Shortly after midnight, early on Christmas Day 2010, the Cultural Centre of San Andrés Pisimbalá, a small town nestled in Colombia’s western mountain range, was transformed into a battlefield. Celebrations were interrupted by gunshots that left four people seriously injured, and machete attacks that left another dozen with minor wounds. This would be the first of many violent episodes in a conflict between indigenous and peasant residents over territorial control and the implementation of ethnocultural education in schools. For almost a decade now, life in San Andrés has been disrupted by a series of land invasions, house and crop burnings, forced displacement, and threats. Ten years after that fateful episode, the local school is still closed to peasant children and the conflict remains unresolved.

In Latin America, rural communities have historically represented a challenge both for the nation-building process and for countries’ development strategies. How should the indigenous population be incorporated into the nation, while moderating the potentially destabilising tensions rooted in persistent ethno-cultural differences? And how can rural households become active contributors to economic development without triggering subversive forces that would threaten the stability of the national economy and its involvement in regional and global markets? To address these questions, since independence Latin American states have adopted a variety of strategies, underpinned by different, and sometimes opposite, visions of citizenship and development. These strategies have had concrete effects in redefining ethnic and class boundaries, shaping at the same time relationships between the state and social groups and among social groups themselves. Since the early twentieth century, citizenship and development regimes have followed somewhat cyclical patterns, oscillating between the dyadic forces of separation and assimilation, social inclusion and differentiation.

In this chapter, I compare national debates around the definition of the collective subject that should be granted access to a new participatory mechanism for development and resource governance called Free Prior and Informed Consent/Consultation (FPIC). This is an interesting case, I argue, around which to discuss a type of recognition conflict that I call participation conflict. These conflicts result from the implementation of means of recognition (through categorisation exercises) in contexts where opportunities to control new strategic resources are pursued by traditionally marginalised social actors. Regulated by ILO Convention 169 and included in most Latin American legal frameworks since the 1990s, in recent years, FPIC has suddenly catalysed the attention of both governments and social movements. FPIC aims at achieving more effective bottom-up participation by establishing an obligation to consult – or obtain the consent of – indigenous peoples before large development projects and legal reforms that would affect them can proceed. Given its relevance for natural resource governance, interest in FPIC initiatives has been growing, particularly in the framework of political economy models that increasingly rely on commodity exploitation to sustain economic growth and welfare investments. The Andean region has been pioneering the implementation of FPIC worldwide. Here is where the most advanced legislation and institutionalisation processes in regard to FPIC have developed over the past decade. However, these advances have not occurred without tensions. Heated disputes on the definition of the collective subject that should be granted this new right have led to very different outcomes in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. Some crucial knots in this discussion have revolved around how to operationalise the distinction between ethnic and non-ethnic communities and, notably, whether or not peasant communities should be entitled to FPIC. This represents, therefore, a telling example of an ethnic boundary-making exercise (a classic ‘means of recognition’) with important implications for groups’ self-perception and mutual relationships. The different answers offered by the three countries to the subject question not only have important implications in terms of the inclusion and exclusion of considerable parts of the rural population from new mechanisms of participatory governance; they also reflect the models of citizenship and development that these countries are committed to building through the redefinition of identity articulation/disarticulation processes and delimitation of social boundaries.1

In the previous chapter, I briefly illustrated the changes in citizenship and development models institutionalised by Latin American governments from the early twentieth century up to the present day. These transformations have shaped the very identities of social actors, and their modes of interaction with the state and between themselves. How have patterns of collective self-identification changed over time and how have scholars made sense of these processes? In this chapter, I focus on changes in collective identities through a critical assessment of the narratives used to describe the alternations between class and ethnicity as referents for social organisation. Indeed, as Yashar (2005) has famously demonstrated in the Latin American context, different kinds of citizenship regimes diffuse and then activate different identity cleavages. A review of the abundant literature on rural movements in Latin America clearly shows how scholarly production has been greatly influenced by intellectual fashions and political ideologies, often in a cyclical way. As a result, the same aspects of reality have been glorified in certain periods and neglected in others, and most narratives of social change have oscillated between either dichotomous or homogenising interpretations of collective identities. Here, I consciously try to remedy this imbalance as I analyse the political roles, forms of organisation and social relevance of both indigenous and peasant movements since the 1950s.

