Humanities

Abstract

From 1960s onwards, liberal multiculturalism – from Iris M. Young's notion of a ‘differentiated citizenship’ or what Rodolfo Stavenhagen terms ‘internal self-determination’ to Will Kymlicka's multicultural citizenship and federacy arrangements, Arendt Lijphart's consociationalism and Rainer Bauböck's pluralist federation – has played a fundamental role in the recognition of difference as well as questioning the configuration of the nation–state as racially homogenous and administratively unified. So far, these liberal approaches have successfully addressed and accommodated some of the core political and cultural demands of religious and ethnic minorities. Yet, drawing on field research conducted in Chile and Nicaragua as well as a critical examination of this liberal canon on multiculturalism, this paper theorises that in the case of indigenous quests for autonomy, these approaches exude nothing but epistemological blindness, ignoring or dismissing alterity. At worst, they function as an epistemic violence that silences, incorporates and decontests synchronic alternative autonomist indigenous articulations.


Sinopsis

A partir de la década de 1960, el multiculturalismo liberal, representado preponderantemente por las teorías de “ciudadanía diferenciada” de Iris M. Young—o lo que Rodolfo Stavenhagen ha denominado “autodeterminación interna”—así como los modelos de ciudadanía multicultural y federacía desarrollados por Will Kymlicka; la democracia consociacional elaborada por Arendt Lijphart y la federación plural desarrollada por Rainer Bauböck, ha jugado un papel predominante en el reconocimiento de la diferencia étnica. De la misma forma, el modelo liberal de multiculturalismo ha sido pionero en el cuestionamiento de las premisas del estado-nación como ente racialmente homogéneo y administrativamente unitario. Hasta ahora, estos regímenes multiculturales han exitosamente tratado las exigencias culturales y políticas y han llevado a la transformación de legislaciones nacionales a favor de las demandas de un gran número de minorías étnicas y grupos religiosos. Sin embargo, este artículo, a través de una examinación crítica del multiculturalismo liberal y la yuxtaposición de este modelo inherentemente Occidental con las articulaciones de autonomía emanadas de movimientos indígenas en América Latina, en particular en Nicaragua y Chile, teoriza que estos modelos de autonomía, en el mejor de los casos, exudan únicamente una ceguera epistemológica que ignora o descarta alteridad. En el peor de los casos, funcionan como una violencia epistémica que silencia e incorpora articulaciones autonomistas indígenas sincrónicas.

What factors have caused and sustained Islamism in West Africa? In answering this historically relevant question, this article re-examines the dominant narratives and hegemonic schools of thought that have attempted to tackle this phenomenon. Drawing from existing theoretical trends, this article repackages and synthesises their hypotheses into a
basic formula. Escaping the ideological trappings of the past and overcoming the old structure-agency and material-ideational divide, this article argues that in West Africa, and the Sahel-Sahara region in particular, prerequisites for terrorism and factors that allow an effective dissemination of Salafi-jihadism are primarily located in geography (human and physical) and history. Islamism, this article argues, is thus a mix of context-derived geopolitical and contemporary factors and a case of ideational resuscitation of historical events and religious memories.

This article explores the politics, discursive utterances and postures of an under-studied indigenous autonomist movement whose anti-colonial and anti-Western project demands to be studied per se: the Council of Miskitu Elders of the Communitarian Nation Mosquitia in Nicaragua. As the epitome of what here is denominated revindicative autonomism, this movement presents an articulation of autonomy that not only deviates from but also challenges the current hegemonic model of liberal multiculturalism. Engaging in an anti-colonial struggle, the Council of Elders rearticulates autonomy firstly by bringing to the fore the territorial component of the nomos. Secondly, it does so by pushing for the outright rejection of the Western nation-state and its hierarchical multicultural models of governance. Drawing from an extensive and detailed examination of this movement’s textual and rhetorical contrivances as well as field research conducted in the region, this work explores the rarely acknowledged bottom-up politics of autonomism and attempts to diversify the often reductionist theorisation of indigenous autonomist demands in Latin America.

The synthesis of different modalities of power and ideological frameworks has ensured
an overpowering and suffocating interpellation of the subject. The state apparatus in
conjunction with the capitalist dispositif dictates not only the ontological realities of
the subject but also its social destiny, its subjective capabilities and degree of
appearance in the world. In this paper, we examine and revisit Louis Althusser’s dual
mode of politico-ontological subjectivity: the Good-Subject and the bad-subject. The
former is the interpellated human-animal of the world of domestication which
through erasing or denying revolutionary-truth comes to conceive politics merely as
the art of being governed. This Good-Subject conceives political subjectivity as either
an endeavour to return to an authentic originary past, an ad hominem identitarian
logicality, or at best the amendment of the existing configuration of the system. On
the other hand, the bad-subject is one that is obsessed with the question of how not
to be governed by the existing capitalo-statist logic and order. We argue here that the
bad-subject is a generic subjective-operator consisting of a set of critical procedures,
radical ethos and praxical political steps that introduce a novel revolutionary-truth
into the structured hierarchized capitalo-statist world.

The initial resurgence of indigenous mobilization in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s was certainly driven by the framework of the ‘politics of recognition’. However, since then much has been altered in the politico-economic and cultural framework of Latin American societies. This paper examines a new strand of indigenous mobilization in the region today, what we call ‘revindicative autonomism’. Moving away from the language of ‘rights’ and statist autonomy arrangements, this is a struggle against the much-lauded regimes of multiculturalism and differentiated citizenship. Although officially formed back in the late 1990s, the Coordinadora Arauco Malleco (CAM) has more recently emerged as the central actor in what has been called the ‘New Arauco War’ in south-central Chile. This movement has put forward a sui generis project for autonomy that is contingent on the complete territorial recovery and the reconstruction of Wallmapu as a whole. To achieve that, CAM draws from the pre-colonial past and resuscitates the ontologies and epistemologies of the Mapuche nation.

A new wave of socio-political and economic challenges have undermined the exercise of self-determination and autonomy in the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. The increasing advance of the frontera agrícola into the autonomous territories has led to the clearing and destruction of vast areas of rainforest for agricultural and cattle ranching purposes—fundamentally changing the landscape, demographics and the livelihood of indigenous and ethnic communities. The advance of the frontera agrícola is correlated to the phenomenon of mass migration of Pacific and central mestizo Nicaraguans (mostly peasants and lumpen-proletarians) to La Mosquitia. In the past decade, this migration has wrecked havoc and ethnic conflict in the indigenous territory. The mestizo peasant and lumpen-proletarian migrants, known by the local inhabitants as colonos, being forced out by large land-proprietors and transnational agricultural firms, have illegally settled into lands and territories originally protected by the System of Communal Ownership of Land of Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Communities of the Autonomous Regions of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua and the Bocay, Coco, Indio and Maíz Rivers (Law 445), which came into force in 2003. In this paper we examine the roots of this phenomenon of internal migration and ethnic conflict between the mestizo peasants and local indigenous forces in Nicaragua. We place the forced displacement of mestizo peasants, the illegal occupation of indigenous lands and the subsequent ethnic conflict in the symbiotic yet unequal relationship between the local bourgeoisie and its state, and the omnipresent and omnipotent global capitalist apparatuses.