Indigenous Worlding: Kichwa Women Pluralizing Sovereignty

By Manuela L. Picq, Universidad San Francisco de Quito ([email protected])

Introduction

State sovereignty seems so passé. Prominent political theorists have reiterated time and

again the need to move beyond the nation-state: Arjun Appadurai (1993) asked us to

“think ourselves beyond the nation;” Chatterjee (1993) told us to look within it; and

Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) provincialized Europe, with its nation-state system, as an

inadequate guide to political possibilities. Scholars tackled the ethics of post-sovereignty

(Shapiro 1994) and are now looking for new ways to think about the state (Migdal 2009).

Slowly but surely, attempts to break away from the historical straightjacket of the nation-

state as the expected form of political organization are seeping into international relations,

a discipline that has canonized Westphalian sovereignty as a collective fait accompli.

Opening up our imaginaries to non-dominant patterns of knowledge production forces us

to ask what a world politics emancipated from the state actually looks like. If we are to

quiet IR’s obsession with state sovereignty, we must complement conceptualizations with

praxis. In addition to post-national grammars, we need to identify concrete possibilities of

what beyond—and within—the state can be.

Indigeneity is perhaps as ‘beyond’ the state as it goes. Escaping statist

conceptions of boundaries, rooted in non-western ways of worlding, and entailing a

political legitimacy that precedes the state, indigeneity is a strategic site from which to

rethink sovereignty. Indigenous politics offer radically different insights into the

international because they engage forms of governance constituted outside- and to a large

extent before- the modern state. And since there is no way to divorce theory from a

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standpoint in time and space (Cox 1986), indigeneity constitutes a unique positionality to

contest hegemonic histories, with political cosmologies that denaturalize the state as the

sole locus of the political (Beier 2005). More specifically, indigenous practices of

authority-- plural, shared, and unbounded from states--exemplify how to “dispense” with

conventional sovereignty, echoing efforts to emancipate world politics from the shackles

of Eurocentric political practices (Shilliam 2010).

Conventional understandings of stateness are increasingly under attack.

Disciplinary boundaries are contested by voices on the periphery (Tickner and Blaney

2011), on methodological grounds (Jackson 2011) or by engaging storytelling as a form

of knowledge production (Inayatullah 2011). The feminist critique contesting IR

epistemologies (Tickner 1997) has been complemented with post-colonial perspectives

seeking to unfurl silenced histories, while post-racist political projects have intensified

contestation of the field’s Eurocentrism (Hobson 2007, Vitalis 2010). Critics depict the

international as more heterogeneous than conventional wisdom acknowledges, yet few

seem to engage indigenous perspectives to stir political creativity.

Perceived as a local particularism disconnected from the international or too

vernacular to be deemed worthy of universal categorizations, indigeneity remains largely

overlooked by scholars of international relations. Indigenous peoples seem to be “relics,”

more relevant to anthropologists than scholars of global politics. After being written out

of history by selective processes of memory-making (O’Brien 2010), indigenous peoples

are silenced in political modernity (Beier 2009). Lingering imaginaries of this sort are at

odds with the sophistication of indigenous political praxis, indicating the dose of

colonialism still embedded in the discipline (Shaw 2008). While they harvest millennia-

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old grains and speak pre-Columbian languages, indigenous peoples of the Americas have

long articulated their interests in international realms. Indigenous struggles are

fundamentally international, even if they are treated as irremediably apolitical and

implicitly located at the borders of political rationality.

This chapter argues that indigeneity is a valuable site for critical theory. The

political experience of indigenous peoples, and especially indigenous women, is key to

rethinking the world of politics. It seeks to make visible the international dynamism of

indigenous politics and emphasizes its efforts to counter state-centrism. Following

Chatterjee’s (1993) suggestion to look within the nation, I combine ethnographic

approaches with a feminist standpoint to show how indigenous women shape the

international. I support my argument with a case study analysis of indigenous women

struggles in Ecuador. Locating their politics at the intersections of collective, indigenous

rights and international women rights, Kichwa women articulate indigenous politics, the

nation-state, and international norms in ways that dislodge conventional forms of legal

authority. Their pursuit of justice is deeply entangled in global politics and results in

multi-layered and overlapping practices of sovereignty. Overall, the analysis posits

indigeneity as a significant, yet mostly overlooked, category of analysis to think

international relations differently.

In what follows, I first propose indigeneity as a strategic way of seeing that moves

the international beyond state-centrism. I then look at indigenous women’s use of global

politics in Ecuador, debunking accepted understandings of what constitutes the

international, where it is located, and who its legitimate actors are. Although perceived as

peripheral –even external—to international relations, indigenous women are relocating

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legal sovereignty beyond the nation-state. Finally, I analyze the significance of

indigenous forms of sovereignty for identifying alternative roadmaps in world politics.

The triangulation of judicial authority between indigenous, domestic, and international

law dislocates legal sovereignty not from above, as in the European Union, but from

alternative geographies within the state.

1. Why indigeneity matters for international relations

Ways of seeing the international

Indigeneity offers potential insights for thinking differently about the international, for

breaking with disciplinary silences, and for moving beyond state-centrism. It is a valuable

category of analysis because it rescues stories deemed irrelevant and left invisible in

hegemonic narratives of global politics.

First and foremost contribution, indigeneity expands ways of seeing.

