Event Details

The Honduran political regime that emerged following the 2009 coup has promoted its extractive development model through legislative and judicial channels. This presentation explores the state’s irregular use of legal mechanisms, sometimes in tandem with organised crime, to counter local opposition.

The legal-political strategies of locals from Tocoa, in the Bajo Aguán Valley, who have opposed to mining have been mainly defensive, seeking to reveal irregularities by the state and to highlight the ‘gray areas’ of politics that have enabled them. However, the mobilisation of Tocoa locals has also inserted within political-legal circuits notions of nature and territory characterised by commoning logics with roots in the region’s peasant past. Such notions could encourage the development of collective rights with regard to territory among non-indigenous populations. In so doing, these notions, which resonate with the concept of the indigenous commons, could also potentially foster political alliances between indigenous and non-indigenous populations that are both seeking to lay claims over territory.

Speaker Dr Ainhoa Montoya is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

This seminar is organised in partnership with Lancaster University's Department of Languages & Cultures (DeLC) in a collaboration that has been led by Dr Cornelia Gräbner. Dr Gräbner is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature at DeLC and will chair the session.

Joining the seminar

This seminar will be held live online through Microsoft Teams. All are very welcome to join us!

Click this link at 13:00 (UK time) 24 February 2021 to join this session: Click here to join the meeting.

Please note this session will not be recorded.

Guidance on joining a Teams event available here.

Format

• 13:00 (UK time) Welcome and introduction
• 40 minute presentation from our speaker
• Speaker takes questions from our live virtual audience submitted through the text 'Chat' function

You can also join the conversation on Twitter: #LECSeminar.

Full LEC Seminar series

Follow the full programme at https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lec/about-us/events/