Indigenous and Afro-descendant territorial justice claims and sociolegal mobilization in Latin America

Future agendas

Abstract

The multicultural and plurinational constitutional turn of the late twentieth century in Latin America recognised the rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities to land. In the face of deepening neoliberal extractivism, defence of their ancestral territories has involved attempts to enforce legal rights through recourse to the courts alongside advocacy, direct action, and strategies to strengthen place-based forms of autonomy. This essay reviews the balance of scholarship on Indigenous and Afro-descendant mobilisation for collective rights to land through the courts in Latin America and outlines areas for future research. These include the implementation gap; climate justice litigation; rights of nature; transitional justice; cuerpo-territorio; courts and the authoritarian turn; and criminalisation of protest and extrajudicial violence.