Jurisdification

Political-legal mobilization in social-environmental conflicts in Latin America

Disputes over natural resources and their management have increasingly assumed a law-like shape and have been channelled through legal and quasi-legal arenas, such as civil and criminal courts (to challenge extractive projects but also to criminalise protest movements), arbitration tribunals, popular tribunals, community consultations emulating legally-binding plebiscites, grassroots forms of lawmaking, and international human rights institutions. Crucially, environmental politics involves not only the resource-rich territories that provide a habitat and/or livelihood for local populations, but also a plurality of incommensurable moralities and ontologies vis-à-vis the environment, natural resources, extraction, rights, sovereignty and development. In this vein, this project builds upon the premise that the juridification of resource conflicts has its own idiosyncrasies relative to similar processes in other domains of social life.