Contemporary hegemonic narratives of the state, like coloniality lenses in the past, seem

particularly inapt at seeing anything beyond that which resembles the self. Art Historian

Carolyn Dean describes the consternation of Spanish colonizers encountering “ugly”

Andean idols (Dean 2010:11). The Spanish were seeking the sacred in familiar,

aesthetically pleasing “art” forms according to their standards, rather than in the Andean

landscape. The Spaniards were likewise unable to apprehend Inca perspectives on rocks

as animate, powerful, and sentient. That inability to access Inca meaning echoes the

larger colonial inability to read alternative standpoints. Then as now, the capacity to

recognize other ways of knowing is intertwined in formulations of the political self.

Vanita Seth (2010) analyzes the European difficulty in seeing (and representing)

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difference as stemming from the broader inability to convert the encountered New World

into familiar political language

Still today, part of the inability to account for indigenous dynamics in global

politics derives from its otherness. Indigeneity continues to epitomize the non-scientific

and non-European, marginalized as unreliable and systematically excluded from

legitimate processes of knowledge production. Transplanting Seth’s notions into

contemporary readings of global politics, I suggest that indigeneity is a necessary tool to

recognize the diversity of political configurations differing from western state-centrism.

Or, as Seth puts it, “it is difficult to speak the language of otherness when the other is

virtually absent from the discourse of the self” (Seth 2010:38). More crucially, leaving

indigenous stories unseen allows past omissions to become the foundations of ‘scientific’

narratives (Trouillot 1995). So the invention of the indigenous as savage lingers on today

in implicit understandings of indigeneity as outside of “real politics.” Thinking from

marginal locations, like indigeneity, permits such silences to be broken.

Such dynamics also occur with regards to gender and race. The feminist critique

was groundbreaking for introducing the idea of positionality to global politics. It

expanded conventional understandings of what constitutes the international, for instance

conceptualizing rape as a weapon of war and defining masculinity as a foreign policy

issue (Enloe 2005). Showing how gender matters, the feminist gaze changed what the

discipline looks at and new research methodologies opened pathways to think differently

(Ackerly, Stern, and True 2006). Positionality permitted to shed light on other

invisibilities, such as the racist traits of international relations (Tickner 2010). Scholars

started examining the impact of racism on foreign affairs and denounced the racist

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assumptions that inform present theoretical constructs for most of IR theory (Henderson

2012; Hobson 2007). These approaches explicate for instance how past incapacities to

apprehend the Haitian Revolution, even by its contemporaries (Buck-Morss 2009),

conspire with contemporary silences to keep slavery invisible—or insignificant—from

mainstream narratives of international relations. Just as feminist methodologies produced

new forms of knowledge, engaging indigenous forms of inquiry (L.T. Smith 1999)

contributes layers of complexity to reframe- and repair- our conception of global politics.

Indigenous scholars take the effort of situating the self beyond gender, traversing cultural

paradigms through community research and placing ethics as a methodology (Kovach

2010). Validating story telling and remembrance as forms of knowing, for example,

enables powerful counter-stories to emerge (Mallon 2011). If the birth of IR is a story

about empire where racial boundaries mattered more than territorial ones, as claims

Robert Vitalis (2010:910), then it is all the more urgent to engage categories such as

indigeneity to revisit foundational concepts through other eyes.

Indeed, indigenous peoples never ‘disappeared,’ as suggested by pernicious, if

enduring, discourses of state-formation, nor are they folkloric minorities at the margins

(Den Ouden 2005). They have led active struggles against the colonial state (Brown-

Perez 2011). Yet few scholars of international relations seem interested in articulating the

impact of indigenous struggles on world politics. Karena Shaw (2008) argues this

conceptual marginalization is in part due to the coloniality of a discipline that still

considers indigenous ontologies to be ‘inappropriate’ subjects of analysis or of politics.

For J. Marshall Beier (2009), indigenous politics are not untold stories but unheard ones.

Indigenous women stories are even less heard, despite their strategic mobilization of

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intersectional politics pursuing individual women’s rights and collective indigenous

rights (Parisi and Corntassel 2007; Barker 2006). Still, scholars argue that the modern

model of sovereignty will not work for indigenous peoples, whose dynamic diplomacies

are meaningful to IR because they depart from western, state-centric practices. It is

precisely because indigenous forms of governance transcend state-centrism that they are

able to abstract sovereignty from its Westphalian limitations. Indigenous philosophies

provide non-western forms of inquiry to analyze world politics. Karen Smith (2011), for

instance, engages the South African concept of Ubuntu to complement the frame of

global human rights. While individual scholars made pioneering contributions to

broadening the extent ad content of what constitutes the international, the discipline at

large still lacks a theoretical engagement of indigeneity as a useful category for the

analysis of world politics.

However, scholars from outside of International Relations have drawn on

indigenous experiences to rethink state politics in fundamental ways. In the Andes,

indigenous peoples self-organize in a day-to-day attempt to adapt to local realities and

external forces independently of the state. Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld (2009:17) refers to

these indigenous organizational dynamics as “vernacular statecraft.” James C. Scott

(2010), in his now famous study, tells how the peoples of Zomia deliberately and

reactively remained stateless; he frames self-determination as the art of not being

governed. For scholars of Native Studies, in turn, the nation-state is but one political

geography among several (Biolsi 2005), and the notion of indigeneity as a ‘third space of

sovereignty’ indicates overlapping, non-binary renderings of political life (Bruyneel

2007). Indigenous approaches to the political permit us to account for variations in

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practices of authority, notably modular or shared forms of sovereignty. We can then

recognize (and imagine) political re-arrangements beyond the state for a less hegemonic

distribution of authority.