Since the 1970s, the rise of identity politics has had a crucial impact on debates about the relationship between education and diversity. A new focus was placed on cultural and linguistic differences, as both sources of discrimination in the school environment and indispensable components of multicultural curricula (Vavrus 2015). In normative terms, this perspective contributed to popularising two major policy initiatives: intercultural (bilingual) education (IBE) and race-focused affirmative action (AA) measures. I term these initiatives, which, in different ways, have sought to account for ethno-cultural diversity in education, the ‘identity policies in education’. More than three decades after these initiatives were launched, IBE and AA remain popular policies for ethno-cultural management in education across the world. I include these policies under the ‘means of recognition’ category, as their main effect rests on the crystallisation of ethnic categories in education norms and implementation, while their impact on redistribution is indirect and less substantial compared to other explicitly distributive recognition policies (e.g. agrarian reforms).

This book argues for the need to closely examine recognition theories and politics in light of social facts. After digging into the very detailed empirics of recognition conflicts, it is now time to go back to the analytical and theoretical frameworks spelled out at the beginning of the book, and to consider the implications of my findings for broader debates on ethnic diversity and social justice. This concluding chapter makes three main contributions. The first is to summarise the main findings about recognition conflicts and how these can contribute to building bridges across the rigid continental divide that characterises recognition and ethnic conflict scholarship. I then discuss how the empirical evidence should encourage new thinking around the way in which recognition is theorised as a justice principle. Finally, I offer some recommendations on how to incorporate the book’s findings into a policy agenda, or how to tackle these empirical and normative puzzles through concrete action and policy measures. In sum, I argue that the ‘costs’ and seeds of conflict linked to recognition politics should be addressed not by eliminating or curtailing recognition but, on the contrary, by ‘levelling up’ the recognition field so that more social groups can have access to it, and by implementing mitigation strategies that would reduce the ‘side effects’ of recognition on conflict and inequality.

In this chapter, I offer an original analytical framework for what I call recognition conflicts. I propose a definition and a typology that can help identify these conflicts beyond the specific geographical and temporal boundaries of my empirical cases. The second part of the chapter is intended as a methodological and conceptual framework to orient the reader throughout the remainder of the book. I provide a rationale for the country case selection, a description of methods used and my methodological approaches, and a brief discussion of key concepts and terminology.

As we saw in the previous chapter, demands over common resources can reveal new dynamics of the articulation/disarticulation of identities and can result in the consolidation of new ethnic boundaries. In this chapter, I focus on the consequences of identity boundary-making for physical spaces. I argue that the endemic lack of resources in contexts where recognition reforms with important redistributive components (what I have called ‘means of redistribution’) are implemented is behind the rise of perhaps the most common among the types of recognition conflict I identify in this book: social reproduction conflicts.

Changes in local demographics have introduced new challenges for the coexistence of different social groups in the post-recognition phase. These changes are rooted in both exogenous and endogenous factors. On one hand, sustained migration has created new settlements, expanded the agrarian frontier, and pushed indigenous groups to assume a more hostile and protectionist attitude towards non-indigenous settlers. On the other, indigenous groups’ increasing population rates have encouraged an expansionist strategy that involves targeting new territories already occupied by other groups. This chapter considers both exogenously and endogenously driven changes in rural demographics as factors that contribute to the new relevance of social heterogeneity and of distributive measures embedded in recognition reforms. As I illustrated in the previous chapter, land is often at the root of recognition disputes in the context of resource scarcity. In this chapter, I analyse how changes in social heterogeneity can fuel land conflicts as well as conflicts for social provisions (e.g. access to water and electricity), linked to the implementation of recognition reforms. As in the previous chapter, norms around land tenure work as ‘means of redistribution’ embedded in a recognition framework that dramatically influences communities’ access to key resources and is often an object of contention. I discuss these tensions in relation to shifts and shocks in social communities’ demographic composition which result in increased social heterogeneity. Because these conflicts are all related to changes in local demographics, I call this type of recognition conflict demographic conflict. I rely on empirical cases from the inter-Andean regions of Peru to illustrate the challenging coexistence of rural migrants and indigenous communities; and on the case of the Cauca Department in Colombia to analyse how population growth, combined with a situation of widespread and acute violence generated by the civil war, has aggravated resource competition. Based on these empirical cases, I argue that the recognition framework is poorly equipped to account for the more fluid aspects of social communities embedded in migration dynamics and other demographic changes.