On September 26 th , 2014, students in Mexico from the school of Ayotzinapa were attacked and for... more On September 26 th , 2014, students in Mexico from the school of Ayotzinapa were attacked and forcibly disappeared. As hundreds of thousands of people took to the street in an unprecedented outpouring of anger and rage, the attack became the largest scandal in recent historical memory, revealing the horror of contemporary forms of governance. Situated at the interstices of the Drug War, the militarization of the Mexican State, political corruption and impunity, neoliberal reforms, and the residual national trauma of the Dirty War of the 60s and 70s, the attack quickly transformed into a metonym of ubiquitous contemporary forms of violence and loss experienced across Mexico. This work explore how Ayotzinapa became an event which called into question the very legitimacy of the occult powers of the state, challenging the very organization of secrecy, the epistemological conditions and contradictions of governance. This work argues that by mobilizing the horror of Aytozinapa, the unspeakable scandal that lies at the heart of the event, the movement was able to open a breach in historical time and allow people to sense the violence concealed within the everyday. This work looks at both at the epistemic conditions of governance by which the constitutive violence of the state-form is continually figured as exceptional and how other ways of knowing, characterized by refusal and negation, are capable of overcoming these conditions.
Guatemala’s neoliberal turn in the 1990s was heralded as an emergence from a 34- year long civil ... more Guatemala’s neoliberal turn in the 1990s was heralded as an emergence from a 34- year long civil war marked by genocidal counterinsurgency campaigns to a new order of peaceful development, multiculturalism and a singular rule of law. However, Postwar Guatemala has instead witnessed new forms of violence in the highly destructive megaprojects brought by transnational capital as well as the emergence of the massive indigenous Moviemento Maya (Mayan Movement) that contests these projects, claiming they violate Mayan law and their rights to territorial sovereignty. The Marlin Mine, an open pit gold mine located between the municipalities of San Miguel Ixtahuacán and Sipacapa in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, is one such site of conflict between the interests of extractive industry on the one hand and on these emergent claims to collective indigenous rights the other. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis contextualizes, historicizes and critically analyzes the emergence and constitution this collective indigenous subject of rights within Guatemala’s ongoing colonial history. Turning to the place of indigenous people in national and international law, this thesis explores how claims to sovereignty and law both constitute a Mayan subject and serve to contest the Marlin Mine and the operation of neoliberal forms of power more generally. By examining these counter-hegemonic uses of law, I argue against an instrumental conception of the relationship between the Sovereign and Law. I argue instead that Law isn’t something wielded by a Sovereign power, nor is it ever singular, but instead that sovereignty is a legal fiction, an aspirational claim that is made and legitimated through numerous overlapping legal orders and that only takes on reality through micro-contextual practices of recognition. Turning to these micro-contextual practices of recognition, I leave the international courtrooms behind to examine the lived spaces of legal contestation around the mine, from the indigenous authorities who meet in the Casa Del Pueblo to the (legal) blockades demanding access to clean water.
To speak of crisis is to demand a response. Both those who support further border militarization ... more To speak of crisis is to demand a response. Both those who support further border militarization and those who support migrants’ freedom of movement, deploy the rhetoric of “border crisis” in hopes of precipitating state action. Such was the case in what has come to be known as the “American Immigration Crisis of 2014,” the “surge” in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization. What was so remarkable about this invocation of crisis was its mobility across a polarized political landscape: whether one faulted an inadequate immigration system (unable to accommodate asylum-seekers) or a porous border (failing to hold back the flood of those who did not belong), the nation was in crisis and called to action. Here, the language of crisis reveals itself to be a technique of bordering, an affirmation of an always-aspirational sovereignty. In other words, when crisis is invoked, sovereignty itself is performatively called into being and along with it, the nation’s territorial scope and boundaries. At the same time, the exceptional aspect of the concept of crisis naturalizes the structure of a territorial border, masking its contingent, historically-rooted emergence. Therefore, while the bordering practice of “crisis” figures the border as an imperiled yet concrete and pre-existing boundary, in actuality the coherence of the border as such cannot be understood without this element of peril. There is no border crisis; the border is crisis.
