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Abstract This paper asserts that critiques of political science for neglecting Indigenous politics highlight a critical gap that risks overlooking significant conceptual and practical innovations. It emphasizes how Indigenous autonomy claims challenge traditional notions of sovereignty. Scholars of Indigenous politics in Latin America, publishing in area studies journals, provide essential insights into these autonomy claims and contribute valuable perspectives to the discipline. We identify rigorous scholarly work in English language, peer-reviewed journals exploring Indigenous autonomy, conceptualizing it as a multifaceted notion that encompasses political visions, practices, and social movement agendas. Through a comprehensive meta-analysis of literature in Latin American area studies, we argue that this field offers four fundamental insights. First, Indigenous peoples deploy diverse strategies to assert their rights, positioning themselves as active citizens and political agents rather than passive groups. Second, the emergence of multicultural institutions that integrate individual and collective rights is fundamentally reshaping politics and citizenship, leading to innovative governance structures. Third, accumulation by dispossession remains a crucial driver of wealth creation, severely undermining Indigenous autonomy and degrading their environments. Finally, a renewed emphasis on Indigenous territorial autonomy decisively challenges conventional views of state sovereignty, as Indigenous peoples assert territorial and nonterritorial rights.
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Forest citizens and people‐centered conservation in the Brazilian Amazon
Demands for territorial recognition are foundational to the claiming of rights by forest-proximate people who attempt to conserve their forests. The rights of these often marginalized populations have been largely overlooked by conservationists, yet they are central to achieving people-centered conservation. We further developed the concept of forest citizenship as a normative framework and analytical tool based on Brazilian social environmentalism (socioambientalismo), florestania (a former political project in Acre state), Latin American scholarship on ecological citizenship, and Eurocentric political philosophy. Decades of struggle for territorial recognition and social inclusion have solidified the right to have rights for Amazonia’s forest citizens. Hence, forest citizens are people who have become so through the sociopolitical dynamics of their rights claims. Forest citizenship is built on community mobilization to create legally recognized territories with participatory governance but becomes tangible only if individuals and communities can successfully claim other rights from institutions through everyday practices of citizenship. We also assessed the current number and distribution of forest citizens across Brazilian Amazonia based on gridded population data and spatial analyses to calculate the resident population in four territorial categories that meet these democratic preconditions: Indigenous lands, extractive reserves, sustainable development reserves, ecological settlement projects, and Afro-descendent Quilombola territories. The territories covered 31% of the Legal Amazon, were home to 1.05 million forest citizens, and had diverse primary policy objectives but shared goals of empowering communities and conserving forests. To be emancipatory, forest citizenship must be bottom-up, socially inclusive, and improve people’s lives. We suggest that conservationists pay greater attention to power relations and decision-making structures related to forest territories. Territory-based forest citizenship may be relevant for other countries where environmentalism has intersected with struggles for land rights and democracy.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2222007
- PAR ID:
- 10671060
- Publisher / Repository:
- Conservation Biology
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Conservation Biology
- Volume:
- 39
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0888-8892
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.70031