Indigeneity as a category of analysis

There are at least three reasons for engaging indigeneity as a category of analysis to think

beyond the state. On empirical grounds indigenous struggles successfully challenging

sovereign states are too powerful not to impact the international in significant ways. In

historical terms, indigeneity is intrinsically relational to state-formation, making it a

valuable tool to think post-national re-assemblages. At a theoretical level, indigeneity is a

strategic site from which to defy the disciplinary borders of international relations. I will

treat each issue in turn.

First, there is an empirical need to integrate indigenous politics into the study of

international relations because of its immediate impact on world affairs. From the Artic to

the Amazon, indigenous communities are fighting extractive industries and resisting

predatory policies on autonomous territories (Banerjee 2012; Bebbington and Bebbington

2011). In Ecuador, indigenous movements evolved into formal political parties, with the

creation of Pachakutik in 1996 (Becker 2011), whereas Inuits have achieved some of the

most comprehensive forms of self-government in the world (Shadian 2013). As

differences between the political right and left grow blurry, indigenous groups are rising

as global sites of contestation against state policy, providing hopes of alternative ethics of

governance (Boaventura de Sousa Santos 2012, El Mundo). Indigenous systems of justice

are recasting judicial authority, making visible collaborative social contracts independent

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from the state. Indigenous territoriality challenges not only the authority of individual

states within national borders, but the organization of world politics around sovereignty.

In fact, indigenous claims seek the redistribution of rights as much as the uprooting of the

concentration of power in the state.

Second, the historical imperative to bring indigeneity into IR stems from its role

in so many processes of state-formation. The invention of indigenous peoples as savages

to be civilized led to colonial land-grabbing policies supported by the doctrine of

discovery. Indigeneity was the imagined antithesis of European modernity, a-temporal

and apolitical, epitomizing an invented absence of the social contract that ostensibly

preceded the (European) state. Indigeneity refers to the uncivilized natives who do not

belong to the ‘modern’ project of state-building. The term applies to those who precede

the modern state. Thus, indigeneity mirrors modernity in that it refers to the ‘cultural’

other against which the history of the European nation unfolds. It is intrinsically

relational to the state, and thus vital to a discipline dedicated to studying relations among

states. To dismiss indigenous politics on the grounds of minority status is misleading

because indigeneity refers, first and foremost, to the state.

This conceptual inter-linkage is key. The co-constitutive relation of indigeneity

and the state explains the worldwide proliferation yet diversity of indigenous claims.1 The

common denominator of indigenous politics worldwide is the colonial legacy of nation-

states. Although colonialisms vary from South-East Asia to Latin America,

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1
It is because indigeneity refers to the state as much as to the people outside of it that indigenous counter-
narratives to state-formation vary greatly according to context, time and region (Engelbert 2009).
“Indigenous” is a contested, heterogeneous, and fluid identity, referring less to a constitutive who/what then
to the otherness implied by the term (Canessa 2005). International law only proposes general guidelines to
identify indigeneity (precedence, language, ancestral lands), which is attributed largely on the grounds of
self-definition.

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provincializing European political frameworks is a shared challenge (Chakrabarty 2000).

It is precisely because indigenous politics are intrinsic to the emergence of the state and

contest its authority that they may contribute critiques distinct from feminist or racial

approaches. Whereas gender and race-based demands aim to expand access to the state,

indigenous claims, by contrast, demand rights autonomous from the state. Indigeneity

demands less state, not more, as feminist standpoints usually do. Standing outside of and

prior to the state makes indigenous standpoints valuable sites for post-state worlding.

Third, and consequently, indigeneity disrupts some of the core epistemological

foundations of international relations. Indigeneity is a strategic location from which to

think differently, because its precedence over the modern state entails a political

legitimacy beyond it. Indigenous experiences complement official national histories with

forgotten or repressed narratives. In the process, they bring other epistemologies in,

destabilizing state-centric conceptualizations of the political. The ‘prior,’ which Saskia

Sassen (2008) sees as challenging sovereignty, is, I argue, precisely indigeneity. In this

way, indigeneity encompasses territorial and historical dimensions that neither gender nor

race alone have, to think political authority beyond stateness.

Thus, spatial imaginaries of the state as modern and global, in contrast to

indigeneities imagined as non-political and isolated, miss not only the impact of

indigenous politics but the very essence of the state. Indigeneity is key to tackle post-

colonial questions such as those raised by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000). The modern state

appears as fundamentally inadequate to recognize the breadth of alternative political

projects. Indigeneity, as a colonial category central to state-making, provides tools to

historicize the state and sovereignty. Further, if decolonized epistemologies are an

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indispensable point of departure to move beyond European state-centrism, indigenous

experiences complement theory with praxis. Indigenous autonomy over territory and

jurisdiction, for instance, postulates a political space beyond state sovereignty. Such

experiences free political imaginaries from the hegemonic episteme of the nation-state

(Biolsi 2005), making it possible to think of a world that is not state-based. Bringing

indigenous studies into international relations determines our ability to engage the variety

of political practices that are thriving beneath the surface. Further, it opens

epistemological debates that can transform IR’s self-understanding. The vibrancy of

indigenous struggles not only confirm the inadequacy of the state, it also provides

concrete experiences of what the international can actually look like within and beyond it.

