The Permanent People’s Tribunals and indigenous people’s struggles in Mexico

On 21 October 2011, hundreds of Mexican civil society organizations formally submitted a petition to the Lelio e Lisli Basso Foundation in Rome to justify the opening of a Mexican Chapter of the Permanent People’s Tribunals (PPT). The PPT was established in 1979 as the successor to the Russell Tribunals on Vietnam (1966–1967) and on the Latin American Dictatorships (1974–1976). The PPT is considered an ethical non-governmental tribunal and their sessions are described as a mechanism for raising awareness of national and international public opinion on rights violations. This article investigates the potential of the PPT for contributing to epistemic justice in Mexico, by focusing on indigenous people communities’ long-term struggle for legal pluralism and autonomy. In so doing, it offers an analysis about the coloniality of international human rights law operating in nongovernmental mechanisms of popular litigation such as the PPT; a perspective that has remained absent in critical international and global studies. In particular, the article argues that the PPT in Mexico is imbricated with Eurocentric modes of legal production but that it nonetheless has the potential to contribute, in a relevant but fragile way, to epistemic justice. On the one hand, it is observed that PPT key documents and statements explaining different forms of violence in Mexico emphasize causal relationships based on the all-encompassing power or logic of capitalism. This perspective, it is argued, has the effect of epistemic erasure: notions and practices of justice that exceed this logic are silenced in the process of legal translation for the construction of “model cases”. On the other hand, the article highlights the coexistence of different notions of justice in one of the PPT thematic hearings on Violence against Corn, food sovereignty and autonomy hold in Oaxaca, Mexico, to argue for a re-thinking of the monocultural state-centric legal frames that ground PPT legal qualification. As the PPT classify social grievances in legal terms through the lens/gaze of international law, this legal qualification works as an activity of “translation”, in some cases of incommensurable notions of justice or absence of justice, violence or well-being. The article concludes with an emphasis on the potential contributions of the PPT to epistemic justice as the political visibility of the many ways in which justice is understood and experienced despite the many forms of violence and oppression in contemporary Mexico

Social Struggles as Epistemic Struggles

__Abstract__ This contribution offers a view on social struggles as epistemic struggles to critically engage with the Activism 2010+ debate. Our core idea is that socia

Knowledge dialogues with Central American social movements

It was almost seven years back when Hivos invited the ISS to participate in a new programme that was going to explore possibilities for a ‘knowledge exchange’. The idea of the programme was to take advantage of all the interesting information present in the drawers (and in the heads) of project officers in Hivos and their colleagues in partner organisations worldwide. It was assumed that a ‘treasure box’ existed somewhere out there, containing a wealth of rough but interesting data on civil society dynamics that was begging for systematic and critical analysis. ISS immediately showed an interest, agreed on the conditions, and then became in 2005 the first academic organisation participating in this new ‘knowledge programme’. It soon explored the possibilities for a dialogue between Hivos and its Southern partners on the one hand, and ISS staff and Southern researchers on the other. The knowledge programme focused initially on the practice of civil society building, and in particular on the dynamics of Central American social movements, one of Hivos’ crucial target groups. The ultimate purpose was to learn from the rich experience of Hivos’ partners in order to better understand the complex process of civil society formation

Book Review on: Patrick Barrett, Daniel Chavez and Cesar Rodriguez Garavito. The New Latin American Left. Utopia Reborn?

Barret, Chavez and Rodriguez main task in The New Latin American Left. Utopia Reborn?, is that of identifying what are the factors that can explain the em

Book Review of: Daniel Drache. Defiant Publics: the Unprecedented Reach of the Global Citizen

Daniel Drache asks ‘what should we make of these angry, defiant, self-organized publics?’ The result is a theoretical contribution that brings to the fore Habermas’ concept of interactive communication and Harold Innis’ bias of communication for understanding rising global public activism and the effects of their dissent in global politics. In particular, Drache interrogates the driving forces behind the unprecedented reach of the global citizen. In his view, new information technologies are providing the opportunity for non-hierarchical forms of organization and coordination through text-messaging, blogging and going on line. These virtual-communicational forms combined with grass root organizing strategies have opened opportunities for public participation and social change in both, local and global arenas. Furthermore, for Drache the nature of the public sphere as the forum in which collective needs and concerns are voiced has been transformed by the rising of virtual mediation

Decolonial Feminism and Global Politics: Border Thinking and Vulnerability as a knowing otherwise

For more than two decades, the vast production of post-structuralist/post-positivist feminist critique and postcolonial feminist thinking within the field of International Relations (IR) and, more recently, Global Politics (GP) has prompted critical investigations on their modern and colonial foundations (for examples, see, Sylvester 1993; Pappart and Marchand 1995; Gruffyd Jones 2006; Shilliam 2010). In doing so, different epistemological positions have been deployed in attempts to destabilize narratives that (re)produce dominant ideas about ‘the international’ and ‘global politics.’ Today, these contributions constitute a fruitful background to the current wave of academic interest focused on critically understanding the epistemic foundations of IR and GP as disciplines responsible for thinking about how power operates in international and global spheresDecolonial thinking has recently played a key role in this critical endeavour (Icaza 2010; 2015; Taylor 2012; Icaza and Vazquez 2013). Belonging to a different geo-genealogy2 than that of post-colonial studies, decolonial thinking takes as its point of departure the acknowledgement that there is ‘no modernity without coloniality’ (Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2003; 2013; Walsh 2007; 2010; 2011; 2012; Lugonés 2010a; 2010b; Vazquez 2009; 2011; 2014). For the purposes of this text, the relevance of this affirmation is that coloniality as the underside of modernity constitutes an epistemic location from which reality is thought. This locus of enunciation, following Mignolo, means that hegemonic histories of modernity as a product of the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution are not accepted but challenged in order to undo the Eurocentric power projection inherent to them. Precisely, in seeking to avoid becoming just another hegemonic project, decolonial thinking is also understood as an option — in contrast to a paradigm or grand theory — among a plurality of option

Intersectionality and Diversity in Higher Education,

What is ‘intersectionality’ and why does it matter to teachers and researchers of diversity in higher education? In this text, we approach intersectionality not just as concept that allows a critical enquiry into how class, gender and race shape society but also as praxis for social justice (Birge and Hill Collins 2016). For feminist researchers working on/about diversity, intersectionality constitutes a way of doing, sensing and thinking about the worlds we inhabit and construct, as teachers and researchers in higher education (Ahmed 2012, Harcourt et. al. 2016, Icaza 2015). Intersectionality has allowed feminist researchers to consider people and groups’ nuances in their experiences of exclusion and inclusion as emerging from the intersections of race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, body ableness and so on, instead of as an effect of one single mark or category o

Simposio ¿Que Significa ser Ciudadana Hoy en America Latina?

Con esta pregunta queremos abrir una reflexión teórica y estratégica. Consideramos que interrogar los contenidos de la ciudadanía en el contexto actual es una forma de contribuir al debate jurídico, ya que permite identificar y comprender las variables que pueden incidir en la condición y calidad de la ciudadanía de las mujeres en nuestro continente. Asimismo, este ejercicio puede facilitar un diálogo entre las teorías que definen la ciudadanía desde la pertenencia a una unidad política y aquellas teorías que ven en el derecho a tener derechos una condición básica y universal para plantear el goce efectivo de los derechos humanos