Born of revolutionary struggles in the peripheries of Mexico City, the Panchos have spent the pas... more Born of revolutionary struggles in the peripheries of Mexico City, the Panchos have spent the past three decades transforming land occupations into vibrant communities aiming to take charge of every aspect of their lives. To date, they have constructed eight autonomous territories that are home to thousands of families. The Panchos insist they are building not housing projects but life projects. The struggle to transform the material environment to meet immediate needs forms part of a larger political struggle for a qualitatively different form of life, a dignified and communal life grounded in quotidian practices of self‐organization, collective decision making, and shared labor. This article argues that the deepening of this communal form of life exemplifies a destituent praxis, one that reveals, refuses, and abandons the world imposed by the metropolis. By placing Ivan Illich's critique of institutionality in dialogue with recent theorizations of destituent power, this article explores emergent practices of emancipation that abandon the classical locus of revolutionary struggle—seizing state power—and instead combatively assemble, here and now, other ways of living.
On September 26 th , 2014, students in Mexico from the school of Ayotzinapa were attacked and for... more On September 26 th , 2014, students in Mexico from the school of Ayotzinapa were attacked and forcibly disappeared. As hundreds of thousands of people took to the street in an unprecedented outpouring of anger and rage, the attack became the largest scandal in recent historical memory, revealing the horror of contemporary forms of governance. Situated at the interstices of the Drug War, the militarization of the Mexican State, political corruption and impunity, neoliberal reforms, and the residual national trauma of the Dirty War of the 60s and 70s, the attack quickly transformed into a metonym of ubiquitous contemporary forms of violence and loss experienced across Mexico. This work explore how Ayotzinapa became an event which called into question the very legitimacy of the occult powers of the state, challenging the very organization of secrecy, the epistemological conditions and contradictions of governance. This work argues that by mobilizing the horror of Aytozinapa, the unspeakable scandal that lies at the heart of the event, the movement was able to open a breach in historical time and allow people to sense the violence concealed within the everyday. This work looks at both at the epistemic conditions of governance by which the constitutive violence of the state-form is continually figured as exceptional and how other ways of knowing, characterized by refusal and negation, are capable of overcoming these conditions.
Guatemala’s neoliberal turn in the 1990s was heralded as an emergence from a 34- year long civil ... more Guatemala’s neoliberal turn in the 1990s was heralded as an emergence from a 34- year long civil war marked by genocidal counterinsurgency campaigns to a new order of peaceful development, multiculturalism and a singular rule of law. However, Postwar Guatemala has instead witnessed new forms of violence in the highly destructive megaprojects brought by transnational capital as well as the emergence of the massive indigenous Moviemento Maya (Mayan Movement) that contests these projects, claiming they violate Mayan law and their rights to territorial sovereignty. The Marlin Mine, an open pit gold mine located between the municipalities of San Miguel Ixtahuacán and Sipacapa in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, is one such site of conflict between the interests of extractive industry on the one hand and on these emergent claims to collective indigenous rights the other. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis contextualizes, historicizes and critically analyzes the emergence and constitution this collective indigenous subject of rights within Guatemala’s ongoing colonial history. Turning to the place of indigenous people in national and international law, this thesis explores how claims to sovereignty and law both constitute a Mayan subject and serve to contest the Marlin Mine and the operation of neoliberal forms of power more generally. By examining these counter-hegemonic uses of law, I argue against an instrumental conception of the relationship between the Sovereign and Law. I argue instead that Law isn’t something wielded by a Sovereign power, nor is it ever singular, but instead that sovereignty is a legal fiction, an aspirational claim that is made and legitimated through numerous overlapping legal orders and that only takes on reality through micro-contextual practices of recognition. Turning to these micro-contextual practices of recognition, I leave the international courtrooms behind to examine the lived spaces of legal contestation around the mine, from the indigenous authorities who meet in the Casa Del Pueblo to the (legal) blockades demanding access to clean water.
