Governance Sensitivities and the Politics of Translation: Rethinking the Colonisation of the Shuar of Ecuador's Amazonian South-East

The article analyses two delegated governance projects carried out in Ecuador's Amazonian south-east in the twentieth century. In collaboration with the military and public institutions, two Catholic missions, the Salesian and the Franciscan, were central actors in the colonising of an area inhabited by the Shuar. Considering the wider historical and ethnographic regional context and focusing on practices of cultural translation and territorial politics, I discuss the two missions’ divergent governance sensitivities vis-à-vis the Shuar. ‘Governance sensitivities’ refers in this context to the colonial actors’ capability to recognise colonised subjects as culturally distinct. I combine new empirical material from the historical archive of the Franciscans in Zamora with secondary sources in order to analyse how differences between the two missions’ sensitivity and insensitivity to Shuar otherness became especially prevalent in the 1960s and 70s. The divergent ways the Salesians and Franciscans perceived the Shuar colonial subject had consequences for how they engaged in the protection of Shuar land and for how they contributed to facilitating or holding back indigenous political organisation.

Territorial Politics and the Party System in Spain: Continuity and Change since the Financial Crisis, Caroline Gray (2020)

Review of: Territorial Politics and the Party System in Spain: Continuity and Change since the Financial Crisis, Caroline Gray (2020) Abingdon: Routledge, 167 pp., ISBN 978-1-85743-983-0, h/bk, £84.00, ISBN 978-0-42929-006-0, e/bk, £25.89

The Evolution of Forming “Territories of Traditional Nature Use” in the Sakha Republic (Iakutiia)

In the struggle of Russia’s Indigenous northerners for greater control over their ancestral lands, the spatiolegal formations known as Territories of Traditional Nature Use (TTPs, using the Russian acronym) have become their most effective tool. TTPs have assumed diverse characteristics across Russian regions in response to the evolution of federal and sub-federal law and of center-periphery relations at national and regional scales. In the Sakha Republic (Iakutiia), TTP formation is entangled with wider territorial politics and economic trends, which have led to the precarious but powerful advancement of Indigenous rights. This article explores this evolution by comparing the creation of two neighboring TTPs, formed eight years apart under distinct political and legislative conditions. A combination of local efforts, subnational legislative and economic initiatives, and reaction to federal overstep have compelled the improvement and systematization of Indigenous rights in the republic.

Griffiths, Ryan D., and Muro, Diego (eds.) (2020). Strategies of Secession and Counter-Secession. ECPR Press. 244 pages.

The book Strategies of Secession and Counter-Secession edited by professors Ryan D. Grifiths and Diego Muro is a major and necessary contribution to the study of secessionism. The book should be read not only by scholars and students of territorial politics but by practitioners and political actors too. The chapters gathered in this volume offer useful reflections to understand this global phenomenon.