On 20 November 2016, residents of Gran Chaco Province in south-east Bolivia voted by popular referendum to approve a statute that established Gran Chaco as Bolivia's first autonomous region. This article examines regional autonomy in the Chaco as an example of how identities, territory and political power are being remapped at the intersection of an extractivist development model and competing visions of a plurinational state. I chart how regional autonomy, an elite-led project centred on demands for a fixed share of departmental gas royalties, has been institutionalised under the framework of plurinationalism and used to bolster central state power in this gas-rich region. The article considers the historical evolution of this regionalist project, its intersection with broader processes of state formation under the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement towards Socialism, MAS) government and its implications for the Chaco's Indigenous peoples, who have achieved significant representation within the regional assembly while seeing their own visions of territorial autonomy sidelined by an extractivist development agenda.

R. G. Davis directed the first commercial productions of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist and We Won't Pay We Won't Pay!, both in Canada and the USA. In the context of the original close relevance of the plays to the political situation in Italy, he looks at how in the USA especially their force has been diluted if not extinguished by the imperative to conform to the inherent anti-communsm of American culture. R. G.Davis founded and directed the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 1960s, and the Epic West Center for the Study of Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theatre at Berkeley in 1975. Later he returned to academia to study science and ecology, and visited Cuba to examine the culture of organic farming. He has contributed previously to New Theatre Quarterly and its predecessor, specifically on Fo in two articles for the original Theatre Quarterly: ‘Seven Anarchists I Have Known: American Approaches to Dario Fo’, in TQ 8 (1986), and ‘Dario Fo Off-Broadway: the Making of Left Culture under Adverse Conditions’, in TQ 40 (1981).

This article examines the formation of Admapu – an organisation representing a broad sector of Mapuche society that resisted the actions of the Chilean dictatorship during the 1980s. In political memory, the period of agrarian reform marks a time of hope and strong participation, but here we show how an autonomy project developed within Admapu conflicted with those making political alliances with the Chilean Left. We examine the internal dynamics within Admapu, and argue that at the end of the decade the organisation divided into factions that cemented a rupture with the political system and brought about the formation of contemporary resistance movements.

Bridging the ways in which scholars have looked at the co-option of both gender and cultural rights through neoliberal governance in Latin America, this article will examine how gender has been utilised by the state as a discourse of governmentality in order to regulate indigenous subjects. Moreover, the article will explore how indigenous women activists in Mexico are creating a practice of autonomy as a vital strategy to move beyond rights discourse and challenge the ways in which neoliberal states have selectively co-opted social movement demands. Through their grassroots forms of consultation, indigenous women activists shift the concept of autonomy as a right granted by the state to a practice of decolonisation that is part of everyday life and community sociality.

The Mayan Indians of Guatemala share the burdens of local government by taking on a set of public duties, thereby maintaining community cohesion as well as political autonomy. This article analyses recent changes in this cargo system in a context defined by development, new representations of ‘Mayanness’, and multicultural politics. It shows how sovereignty – grounded in a distinct philosophy of leadership that generates meaningful self-rule – is crucial in facilitating political transformation towards more democratic arrangements at the cost of rule by the elders.