Duer, Mara (2017) The right to belong to the land : coloniality and resistance in the Araucanía. PhD thesis, University of Warwick .

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Abstract

This project focuses on the formation of the countryside in the violent encounter of extractive capitalism and resistance movements. My case study looks at land contestation in the Araucanía (centre-south of Chile) between forestry corporations, state agencies and Mapuche rural communities. The project questions the narrow approach to understandings of land in the Western canon as a relation of exclusive ownership. I examine how land is changing its role as a provider of the quotidian and an environmental regulator to become a disciplinary technology of displacement. Through different deployments of notions of land (i.e.: property, territory and patrimony) I developed a typology of land resistance based on the perspective of the communities actively resisting land dispossession and claiming ancestral land. To date, a considerable body of research has sought to explore the restructuring of the countryside in the Global South through political-economy approaches. Instead of using a quantitative analysis to think of global capital expansion over rural peripheral lands, this thesis explores the changing qualities of land in relation to the advancement of land commodification. Thus, I take a relational approach to land, first, to fill a gap in how the production of land has been theorised to date, and second, to show how its contested determination (as a resource) affects the formation of the rural social space. This study will demonstrate how property relations are losing dominance over the management of the ground with the arrival of other landed relations showing that land is more than a thing to be owned. By using the case of the forestry sector in Chile, I explore the corporate takeover of rural lands as a continuation of a long history of expropriation and exploitation of racialized peoples and lands. In order to give context to the current period, I revisit the history of racialized landed relations in the Araucanía arriving to its current forms. This new period of modern-colonial relations will show a new calibration between fixes and dispossessions at the encounter between global corporate interest in land on one hand and indigenous ancestral land claims on the other.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform K Law [LC] > K Law (General)
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Eviction -- Araucanía (Chile), Land use, Rural -- Araucanía (Chile), Globalization -- Araucanía (Chile), Protest movements -- Araucanía (Chile)
Official Date:	September 2017
Dates:	Date Event September 2017 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Politics and International Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Vaughan-Williams, Nick
Extent:	xiv, 292 leaves maps, illustrations
Language:	eng

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