Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes <i>by Lorenza B. Fontana</i>

Without a doubt, one of the most promising developments in Latin America over the past thirty years has been the rise of Indigenous movements and the expansion of democracy to include Indigenous actors and issues. Fontana's book is about what happens next now that Indigenous groups are relatively entrenched as social and political actors, or what the author terms the “post-recognition phase” (14). The book tells the story of the non-Indigenous, rural, poor communities who have been left behind by international recognition politics. Without recourse to Indigenous identity and living in an environment of resource scarcity, building resentment by peasant groups has translated into intercommunal conflicts with Indigenous peoples in the featured cases of Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. In an era of growing strife and instability in the Andes, this book will make Indigenous politics scholars stop and think about the potential ramifications of our work. The central thesis of the book is that recognition reforms that advance Indigenous peoples’ rights to the exclusion of other rural folk can produce “recognition conflicts” in the form of violent disputes between peasant groups and Indigenous peoples (4). This is a controversial argument, one that runs counter to the literature on multiculturalism and Indigenous rights. Based on extensive field work observations carried out in the three country cases, Fontana, to support her points, provides paradigmatic examples of disputes between Indigenous people and peasant communities in issue areas ranging from territorial control and prior consultation to bilingual intercultural education. In one example, a 2007 protest in the Bolivian Amazon saw hundreds of disaffected peasants march into an Indigenous territory and national park with chainsaws, threatening to clear cut the forest in response to the state's granting of the land title to an Indigenous organization. In another example, an illegal migrant settlement within an Indigenous territory in the Peruvian Amazon was attacked by members of the local Awajún community in a 2002 skirmish that left sixteen people dead (160). The author makes a compelling case for the need for more scholarly attention to the horizontal dimensions of contentious Indigenous politics in a literature that is dominated by a focus on the vertical conflicts between Indigenous peoples and the state.

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