The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy is pleased to announce a new publication on democracy, development, and indigenous rights, the key theme of its contribution to the Geneva Democracy Week in 2018.

Gathering an interdisciplinary group of researchers working on those themes, the international conference hosted by the Centre on that occasion was titled “Democracy, Indigenous Rights and Ethno-Racial Mobilization: Latin America in Comparative Perspective”. It was jointly organised with the Europaeum, an association of a dozen of Europe’s leading universities of which the Graduate Institute is a member, and with Alternautas, an academic blog and journal dedicated to the critical analysis of development in Latin America. The conference was meant to provide opportunities for a younger generation of social scientists to dialogue with senior scholars and to elicit a debate, beyond academia, on ‘exit, voice and loyalty’ (Hirschman 1970).

The papers received feedback from conference conveners, Graziella Moraes, Filipe Calvão and Diego Silva from the Graduate Institute, as well as from the four guests from the Americas who were invited to participate in the debates with the Graduate Institute academic community and with the public during the Democracy Week: Ruth Betsaida Itamari Choque, Member of the Bolivian Parliament, Ethel Branch, Attorney General of the Navajo Nation, Nancy Postero, Professor of Anthropology and co-Director, International Institute, UC San Diego, and Karmen Ramírez Boscán, Founder of Wayunkerra Indigenous Women’s Initiative.

Several of the nine articles presented in that conference by young scholars from different European universities have now been published in a special issue by Alternautas entitled “Indigenous and Afrodescendant Movements and Organizations in Latin America”.

The foci of this 160-page special issue are the political strategies, forms of resistance, and antipolitical practices that indigenous and Afro-descendant communities across Latin America have developed to deal with diverse challenges presented to them by the state and the market.

Read the special issue here.

The conference and subsequent publication intend to illuminate the ongoing contributions that Indigenous and Afrodescendant movements have made to expanding and redefining democracy. Latin America has been the site of such activism over the last decades, as formerly subaltern populations have challenged the ongoing legacies of colonialism and claimed citizenship rights.

Watch the video of the related panel discussion entitled “The new wave of populism in the Americas : advance or setback for indigenous communities?” that was jointly organised with the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) during the 2018 Democracy Week.