Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Throughout the 1990s and the current decade, the indigenous rights movement has catapulted from resource-poor, local activists to global activists with resource avenues extending from local, national, and global sources. Therise of transnational indigenous rights movements has paralleled and interfaced with a number of significant structural developments at the international and state-systemic level that raise important questions aboutthe interplay between global and local politics as arenas of social change. These developments include the apparently increasing openness of states in the latter part of the 1990s, the proliferation and sophistication of transnational networks and resources (primarily facilitated by international non-governmental organizations and inter-governmental organizations), and the accelerated globalization of neo-liberal economic reforms, which entrenched the indigenous movement in a series of conflicts over natural resource use and extraction. These developments, in other words, opened up or widened political spaces for indigenous peoples throughout the world to become more influential participants in both local (state) and transnational or global political processes. Their participation is evident in national political outcomes such as constitutional reform and increased governmental representation at all levels. Such outcomes, in turn, have further empowered indigenous movements.Accelerated globalization and market reform, however, also create challenges to indigenous movements, including the propensity for disconnect between cosmopolitan leaders (Tarrow 2005) and their local bases, fragmentation between local and national indigenous movements, and strategic conflicts between the global and the local levels of activism. This paper addresses the challenges that complex processes of global governance pose to the indigenous rights movement and the implications for both domestic and international political outcomes based on recent protests and political policy changes in indigenous regions. Finally, although we focus here on cases inCentral and South America, we note the uneven successes of and challenges to indigenous movements in other venues, such as in the wealthier settler states in North America, and assess the role of international norms pertaining both to human rights and neoliberalism in shaping indigenous movements and state responses. We conclude by evaluating whether recent theorizing about norm diffusion sheds any light on understanding both the measure of success of indigenous movements in influencing state politics as well as in creating the challenges they face as a result of their simultaneously increasing embeddedness within the globalization of neoliberalism.