Noer Fauzi Rachman
A revised version of my paper “A Review Notes On Transnational Indigenous and Peasant Movement, Notes on Networks, Coalition and Transnational Movement Organization”, dated April 18, 2007, originally for my PhD qualifying exam under Prof. Kate O’Neill, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM), Society and Environment Division, University of California, Berkeley.
How we define globalization and how globalization enables/constrains the opportunities of the emergence of transnational advocacy/movement/network/activism?
When I started to read some basic literature on transnational advocacy/movement/network/activism, such as Keck and Sikkink’s Activist Beyond Border (1998), Bandy and Smith’s Coalitions across Border (2005), Porta and Tarrow’s Transnational Protest and Global Activism (2005), Tarrow’s The New Transnational Activism (2005) that question stand up in my mind.
Tarrow (2005:5) re-presents a general claim that “Globalization is responsible for the rise of transnational activism”. .” The literature says “too little” because “it leaves out the intervening processes that lead people to engage in contentious politics”; It says “too much” because “a great deal of the transnational activism we find today in the world cannot be traced to globalization” (Tarrow 2005:5).
In order to answer Tarrow’s complain, In order to answer Tarrow’s complain, I feel Philip McMichael[3] piece is useful. McMichael identifies five different analytics that were used by different scholars in conceptualizing globalization:
a) As a process, globalization is typically defined, in economic terms, as the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world by the enormous reduction of costs of transportation and communication, and the breaking down of artificial barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital, knowledge, and people across borders.
b) As an organizing principle, it can be conceptualized as ‘de-territorialization’ that is, as “the explanans in accounting for contemporary social change”, as “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.
c) As an outcome, globalization is usually understood as an inexorable phase of world development, where transnational economic integration takes precedence over a state-centered world.
d) As a conjuncture, globalization has been viewed as an historically specific ordering of post-Bretton Woods international relations, structured by the ‘financialization’ of strategies of capital accumulation associated with a post-hegemonic world order, or as a form of corporate management of an unstable international financial system.
e) As a project, globalization has been viewed as an ideological justification of the deployment of neo-liberal policies privileging corporate rights. (McMichael 2005)
To examine globalization through social movement enable me to see globalization and social movement as contradictory in character, but at the same time also co-constitutive in relation one to another.
Tarrow also uses the similar Polanyian approach when he argues “… what is most striking about the new transnational activism is both its connection to the current wave of globalization and its relation to the changing structure of international politics. The former … provides incentives and causes of resistance for many (although not all) transnational activists; but the later offers activist focal points for collective action, provide them with expanded resources and opportunities, and bring them together in transnational coalitions and campaigns” (Tarrow 2005:5).
After locating these movements under the current moment of globalization, McMichael conclude that “the twenty-first century double-movement is different, and links immediate protective goals with transitional, visionary practices exemplified in the mass movements of the global south. … [T]oday’s counter-movements reach beyond the formula of national market regulation and wealth redistribution to develop an alternative politics rooted in an ecological paradigm, rejecting modernity’s separations of politics and economics, natural and social worlds, and rulers and ruled. Instead of the singular world-view associated with the modern state, this politics asserts the right to multiple world-views regarding democratic organization and the securing of material well-being through cultural and environmental sustainability” (McMichael 2005:17).
Studies of global connections may show how certain social actors are able to take advantage of the destabilized nation-state to build new transnational connections (Gille and Rianin, 2002). The social actors who construct global imaginations are most explicitly engaged in creating new “political space”. Keck and Sikkink propose “transnational advocacy nework must also be understood as political spaces, in which differently situated actors negotiate—formally or informally—the social, cultural and political meanings of their joint enterprise” (1998:3). I imagine there are another important factors that may be more visible if we make a concrete analysis, i.e. critical moments in creating space to resonance/mismatch, and also friction (as consequences of interaction between forces).
Latin America: Indigenous Transnational Movements
Here, my learning interest is to deepen an understanding on the movements by looking at the intersection of these three themes: neoliberal economic globalization and how it affects the framing and articulation of rural movement claims, political democratizations and the opening of political opportunities for social movement groups, and the networks of advocacy and support organized on a transnational scale.
Davis (1999) offers a new and more geographically and historically specific framework to study of social movements, build on notion of space conceived as both a material and a social construct. With a sensitivity to spaciality and how it articulate with historically given pattern of state formation, class formation, and citizenship, as well as racial, ethnic, and gender-specific identity politics, she promotes to “a new way of understanding and theorizing the origin, nature, and consequences of social movements in different comparative and historical contexts.”
I think Yashar (1998, 1999) able to go beyond the Davis characterization, even she uses explicitly political opportunity framework to analyze indigenous movements in Latin America vis a vis state formation, with emphasizing on political opportunities, organizational capacity, and the politicization of identity.