Indigeneity is a useful, because critical, category of analysis.

2. Indigenous practices of the international

The intersection of feminist standpoints with indigenous ways of knowing provides a

strategic positionality to look at world politics. I will explore this intersection in a case-

study analysis of indigenous women’s struggles in Ecuador. The legal maneuvering of

Kichwa women in the highlands of Chimborazo is not only anchored in the international,

but also constitutes a denationalized legal space defying expected imaginaries of

sovereignty. This section first posits the international dimension of indigenous claims to

then analyze the mechanisms by which Kichwa women create new legal rights.

Indigenous internationalism

There is nothing new about the international dimension of indigenous politics. IR

may not have gotten there yet, but historians trace the link between indigenous peoples

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and international law back to the relation between imposed and indigenous law in the

expansion of settlers’ sovereignty (Benton 2009; Ford 2010). Scholars of indigenous

studies provided extensive evidence of how native populations articulated their collective

rights in the terms of colonial law. Indigenous women in colonial Quito skillfully

navigated across legal systems (Gauderman 2003), while in New England the Eastern

Pequots established their reservation through a legal agreement in 1683 (Den Ouden

2012). In the early nineteenth-century, Chief Justice John Marshall stressed Native

sovereignty in two Cherokee Nation v. Georgia Court Cases. He defined “the character of

the Cherokees as a state, as a distinct political community… governing itself,”

establishing that the laws of Georgia were non-enforceable within the Cherokee Nation

(Biolsi 2005:242), though it remains a contentious point in US law that the US

government recognized Native Americans as independent states while strategically

denying them the right to practice international affairs (Deloria Jr. and Lytle 1998). Vine

Deloria Jr. (2006) rightly denounces court battles between Native groups and the state

that were nothing more than a “conquest masquerading as law,” and Amy Den Ouden

(2012) details the legal violence of the colonial state. Reservations are nonetheless a

sovereign land from which to practice legal contestation. The international has been a

preferred, perhaps inevitable, site for indigenous contestation because indigenous politics

have always been situated outside the state.Indigenous legal resistance should not be seen,

then as a new or novel phenomenon (Belmessous 2011). Rather, contemporary struggles

are rooted in five hundred years of elaborated international strategies. The European

dispossession of native land for state-formation depended on invalidating existing

systems of authority. Indigenous groups then (and now) were kept outside the state, and

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their contestation produced sophisticated legalities to defy the self-assigned sovereign

authority of the state. Indigenous legal activism from the sixteenth century on was so

dynamic that scholars have argued that European legal justifications should be

understood in part as counter-claims rather than the original discourses. Far from being

passive observers, native peoples were active in making, changing, and interpreting

colonial law--and, by extension, in shaping the international order (Benton 2001).

Indigenous claims are, thus, prior to the full establishment of modern states.

Indigenous politics have become more visible in mainstream politics over the last

three decades since gaining space in the international human rights system (Anaya 2004).

At the United Nations, the participation of indigenous organizations at the Working

Group on Indigenous Peoples (WGIP) soared from 48 to 500 between 1983 and 2005

(Corntassel 2007:153; Escárcega 2010).2 The Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues

(UNPFII), which has gathered indigenous peoples annually in New York since 2002,

advises the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The proliferation of UN

organs expanded significantly during the two UN Decades for Indigenous Rights,

creating expert and monitoring mechanisms as well as consolidating norms. Intrinsic to

global human rights, indigenous claims have been gaining momentum as the international

human rights system consolidated (Niezen 2003).

Since 1989, indigenous peoples made vigorous use of the Convention 169 of the

International Labor Organization (ILO) to defend their rights in international courts.3 In

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#!Corntassel(2007) points that the UN organs created for indigenous issues were designed with an open
attendance policy, allowing any representative to participate in the annual conferences and therefore
expanding significantly the participation of indigenous peoples in such forums.
3
Adopted in 1989 by the International Labor Organization, Convention 169 recognizes indigenous peoples
rights to self-determination within nation-states, including self-management of justice and prior
consultation to projects impacting their territories and communities.

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2007, the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the most

important treaty for indigenous rights in the works since 1985, confirmed the global

legitimacy of claims to self-determination.4 UNDRIP was the longest-debated human

rights instrument in UN history, requiring two consecutive UN Decades. The recognition

of collective rights to prior consultation generated discomfort, but what truly blocked the

process was a stern resistance from states to cede autonomy over Indigenous territories.

The declaration sealed the universal recognition of the principle of self-determination

(Article 3) and formalized rights to lands, territories, and resources (Articles 25 to 30).

This required recognizing complex, alternative systems of authority over territories

contained by the sovereign state.5 The solution to the contentious negotiations over

territory was a final article specifying that no part of the declaration can be understood as

undermining in any way the sovereignty and territorial integrity of member states (Article

47). In classic international human rights fashion, the declaration remained ambiguous,

yet indigenous self-determination nevertheless gained global recognition.

