is the role and promise of Indigenous law in negotiating new relationships between Indigenous peoples and Canada? In grappling with these questions, readers will join the authors in exploring the conditions under which Canadian and Indigenous legal orders can productively co-exist.




From Tribal Village to Global Village


Book Description

This book examines the rise of human rights movements in five Latin American countries—Ecuador, Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Bolivia—among the hemisphere's most isolated and powerless people, Latin American Indians. It describes the impact of the Indian rights movement on world politics, from reforming the United Nations to evicting foreign oil companies, and analyzes the impact of these human rights experiences for all of Latin America's indigenous citizens and native people throughout the world.




Decolonizing Law


Book Description

This book brings together Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives on the theory and practice of decolonizing law. Colonialism, imperialism, and settler colonialism continue to affect the lives of racialized communities and Indigenous Peoples around the world. Law, in its many iterations, has played an active role in the dispossession and disenfranchisement of colonized peoples. Law and its various institutions are the means by which colonial, imperial, and settler colonial programs and policies continue to be reinforced and sustained. There are, however, recent and historical examples in which law has played a significant role in dismantling colonial and imperial structures set up during the process of colonization. This book combines usually distinct Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives in order to take up the effort of decolonizing law: both in practice and in the concern to distance and to liberate the foundational theories of legal knowledge and academic engagement from the manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and settler colonialism. Including work by scholars from the Global South and North, this book will be of interest to academics, students and others interested in the legacy of colonial and settler law, and its overcoming.