Episode 15: Recognizing Indigenous Law as Law: The Reverse Side of Coloniality in the Anthropocene

Posted Date: February 4, 2021

Episode Description; In Episode 15, “Recognizing Indigenous Law as Law: The Reverse Side of Coloniality in the Anthropocene,” LAC member Müge Gedik welcomes Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca, a legal ethnographer and the Director of Ethnic and Racial Discrimination Area at Dejusticia, Centre for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society in Bogotá, Colombia. Paulo’s research proposes the idea of indigenizing international law by following the anthropological turn in which indigenous cosmologies are direct to the framework of an international legal order. This displacement highlights the power of indigenous law to counteract international law’s colonial legacies. This episode covers the problem with conceptualizing legal subjects through the exclusion of indigenous people from legal orders. Paulo’s objective is to look at Western and indigenous jurisprudence by scrutinizing colonial enterprise and indigenous resistance and bridging the gap between indigenous and state-centric law.

Guest Biography

Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca is a legal ethnographer and the Director of Ethnic and Racial Discrimination Area at Dejusticia, Centre for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society in Bogotá, Colombia. He had his J.D. from the National University of Colombia, Faculty of Law and Political and Social Sciences, where he specialized in constitutional law. He completed his Ph.D. in Social Legal Studies at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, the United Kingdom. His research proposes the idea of indigenizing international law, by following the anthropological turn in which indigenous cosmologies are direct to the framework of an international legal order. This displacement highlights the power of indigenous law to counteract international law’s colonial legacies; while at the same time, is transforming and enriching its anthropocentric matrix. 

Dr. Bacca’s interest in indigenous jurisprudence vis-à-vis indigenous peoples in western jurisprudence emanates from his field visits and pedagogic meetings with indigenous peoples in Colombia, Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia, the United States, and Australia. In these places, he has seen first-hand the history of a progressively destructive global order marked by the annihilation not only of the biosphere, the biological matrix of life, but also of the ethnosphere, which according to Wade Davis is ‘a term perhaps best defined as the sum total of thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.’

His visits to indigenous territories over the last decade have allowed him to witness not only a humanitarian drama but also the power of hope. He witnessed, on the one hand, the desolate presence of indigenous peoples facing a high risk of genocide due to armed conflicts, forced displacement, and the imposition of a predatory economic model; and, on the other, the strength of indigenous peoples’ communal bonds, the philosophical complexity of their systems of thought, and the sophistication of their systems of justice.

In this context, Dejusticia,  a Colombia-based research and advocacy organization dedicated to the strengthening of the rule of law and the promotion of social justice and human rights in Colombia and the Global South, is being an ideal place to develop his proposal and the best setting in which to receive inspiration to turn his doctoral dissertation into a book. Since starting work in areas related to the protection of indigenous and environmental rights, he has understood the need not only to invigorate their defense before local and international courts but also the importance to do it by taking into consideration environmental justice communities’ thinking and concerns. 

Project Title: Indigenizing International Law and Decolonizing the Anthropocene: Genocide by Ecological Means and Indigenous Nationhood in Contemporary Colombia

Description: This project displays the idea of indigenizing international law by recognizing indigenous law as law. It is by directing indigenous jurisprudences to the framework of international law that the possibility of transforming its roots becomes possible—I call this process inverse legal anthropology. In indigenizing international law using inverse legal anthropology, my project presents a case study on the ongoing genocide of Colombian indigenous peoples in the age of the global ecology of the Anthropocene. In this context, I explain the political consequences of valuing indigenous cosmologies regarding their territories. Indeed, mainstream representations of indigenous territories, taking into consideration the topographic and biologic dimensions of the earth’s surface, have forgotten the pluriverse of organic and inorganic beings that make and negotiate their social living together with indigenous peoples’ ecological and spiritual relations.

Recommended Websites

Accompanying Materials: 

  1. 2019: Three-part series Indigenizing International Law. Part 1: Learning to Learn from Below. In Blog of the American Philosophical Association APA.
  2. 2019: Three-part series Indigenizing International Law. Part 2: Inverse Legal Anthropology. In Blog of the American Philosophical Association APA.
  3. 2019: Three-part series Indigenizing International Law. Part 3: Ethnographies of Ethnic Militancy. In Blog of the American Philosophical Association APA. 
  4.  2018: Deconstruction from the South: On Bruno Mazzoldi and Jacques Derrida. In Blog of the American Philosophical Association APA. .
  5. 2018: Ethnography of the Double Bind. A Conversation with Aymara Sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. In The Latin American Diaries, University of London, Institute of Latin American Studies.