LAND(S) IN DISPUTE: TERRITORIALIZATION, AGRARIAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICTS, AND THE DEFENSE OF RIGHTS IN THE AMERICAS
Latin America, like much of the world, faces a critical crossroads characterized by the expansion of extractive frontiers, agribusiness, and the increasingly palpable effects of climate change.
Contrary to the idea that digital transformations would distance societies from their territorial roots, we start from the hypothesis that, on the contrary, technology reinforces the strategic importance of land.
In this scenario, traditional agrarian law, predominantly centered on property and productivity, proves insufficient unless it engages in dialogue with political ecology, critical geography and human rights. This symposium invites debate on the contemporary dynamics of so-called land and commons “governance” in the region, understanding territory as a field of forces where global capital, state regulatory frameworks and community ways of life intersect.
The objective is to understand the role of law as an instrument of domination, but also as a tool of emancipation and resistance against dispossession. The symposium will receive papers addressing the legal critique of agrarian law, the emergence of so-called “rights of nature,” the protection of native seeds, food security and sovereignty, and institutional mechanisms for preventing, managing and resolving agrarian and socio-environmental conflicts. Likewise, normative tensions in the allocation of vacant lands, processes of formalizing rural property, and the impacts of Inter-American Human Rights System jurisprudence on the protection of collective and ancestral territories will be discussed.
Through this interdisciplinary dialogue, we hope to contribute to a critical mapping of contemporary rural disputes and to envision legal alternatives oriented toward environmental sustainability, distributive justice and territorial peace in Latin American agriculture.
Contributions with a critical legal focus, as well as interdisciplinary work from political science, sociology, geography and legal anthropology, will be received.