The emergence of international norms protecting indigenous rights was not granted by

well-intentioned member-states at the UN. Rather, it is the fruit of a powerful global

indigenous movement (Morgan 2011).6

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4
Negotiations lasted over 11 annual sessions to reach consensus, and the only four countries to oppose it
were Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S. Adopted by 144 countries, the Declaration was the first
legal document dedicated to indigenous rights in the UN system.
5
Most member-states reacted to Article 46, the most contentious, specifying that the declaration could not
be interpreted in any way that could impair the territorial sovereignty of states. Australia, New Zealand,
Canada, and the US voted against the treaty in 2007 and some have since then revised their stands. In 2011,
for instance, the Obama administration recognized UNDRIP.
6
Indigenous global activism is dynamic beyond the formal corridors of intergovernmental organizations, as
shown by the globalization of Indigenous media, such as the World Indigenous Television Broadcasters
Network, and the proliferation of hemispheric meetings. Both the Continental Summits of Indigenous
Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala (Becker 2008) and the Continental Summit of Indigenous

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 Just as in colonial times of land dispossession, today’s purpose of developing

international legal strategies is to contest the nation-state in local realms and the

proliferation of international mechanisms legitimizing indigenous autonomy percolates

within states to frame domestic jurisdiction. Every state in Latin America now recognizes

some degree of indigenous autonomy, from independent systems of justice to territorial

autonomy. The Sarayaku community in the Ecuadorian Amazon has built a forceful

network of internal allies to resist extractive industries on their ancestral territories. In the

case of the Belo Monte dam in Brazil, indigenous pressure to respect laws on prior

consultation resulted in intricate court cases involving local and federal courts, the

Organization of American States, and global norms. In Peru, international law was

invoked so forcefully that the government adopted legislation integrating prior

consultation mechanisms into the Constitution in 2011. Contemporary struggles for

indigenous self-determination impact the contours of the state, more frequently and to

larger depths than usually acknowledged.

It is in part because they are so embedded in the international arena that

international relations should take indigenous politics into greater account. It is also

because, as they unfold, indigenous dynamics impact the content of global politics. In

particular, they shape what sovereignty entails and where it is located. The ways in which

indigenous women use global politics to defend their rights in local communities reveals

how the international is articulated in vernacular, cultural contexts. The international

strategies of a small group of Kichwa women in Ecuador are exemplary. Their

positionality at the intersection of gender and ethnicity seeks a re-assemblage of authority

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Communication in the Americas are testimony to indigenous influence in the formulation of public policies
across borders.

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autonomous from the state, combining indigenous collective rights and global human

rights norms.

Kichwa women assembling legal rights

In Ecuador, a group of Kichwa women, most of them illiterate, took international law as

the main tool to advance their rights within ancestral systems of justice. The Red de

Mujeres Kichwas de Chimborazo (Chimborazo Network of Kichwa Women) located in

the central highlands of Ecuador, consists of about one hundred women, most of them

peasants, bilingual in Kichwa and Spanish but largely illiterate. Indigenous claims often

invoked ILO Convention 169 whereas feminist demands reiterated principles of the

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence against Women (CEDAW)

principles to defend lives free of violence. But Kichwa women were actively hoping to

see global women rights get incorporated in collective rights. Feeling stuck between the

racism of state institutions and customary practices detrimental to women, they used

international human rights norms to lobby for their intersectional rights as indigenous

women.

The opportunity came in 2008, when President Rafael Correa called for a

constitutional reform. The Red de Mujeres Kichwas de Chimborazo had then been

grappling with women’s lack of access to justice after a case of domestic violence stirred

up controversy across the province two years prior. After beating the mother of his

children, Pachakutik Congressman7 Estuardo Remache had demanded that his accusation

be transferred from the ordinary justice system to indigenous community justice, thereby

evading accountability (Picq 2012). When President Correa invited the Ecuadorian

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7
Pachakutik, founded in1996, is the electoral party of Ecuador’s indigenous movement (see Becker 2010).

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citizenry to contribute agendas to be debated by a democratic constitutional process in

Montecristi, Kichwa women had already been working on an agenda to pursue legal

rights of their own.

Just as Ecuador’s indigenous movement has strategically invoked international

human rights to advocate subnational interests, Kichwa women trespassed national

jurisdiction as they searched for legal language supporting their cause. Cristina Cucuri,

the only member of the group with higher education, surfed the web for days looking for

international treaties or foreign constitutions that explicitly defined indigenous women

rights. Screening international treaties and national constitutions from the region on

google, they found precise legislation for indigenous peoples and extensive rights for

women, but little at that intersection.8 The 2007 UN Declaration fails to go any further

than calling for particular attention to be paid to the rights of women (Art.22). In Bolivia,

the new Constitution passed under indigenous President Evo Morales represented a solid

improvement for native populations, yet indigenous rights expanded without much

consideration given to gender.

Kichwa women combined international norms and national law to build their case.

The 1998 Constitution formally recognized collective rights, notably indigenous justice.

Now the challenge was to make collective rights respect gender norms such as those set

forth in the CEDAW. Their goal was to secure women’s participation and decision-

making within community affairs. To get there, the strategy was to push Ecuadorian law

to require indigenous systems of justice to abide by international norms of gender parity.

Seizing the opportunity of a Constitutional Reform, Kichwa women tried to bridge

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international law on women rights with domestic legislation on collective rights. They

disregarded the expert advice of a lawyer who declared the idea inoperable under the

pretext that gender was part of universal rights and therefore irreconcilable with

exceptional rights to culture. Instead, they navigated three scales of legal authority to

invent rights of their own and turn them into law. Indigenous women are both protecting

cultural rights and changing their culture, demonstrating this is much less of a

contradiction than it might seem at first glance.

