Rachel Sieder has held the post of Senior Research Professor CIESAS in Mexico City since 2007. She is associate researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway, the Institute of the Americas, UCL, and the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London. Her research interests include: human rights, indigenous rights, social movements, indigenous law,,legal anthropology, the state and violence.
Amongst her most recent books are: ed. Demanding Justice and Security: Indigenous Women and Legal Pluralities in Latin America (2017); ed. with María Teresa Sierra and Rosalva Aída Hernández, Justicias Indígenas y Estado: Violencias Contemporáneas, FLACSO/CIESAS, México (2013); ed. with John-Andrew McNeish, Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities: Latin American and African Perspectives, Routledge-Cavendish (2012); with Carlos Y. Flores, Dos Justicias: Coordinación interlegal e intercultural en Guatemala, Guatemala: F&G Editores-Casa Comal-UAEM (2012) and Autoridad, autonomía y derecho indígena en la Guatemala de posguerra, Guatemala: F&G Editores-Casa Comal-UAEM (2011).
Chapter in book: THE JURIDIFICATION OF POLITICS
This chapter reviews the principal debates on the juridification of politics, discussing anthropological analysis of the juridification of Indigenous politics. While much of the broader debate refers principally to the diffusion and vernacularization of state and international law, and the subjectivities generated by engagements with dominant norms and institutions, here I turn the lens on the complex dialectics involved in Indigenous Peoples’ juridification of their own forms of law or what in Spanish is referred to as derecho propio. Drawing on my ethnographic work in Guatemala, I trace the different ways in which Mayan rights activists and their allies have analyzed, systematized, and defended their own forms of law in the context of battles for state recognition of legal pluralism in the post-war period. I point to the potentialities inherent in the juridification of Mayan law, arguing that different legal engagements can be read as exchanges that also contain and transmit a politics of what Audra Simpson (2015) has termed ‘indigenous refusal’.
ACADEMIC ARTICLE: «TO SPEAK THE LAW”: CONTESTED JURISDICTIONS, LEGAL LEGIBILITY, AND SOVEREIGNTY IN GUATEMALA
Indigenous claims “to speak the law” in Guatemala extend far beyond late-twentieth-century statist proposals for multicultural legal orders based on recognition of legal pluralism. Drawing on collaborative research with the Indigenous Mayoralty of Santa Cruz del Quiché and examination of public debates in the media, this article analyzes attempts to ensure the legibility of Indigenous law, including disputes over constitutional reforms in 2016 and 2017. It suggests how different conceptual framings shape methodological approaches and representations of law. While opponents of Indigenous jurisdiction frame Mayan law as violent and illegal, and thus radically incommensurable with the national legal order, for Indigenous authorities “speaking the law” is not about seeking recognition from the nation-state. Rather, “speaking the law” is about communitarian forms of sovereignty and legality rooted in Mayan languages and cosmologies. Countering racialized tropes, Mayan authorities’ representations allude to understandings of justice and forms of legitimacy that existed prior to the sovereign state and national and international laws. In this way, they highlight not only the historical violence of the Guatemalan state but also the foundational violence of law itself, pointing to temporalities and ontologies of justice beyond modernist legal frames.
ACADEMIC ARTICLE: REVISITING THE JUDICIALIZATION OF POLITICS IN LATIN AMERICA
This review essay analysis advances in the study of law and politics in Latin America, discussing five recent books that contribute to bridging the gap between the literature on judicial behavior, which tended to focus quite narrowly on intra-court dynamics and factors including institutional design and the interests and motivations of judges, and the judicial politics literature, which emphasizes factors external to courts, such as processes of socio-legal mobilization, “rights revolutions”, and the transformation of social and political conflicts into legal disputes. It argues that renewed interdisciplinary debates in the study of law and politics are leading to richer and more complex explanations of legal behavior and legal change.
ACADEMIC ARTICLE: Pluralismo jurídico y los derechos de las mujeres indígenas en México: Las ambigüedades de su reconocimiento
Este artículo discute los efectos del ambiguo reconocimiento del derecho indígena en México sobre las luchas de las mujeres indígenas para asegurar que sus derechos sean respetados. Argumenta que el reconocimiento legal formal de la autonomía indígena y pluralismo legal es débil y ambiguo en México: las autoridades estatales intervienen selectivamente en contra de las autoridades indígenas para defender los derechos humanos de las mujeres cuando obtienen ventajas políticas. Pero las políticas de desarrollo económico y de seguridad violan los derechos humanos y exponen los hombres y las mujeres a mayores daños ejercidas por un poder estatal altamente militarizado y racista.
ACADEMIC ARTICLE: Indigenous Sovereignties in Guatemala: Between Criminalization and Revitalization
This article reviews the current challenges for indigenous ancestral authorities in Guatemala, signaling the tensions between the strengthening of indigenous authorities and their exercise of autonomy, and their criminalization by government and the private sector, which aims to defend violent colonial dispossession.
NACLA JOURNAL: INDIGENOUS SOVEREIGNTIES IN GUATEMALA: BETWEEN CRIMINALIZATION AND REVITALIZATION
This article signals the challenges facing efforts to secure recognition of Mayan law (derecho propio) in Guatemala, at the same time as recognizing the strength and vitality of indigenous forms of governance. It considers the recent defeat of constitutional reforms to recognize indigenous jurisdiction, and the implications of the growing criminalization of indigenous authorities resisting plunder of their territories.
ACADEMIC ARTICLE: Indigenous Women’s Access to Justice in Latin America
Indigenous peoples in Latin America suffer systematic lack of access to justice in state legal systems Structural exclusion and discrimination particularly affect indigenous women. In this article we analyze the challenges and benefits for indigenous women when they try to access justice in indigenous legal systems. We emphasize the need to consider normative frameworks, legal awareness, access to appropriate justice forums and the achievement of satisfactory remedies. While the reasons for lack of access to justice or the barriers involved in specific cases depend on the context, we identify a number of common contributing factors: poverty, discrimination and racism, violence exercised by state and non-state actors and lack of women’s participation in public life. We suggest that the gradual recognition of legal pluralism, as well as the incorporation of international standards on women’s rights within statutory law, is shaping prospects for improved access to justice for indigenous women across the continent. However, we conclude that their demands for gender equality and more dignified lives can only be met when indigenous peoples collectives rights are guaranteed and respected.
JOURNALISTIC ARTICLE: Ayotzinapa y la Crisis del Estado Mexicano: Un Espacio de Reflexión Colectiva Ante la Emergencia Nacional
This article is part of a joint reflection about the crisis provoked by the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, Guerrero.
La Privatización de la Seguridad y de los Territorios Indígenas
La Jornada, 16 de Marzo de 2013
¿Más Estado es más Seguridad?: En Defensa de la Autonomía Indígena
La Jornada, 8 de Marzo de 2013
Two Justices: The Challenges of Coordination
The documentary Two Justices: The Challenges of Coordination analyses a paradigmatic case of coordination between Mayan and state justice systems in Guatemala. It was made in collaboration with the visual anthropologist Carlos Flores and the indigenous mayoralty of Santa Cruz del Quiché using material filmed by non-professional k’iche’ cameramen during a murder case. In the words of the actors themselves, the material shows the complex interlegal coordination that took place and the different positions of defenders of indigenous law and state justice officials in the region.
Rachel’s publications can be found at www.rachelsieder.com