A political analysis of the TIPNIS conflicts

Abstract

The conflicts happening around the Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro­ Sécure (TIPNIS) in Bolivia among the multiple and diverse stakeholders within it, cannot be reduced to a simple confrontation between conflicting interests regarding a highway.

A political analysis of the TIPNIS conflicts should be an analysis of how Modernity responds to different, opposed and complementary civilizational projects, stressing the relation between indigenous peoples, and the plurinational state in Bolivia; the present locus of the conflict. The plurinational state in Bolivia was formed with the express intention of dismantling the colonial and its civilizational order through the reformulation of the Bolivian State.

By contrasting, comparing, dissecting and analyzing how notions of citizenship, nationhood, and civilization are deployed in Modernity, in one geographical place, the TIPNIS in Bolivia, and through different historical eras, we can elucidate how those notions were and are enforced. The civilization/nation/citizen membership and non-membership, who fits and who doesn’t fit those categories, and how the movement between them is managed, throw light on how Modernity’s project is carried away in everyday life, and under what costs.