Armed with two sets of international norms, the women blended gender language

from CEDAW with indigenous rights stated in UNDRIP to draft a proposal. On the

opening day of the Constitutional Assembly, they made their way to the President of the

Constitutional Assembly, Alberto Acosta, and handled him a document explaining the

violence embedded in gender inequality in their communities and demanding that

collective rights respect women’s voices. For months, they took turns travelling to the

coastal town of Montecristi, where the Assembly process was taking place, to pursue

their advocacy efforts. They left their children and their fields, some for the first time,

and took a ten-hour bus-ride to lobby the highest ranked politicians in the country. Their

discourse to ministers and assembly members stressed the responsibility of the

Ecuadorian state to honor the human rights norms it had ratified in international realms.

In particular, they insisted on the adoption of explicit language “guaranteeing the

participation and decision-making of women” for law regarding collective rights, culture,

and indigenous justice.

The group’s focus was to reform their own autonomous systems of justice. They

were not trying to fix gender discrepancies in the judiciary apparatus of the state. Rather,

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they wanted to explicitly integrate international women rights into subnational indigenous

systems, without regard to whether the national state adopted such laws itself. The

reasoning of the women was straightforward. If international human rights norms are

truly universal, then they are valid at subnational levels, including the most ancestral

cultural practices in the Andes. According to the Constitution, international treaties

ratified by Ecuador have legal validity. Thus, while indigenous justice is entirely

autonomous, it is required—like the state—to abide by international human rights treaties.

The demand to respect the human rights of indigenous women was perfectly arguable

through legal deduction, even if it was unprecedented in the national legal system. The

key innovation was that the legal sovereignty of the state was bypassed in making

subnational, indigenous systems of justice explicitly accountable to international women

rights. As a result, Kichwa women fused universal discourses on gender equality with

norms on cultural autonomy, balancing and integrating international law with indigenous

justice. In practice, they strengthened cultural exceptionalism through an agile use of the

international women rights normative framework. At a conceptual level, their political

strategy reconciled long-standing debates that oppose multiculturalism and gender

equality (Okin 1999; Benhabib 2002; Song 2007), almost seamlessly weaving gender into

culture.

Invoking international law was enough to successfully pressure the state. The

women’s group presented formal letters requesting the Constitutional Assembly to

integrate international language on gender parity and equality into six Articles on

collective rights (Art. 1, 9, 10, 16, 17, 22). Inspired by CEDAW, their phrasing required

indigenous culture to “eliminate all forms of discrimination and violence against girls,

! "*!
teens, and adult women” (Art.26). They insisted on explicit wording referring to gender

equality to be integrated throughout the new constitution. Three Articles now included

gender-specific language to secure women’s equal participation. The new text on the

recognition of judicial autonomy over ancestral territories (Art 171) requires the

“guarantee of women’s participation and decision-making.” Gender parity was also

added in Articles on collective rights and culture. After much insistence from Kichwa

women, the long Article 57 on the collective rights of indigenous peoples was

complemented with one final line: “The State will guarantee the application of those

collective rights without any discrimination, in conditions of equality and equity between

women and men.”

The significance of Kichwa women political activism around human rights is

manifold, notably showing the complementarity, rather than incompatibility, between

universal women’s rights and collective rights to culture. At least two considerations are

worth stressing in the intent to emphasize the internationalism of indigenous politics.

First, indigenous peoples make regular and extensive use of international norms and

organizations in their daily politics. As local and traditional as they may be, indigenous

experiences reveal a sophisticated use of international law. Kichwa women successfully

engaged international law to make indigenous justice accountable to women’s rights.

This use of international law is rather relevant in a country where half the population is of

indigenous descent. It shows the local relevance of international treaties and the savvy

internationalism of so-called traditional societies.

Second, indigenous politics are not only adapting international norms

instrumentally but shaping international practice as well. The women of Chimborazo may

! #+!
have been pursuing local justice, but as they instrumentalized national and international

politics, they redefined the ladder of legal accountability from global to local. They made

local, indigenous forms of justice accountable to international human rights law. State

jurisdiction was used only to formalize the new legal arrangement between indigenous

and global law. It is as if the state was engaged as a third party to bear witness of

indigenous international responsibilities. Their policy proposal emerged within

vernacular indigenous contexts, yet resulted in politically and intellectually far-reaching

legal reform. It is not only that the Ecuadorian Constitution became the first across the

Americas to explicitly require women’s full participation and decision-making in

collective and cultural rights, but also that the state became a mediator recording legal

accountability between subnational, autonomous jurisdictions and the global system of

human rights. In so doing, the national state recognized even further the legal

sovereignty of indigenous systems of justice, validating their legal accountability in the

international arena as well. In that sense, framing collective rights in relation to

international norms of gender parity reformed much more than the rights of indigenous

women. It expanded the legal sovereignty of indigenous groups beyond the nation’s

borders to make them directly accountable –and subjects—to international law.

The experience of indigenous women in Ecuador demonstrates how local interests

use the international to undermine the legal authority of the state. This case study

illustrates what the international looks like “within” and “beyond” the state when we

redirect our gaze. It also unveils the far-reaching impact of indigenous women politics

beyond Ecuador. Their political strategies situate global politics within indigenous

! #"!
geographies, providing a practical roadmap to develop legal sovereignties beyond a state-

centered politics.

3. Dislocating legal sovereignty, native style

The practices of indigenous women in Ecuador contribute to rethinking sovereignty

beyond state-centrism. The triangulation of legal authority between subnational, national,

and international legalities indicates scales of sovereignty at once competing,

complementary, and overlapping. This triad needs not undermine the state fully, but it

does blur borders between international and vernacular forms of governance, while also

pointing to alternative spheres of sovereignty within the nation-state.

