AMAZONIAN BORDERS AND STATE FORMATION IN LATIN AMERICA: ACTORS, TERRITORIALITIES AND SOVEREIGNTIES (19TH-20TH CENTURIES)
This symposium proposes to open a space for historiographical and interdisciplinary discussion on the processes of state formation in the Latin American Amazonian regions between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Far from understanding the Amazonian borders as marginal, empty or peripheral spaces, the symposium seeks to problematize their role in shaping the sovereignties, territorialities and mechanisms of government deployed by national states under construction. Drawing on different regional experiences from Latin America, it proposes to reflect on the ways in which the Amazonian borders constituted dynamic spaces of political mediation, territorial dispute, and articulation among state actors, missions, the military, traders and indigenous peoples. Within this framework, the symposium seeks to discuss how the processes of territorial integration and state consolidation were traversed by differentiated forms of authority, mechanisms of power delegation, and the social production of space. The symposium calls for historical, anthropological and ethnohistorical research engaging with issues linked to state formation, fragmented sovereignties, religious missions, extractive economies, border cartographies, regional archives, territorial occupation policies, indigenous mobilities, and local forms of negotiation and resistance in the Latin American Amazon.
