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This book shows that state elites decide to allocate land and natural resource rights to Indigenous people not as a response to human rights activism or democratic pressure, but to build an institutional apparatus that facilitates control over vulnerable territories in remote regions. By titling Indigenous lands, state elites create new institutional arrangements in property that allows for the subordination, monitoring, and management of Indigenous society.
List of contents
- List of Tables, Figures, and Maps
- Preface
- PART I: THEORETICAL FRAMING
- Chapter 2: Communal Property Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Groups: Their Country-Specific Shape
- Chapter 3: The Argument: The Crucial Role of State Interests
- PART II:
- THE POLITICS OF INDIGENOUS LAND TITLING IN THE AMERICAS
- Chapter 4: Nicaragua: Once Bitten, Twice Shy: Titling for Internal Order
- Conclusion
- Chapter 5: Honduras: Mine not Yours: Indigenous Land Titling to Recover the Eastern Territory
- Chapter 6: Brazil: On My Terms: Creating Indigenous Lands to Control the Borderlands
- Limitations of Extant Approaches
- PART III: CONCLUSION
- Chapter 7: New Ethnic Communal Property Regimes: The Devil is in the Details: Legal Implementation, International Norms, and State-Building in the Americas
- Appendices
- Bibliography
About the author
Giorleny Altamirano Rayo is an Instructor in the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a lawyer, political scientist, and applied researcher interested in property rights, natural resource management, and political-economic development issues in Latin America in a comparative perspective. Her work has been funded by Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Vanderbilt University. She is the author of numerous articles about the Global South and also the translator of original work about historical and contemporary Latin American politics. In addition to her scholarly work, she serves as a Chief Data Scientist and Responsible AI Official at the United States Department of State, served as a diplomat in the Nicaraguan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and as an applied researcher at Vanderbilt University. She has been working and conducting research in and about the Global
South for over fifteen years. The views expressed in this and other works are her own and not necessarily those of the U.S. Government and the U.S. Department of State.
Summary
Why and how do some countries title Indigenous lands in some places, and at certain times, but not others? What accounts for the selective implementation of Indigenous people's collective land and natural resource rights? Conventional accounts hold that transnational activism and bottom-up social movements push Indigenous land titling. Other commonly held views are that economic interests and state weakness block these efforts. Giorleny Altamiro Rayo shows Indigenous land titling is neither random nor methodical. Rather, she argues that state elites are motivated to title Indigenous lands to ensure internal order and reinforce the state's territorial power in remote regions.
Rayo unveils how state elites reshape Indigenous peoples' ancestral land claims and transform pre-existing property institutions into a governing mechanism akin to indirect rule. By titling Indigenous lands, state elites create new institutional arrangements in property that allows for the subordination, monitoring, and management of Indigenous society. The broad implication is that state elites subject people that self-identify as Indigenous to a new hierarchical system that perpetuates their political dependency and socioeconomic marginalization. Altamirano Rayo leverages original data from three Latin American countries (Brazil, Honduras, and Nicaragua) and two additional countries of the Global South (Indonesia and Kenya) to propose the theory and test its reach, using a combination of quantitative analysis and comparative case studies of six subnational regions since the 1980s. Rayo develops a new framework to understand the speed and territorial patterns of Indigenous land titling, and invites readers to rethink much of the conventional wisdom about the causes and effects of Indigenous land and natural resource rights allocation.
Additional text
This book offers a thorough testing of the theory of state control in relation to titling of Indigenous lands. Altamirano Rayo's argument that by granting land titles to Indigenous communities, the authorities curb the internal threat to state sovereignty is significant and has not been studied in such detail previously. Another merit is the extensive and at times very revealing interview material with high-ranking administrators and officials which overall contributes greatly to the depth of the analysis in the book.