The articulation of legal authority between domestic law, international norms, and

indigenous justice reveals a multi-layered, complex practice of sovereignties beyond the

state. In the process, indigenous politics dislodge legal sovereignty away from the state,

relocating it among indigenous, autonomous actors. Given this, indigenous dynamics of

sovereignty may be compared to European supranationalism, as each bring equally

important, if distinct, changes to practices of statehood and global governance.

Indigenous women’s politics exposes the concomitance of three scales of legal

authority- indigenous, national, and international- each encompassing a jurisdiction of its

own. Kichwa women triangulated legal strategies as a bank shot on a billiard table. They

used international law to aim at the state in order to expand the legal autonomy—and

sovereignty—of indigenous justice. They triangulated through international and national

authorities to hit their target at the subnational level. Their strategies conceive state

sovereignty not as an end, but as a means to strengthen the international accountability of

! ##!
indigenous spaces. The global normative system provides a source for claims of

universally legitimate rights, whereas the state is the vehicle to codify indigenous

women’s rights as aspects of autonomous indigenous jurisdiction.

Two points are key here. First, this articulation of multiple scales of legal

authority makes the homogenous form of state sovereignty obsolete. Second, indigenous

women’s political agility in maneuvering three systems of justice reveals their potential

complementarity. International norms, state constitutions, and autonomous systems of

justice co-exist as complementary sources of rights, inspiring possibilities of sovereignty

in the plural. Women triangulate accountabilities to compensate for gaps in judicial

jurisdiction at any level. Jurisdictions represent different political realms, priorities, and

enforcement capabilities. They are nonetheless concomitant and inter-related. The

ensuing connection of legal authorities shows that placing these three sets of

sovereignties into dialogue is one way to expand rights. If this legal triad indicates

multiple holders of legal sovereignty, it inevitably destabilizes ideas that conceive all

states as having equal sovereignty over their territories (in relation to one another) as well

as all state territories to be exclusive jurisdictions with “territorial integrity.” For example,

it challenges Carl Schmitt’s (2006) notion of juridical exception as the core ingredient of

sovereignty. Schmitt famously Schmitt identifies the autonomy of the political through

the concept of sovereign exception- sovereignty lies not merely in the making of rules,

but in the making of the exception. By contrast with Schmitt, here international norms

are being used to strengthen alternative states of exception. These are not merely

subnational sovereignties but indigenous ones, which are intrinsically foreign to the state-

system. In that sense, the emergence of indigenous legalities accountable to global norms

! #$!
calls for conceptual reconfigurations of sovereignty, which ceases to be a legal monopoly

of states. Such processes symbolize the possibility of partially autonomous, competing

authorities within the state itself. They reframe sovereignty as plural, with inside and

outside poles containing unequal, varying sets of competences, and a multiplicity of

geographies unbounded by state borders. When Kichwa women enshrine global rights

into indigenous contexts, they are validating alternative sovereignties independent from

the Ecuadorian state. This redistribution of sovereignty within state borders points at

innovative forms of stateness at large.

My analysis indicates that processes taking place deep inside indigenous

geographies are also part of global re-assemblages- even if they tend to be constructed as

unrelated to world politics- because they reflect and reshape international systems and

meanings. Saskia Sassen’s (2008) work exposes how global transformations are

dislodging national capabilities. She warns that these reconfigurations cannot be fully

understood if studied solely on a global scale, without peering within them to examine

dynamics at play in the local. The morphology of states- and the relations among them-

has been complicated by political re-assemblages that take place from the international to

subnational levels. Kichwa women in Ecuador are provoking re-assemblages of authority

in geographically complex ways beyond the nation-state. Indigenous self-determination

encompasses a process of judicial denationalization that challenges the association

between sovereign authority and territory. Indigenous justice is international because it is

validated by global systems of meaning but also because it consists in a deterritorilized

practice of justice. This is one of the reasons why the coordination of fluid indigenous

systems and the rigid, territorially-bound ordinary state justice remains a core challenge

! #%!
of plurinational states. This chapter suggests that indigenous politics of self-

determination are one of the place-makings where sovereignty is obliged to reinvent itself.

Indigenous autonomy does not represent the end of the state, which, as Dipesh

Chakrabarty (2000) posits, is indispensable. It does, however, imply a reconfiguration of

its authority, calling, by consequent, for further conceptualization of shared forms of

sovereignty. As legal authority migrates to non-state actors at subnational levels, it

dethrones a core assumption of sovereignty: the state’s exclusive jurisdiction over its

territory. In the juridical exception it acknowledges, indigenous justice gains growing

relevance for theories of sovereignty. The conceptual complexity stems from the fact that

indigenous systems of justice carve out a state of exception authorized by the sovereign

state itself. If indigenous justice is granted the right of juridical exception, it is no longer

fully contained by or subordinate to the state. Sheryl Lightfoot (2010) sees indigenous

rights implying critical changes to the Westphalian system, opening up a plurinational

practice where sovereignty is shared between states and indigenous peoples. It might not

be possible to claim full sovereignty, yet indigenous justice systems as they now stand in

Latin America enable de facto states of exception in Schmitt’s most fundamental sense.