To speak of crisis is to demand a response. Both those who support further border militarization ... more To speak of crisis is to demand a response. Both those who support further border militarization and those who support migrants’ freedom of movement, deploy the rhetoric of “border crisis” in hopes of precipitating state action. Such was the case in what has come to be known as the “American Immigration Crisis of 2014,” the “surge” in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization. What was so remarkable about this invocation of crisis was its mobility across a polarized political landscape: whether one faulted an inadequate immigration system (unable to accommodate asylum-seekers) or a porous border (failing to hold back the flood of those who did not belong), the nation was in crisis and called to action. Here, the language of crisis reveals itself to be a technique of bordering, an affirmation of an always-aspirational sovereignty. In other words, when crisis is invoked, sovereignty itself is performatively called into being and along with it, the nation’s territorial scope and boundaries. At the same time, the exceptional aspect of the concept of crisis naturalizes the structure of a territorial border, masking its contingent, historically-rooted emergence. Therefore, while the bordering practice of “crisis” figures the border as an imperiled yet concrete and pre-existing boundary, in actuality the coherence of the border as such cannot be understood without this element of peril. There is no border crisis; the border is crisis.
Born of revolutionary struggles in the peripheries of Mexico City, the Panchos have spent the pas... more Born of revolutionary struggles in the peripheries of Mexico City, the Panchos have spent the past three decades transforming land occupations into vibrant communities aiming to take charge of every aspect of their lives. To date, they have constructed eight autonomous territories that are home to thousands of families. The Panchos insist they are building not housing projects but life projects. The struggle to transform the material environment to meet immediate needs forms part of a larger political struggle for a qualitatively different form of life, a dignified and communal life grounded in quotidian practices of self‐organization, collective decision making, and shared labor. This article argues that the deepening of this communal form of life exemplifies a destituent praxis, one that reveals, refuses, and abandons the world imposed by the metropolis. By placing Ivan Illich's critique of institutionality in dialogue with recent theorizations of destituent power, this article explores emergent practices of emancipation that abandon the classical locus of revolutionary struggle—seizing state power—and instead combatively assemble, here and now, other ways of living.
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MA Thesis by Sam Law
BA Thesis by Sam Law
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis contextualizes, historicizes and critically analyzes the emergence and constitution this collective indigenous subject of rights within Guatemala’s ongoing colonial history. Turning to the place of indigenous people in national and international law, this thesis explores how claims to sovereignty and law both constitute a Mayan subject and serve to contest the Marlin Mine and the operation of neoliberal forms of power more generally. By examining these counter-hegemonic uses of law, I argue against an instrumental conception of the relationship between the Sovereign and Law. I argue instead that Law isn’t something wielded by a Sovereign power, nor is it ever singular, but instead that sovereignty is a legal fiction, an aspirational claim that is made and legitimated through numerous overlapping legal orders and that only takes on reality through micro-contextual practices of recognition. Turning to these micro-contextual practices of recognition, I leave the international courtrooms behind to examine the lived spaces of legal contestation around the mine, from the indigenous authorities who meet in the Casa Del Pueblo to the (legal) blockades demanding access to clean water.
Presentations by Sam Law
Papers by Sam Law
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis contextualizes, historicizes and critically analyzes the emergence and constitution this collective indigenous subject of rights within Guatemala’s ongoing colonial history. Turning to the place of indigenous people in national and international law, this thesis explores how claims to sovereignty and law both constitute a Mayan subject and serve to contest the Marlin Mine and the operation of neoliberal forms of power more generally. By examining these counter-hegemonic uses of law, I argue against an instrumental conception of the relationship between the Sovereign and Law. I argue instead that Law isn’t something wielded by a Sovereign power, nor is it ever singular, but instead that sovereignty is a legal fiction, an aspirational claim that is made and legitimated through numerous overlapping legal orders and that only takes on reality through micro-contextual practices of recognition. Turning to these micro-contextual practices of recognition, I leave the international courtrooms behind to examine the lived spaces of legal contestation around the mine, from the indigenous authorities who meet in the Casa Del Pueblo to the (legal) blockades demanding access to clean water.