Limits to Decolonization: Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco

Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs

Program on Latin America and the Caribbean

Department of Geography

present

Limits to Decolonization: Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco

A Talk by Penelope Anthias, Department of Geography, Durham University (UK)

This talk explores Bolivia’s “process of change” from the perspective of a group of indigenous people living at the margins of the state – and on top of its most important gas reserves. Following a recent history of dispossession and debt peonage, Guaraní communities of the Bolivian Chaco have been struggling to gain rights to and control of their ancestral territories as Native Community Lands, a form of collective land title created in 1996. Based on the experiences of the Itika Guasu territorial claim, the talk will describe how racialized inequalities and hydrocarbon interests have conjoined to place enduring obstacles on indigenous struggles for territory.

Sponsored by Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, Program on Latin America and the Caribbean (PLACA), and Department of Geography

This talk is part of Department of Geography’s Spring 2019 Colloquium Series

Contact Havva Karakas-Keles for more information: hkarakas@syr.edu