When Ecuador’s 1998 Constitution recognized indigenous justice, it implicitly

recognized the authority of the 13 indigenous peoples and nationalities comprised within

its borders. This is no flat multiculturalism that allows for various identities. Rather, the

constitution permits the co-existence of various autonomous systems of justice that reveal

layers of authority within a state plural in more than one way. Contemporary approaches

to world politics are therefore saddled with understandings of sovereignty that do not

correspond to life-worlds at play in shaping state formation on the political periphery of

! #&!
the world-system. Indeed, indigenous politics in Latin America support notions that

sovereignty is not inherently territorial or invariantly state-based. It is precisely because

of the threat it represents to sovereignty that self-determination is intensely resisted by

states in global negotiations. In fact, the UN Decade for Indigenous Peoples was unable

to reach consensus to produce an international treaty precisely for this reason, and the

Declaration became the longest debated treaty in UN history. Indigenous justice does

entail a sphere of authority autonomous from the states, but it does not necessarily

undermine conventional sovereignty. It does, however, complicate it. States may remain

the repositories of sovereign authority, but their once exclusive claim on legal exception

can be captured and used by others.

Telling the story of Kichwa women shows what configurations of sovereignty by

global re-assemblages may actually look like in practice. The blossoming of systems of

indigenous justice and their accountability to international regimes implies significant

reconfigurations of legal sovereignty beyond Latin America. Europeanists have

approached the reconfiguration of state sovereignty from above, through a relocation of

state authority to the supranational of the European Union (EU). Jürgen Habermas (2001)

saw this “disempowerment” of the nation-state through supranational institutions as a

path to move toward a post-national constellation beyond sovereignty (2001:81). Others

have championed the role of sub-state regions in such a supranational framework.

Proponents of global governance defended the role of international treaties in the design

and implementation of an international domestic policy (Archibugui and Held 1995).

These epistemic communities suggest a dynamic picture of political interactions among

political processes that persist at national, international, and global levels. Just like

! #'!
Europe has contributed a practice of what a world politics after the nation-state may look

like, Latin America is contributing alternative perspectives of its own—from below.

Taking ethno-politics into account when considering a post-national constellation

permits to discern the possibility of equivalent dynamics within the state. Whereas the

EU has provoked re-assemblages of legal sovereignty toward supranational institutions,

indigenous justice in Latin America is generating re-assemblages of legal sovereignty to

political spheres contained by the state but significantly independent from it. In the case

of the EU, state sovereignty was relocated from above, whereas in Ecuador legal

sovereignty is being relocated from below. Indigenous self-determination is critical to

apprehend international relations because such processes unveil alternative paths for

rethinking the essence and silhouette of the state, the quintessential subject of analysis of

the field of IR.

Both views claim that fragments of sovereignty are migrating away from the state.

The dynamics of European supranationalism are in a sense very similar, if opposite, to

those triggered by indigenous politics in Latin America. The EU orchestrated a

progressive dismantlement of state sovereignty from above, gaining authority over

financial policy, currency, and legal codes. In Latin America, the proliferation of legal

pluralism forces a similar relocation of state authority, except that it is directed inwardly

along local and ethnic lines rather than taking a supranational format. This enables

pockets or zones of sovereignty to materialize within the state, exposing a redistribution

of legal sovereignty to non-state actors that stand at once within and beyond. Yet most

approaches in international relations look outside and above the state and fail to consider

ethnographic approaches that entail complex renegotiations of state authority. Rare are

! #(!
the scholars who identify indigeneity as an intrinsically international site of contestation.

But here we see how an indigenous gaze from below/within/beyond, observes how the

spatiality of power is altered not only by supranational dynamics but also by indigenous

positionalities within its borders but beyond its authority.

My purpose in paying particular attention to the migration of sovereignty is to

underscore the conceptual importance of indigeneity for the study of IR. Indigenous

politics should not be misconceived as a merely “cultural” antidote. While cultural

considerations exist, ethnicity has evolved into a political resource (Comaroffs 2009) that

shapes international organizations (Morgan 2011) as well as the state (Sierra 2005).

Indigenous legal autonomy, a milestone in the recognition of self-determination, is

related to redesigning the content and silhouette of state authority. It is in that sense a

crucial element in global politics that scholars cannot afford to ignore if they are trying to

explain the world we live in.

Conclusion

Attention to indigeneity is valuable to international relations because it empowers new

forms of critical inquiry. The contributions of indigenous ways of worlding are at least

twofold. First, engaging ethnographic perspectives makes visible ways of doing

international relations beyond Westphalia that tend to be left unseen. Second, indigenous

experiences destabilize assumptions about what constitutes the international. Indigeneity

is a key category of analysis to disrupt state-centrism. In particular, it is a strategic site

from which to develop counter-narratives that trespass disciplinary boundaries. The story

of ‘postnational neighborhoods’ (Chatterjee 2010:167) in the Andean highlands of

! #)!
Ecuador shows what sovereignty may actually look like when detached from the state. If

indigenous justice is to be understood as a form of vernacular authority autonomous from

the state, perhaps sovereignty is to be reimagined as multiple and plural. Such insights

into re-arrangements of legal authority taking place in regions of Latin America provide

useful examples that redefine the locus of sovereignty at large. Contemporary indigenous

movements dispute the overlap of law and power -potestas legibus solute. Their struggles

echo the words of Hannah Arendt: “no revolution ever succeeded … so long as the

authority of the body politic was truly intact” (Arendt 1963:141).

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