Indigenous Peoples and Development Processes: New Terrains of Struggle

Abstract

Many of the changes in the arenas in which Indigenous peoples carry on their struggles have been reshaped in these last decades by the initiatives of Indigenous peoples themselves. But much of the terrain has also been dramatically reshaped by others, through the changing roles of the nation-state and of NGOs, the growing importance of transnational corporations and global flows of capital, the expansion of media networks, and the rise of the environmentalist and human rights movements. These changes have altered Indigenous peoples' strategies of struggle to survive and to retain the autonomy they still exercise. We argue, however, that Indigenous peoples' agency and their alliances with wider movements themselves can have, and sometimes have had, transformative effects on the emergence of alternative structures of governance that are not rooted in globalizing development.