She identify that the political liberalization of the 1980s provides the macropolitical opportunity for organizing, as state demilitarized and political liberalization, mainly legalized freedoms of association, expression, and the press (Yashar 1998:31). But beyond the “political opportunity” factor, she arrives to a very original conclusion on two other factors enabling the successful indigenous movements in Latin America: (i) that the motive for indigenous organizing is the changing citizenship regimes that have challenged the local autonomy that indigenous groups enjoyed. “The incentives to organize as Indians lay in state reforms that left Indians politically marginalized as individual citizens, disempowered as corporatist peasant actors, and confronted with a challenge to local, political, and material autonomy”; and (ii) that “[t]he capacity to organize as Indians, however, has depended on trasncommunity networks previously constructed by the state and other social actors” (1998:31)
The motive and incentive to organize. As indigenous peoples have an actual reason to be organized: they lost control over their lands, communities, and livelihoods. They able to fight back in diverse ways, and then when political forces within the state make an alliance with them, they reform the state program and able to implement what Yashar call “corporatist program” such as land reform, agricultural subsidies and credits. Yashar argues that such corporatist program that treated indigenous people as peasants had unintended consequences i.e.: creating enclaves of local autonomy and fostering the formation (and even state recognition in some cases) of indigenous communities. “These state reform unintentionally created greater local political and economic autonomy” (Yashar 1998:33)
But, then in the following period, the protection was violated during the imposition of neoliberal citizenship regimes, when Indians lost access to state benefits, land security, and social resources. “(N)eoliberal-inspired citizenship reforms throughout the region have unintentionally challenged local autonomy, politicized ethnic identity, and catalyzed indigenous movements” (Yashar 1999:78). The result is that indigenous movements protested against the state reforms that restricted their inalienable community rights and de facto local autonomy, in the process demanding that the state officially recognize indigenous communities. “In this context, indigenous movements now pose a postliberal challenge, by demanding a different kind of political mapping—one that would secure individual rights but also accommodate more diverse identities, units of representation, and state structures” (Yashar 1999:88). At this point, we can locate the profound transformation in Bolivia in post-liberal, post-multicultural era, where subjectively the many indigenous peoples claim that “Now We are Citizen” (Postero 2006).
The capacity to organize and articulate demands. Here Yashar suggests where Indian communities were able to tap into already existing networks. “In short, states, unions, churches, and more recently nongovernmental organizations (particularly in Bolivia) have provided networks that enabled indigenous communities to trancend localized identities and to identify commonly trusted leaders. … (T)hese network provided a basis for indigenous mobilizing” (Yashar 1998:37-38). They were able to generate new networks that sustained their larger movements in national level making demand on the state, and also even in international levels making demand on international policies. Under this rubric we can see the organizability of indigenous peoples that are enabled by connectedness, communication, cosmopolitanism, and (imagined) community – as indicated by Brysk (2000:12-18). Brysk also definitely argues that the indigenous rights movement was born transnational, and various indigenous communities in Latin America states show a rage of internationalization from very high (Nicaragua) to moderate (Equador, Bolivia) to mixed (Mexico, Brazil) with different type of internationalization (by missionaries, interstate conflict, multinational companies, NGOs, international market, etc). She firmly claims that “we will discover international relations of tribal village” (Brysk 2000). But, there is also a case where transnational connections disabled the indigenous movement as in El Salvador where “transnational indigenous people movement-inspired programmes by the European Union and UNESCO to support indigenous activism paradoxically weakened the Salvadorean movement by aggravating outside impressions that Salvadorean indigenous communities are `not truly Indian'” (Tilley 2002).
These two factors, however, was only possible when there was sufficient political associational space (related with the shift in national political opportunity structure)—whether the state allowed and/or fostered political organizing. So, Yashar’s analytical contribution is that the successful indigenous movements occur only when indigenous communities have the opportunity, motive and incentive, and capacity to organize themselves. She clearly indicates that operation of these tree factors differs widely from place to place.
Southeast Asia: Indigenous Transnational Movement
The word ”indigenous” is rarely used in official Southeast Asian circles. Only the Philippines has adopted the term in accordance with international usage, and protected the indigenous peoples with special laws, for example the “Act to Recognize, Protect and Promote the Rights of Indigenous Cultural Communities/Indigenous Peoples, Creating a National Commission on Indigenous Peoples, Establishing Implementing Mechanisms, Appropriating Funds therefor, and for Other Purposes” of the Republic of the Philippines (Republic Act No. 8371, official short title: “The Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997”). Indigenous peoples in other countries in Southeast Asia have no adequate legal protection, and have been politically oppressed, culturally discriminated, socially marginalized, and economically exploited, while they themselves have hardly struggled to be legally recognized. Even in the Philippines, mainstream development strategies and practices continuously have generated conflicts between states agencies, development projects, extractive industries, transnational corporation on one hand, and ethnic minorities on the other hand, and such strategies are, at times, ethnocidal in their destructive effects (Clarke 2001; Colchester 1995).
From the Southeast Asian perspective, and from other perspectives as well, the term ”indigenous” has been used to refer collectively to such people and contrast them to the dominant social, cultural, political or economic groups. The term has became part of the international human rights discourse, especially after the ILO convention No. 169, and became even more popular after the Rio Convention of 1992, and during the United Nation’s Decade of Indigenous People 1994-2004, and the long-drafting process of UN declaration of Indigenous Peoples. Every activist who actively involved and promoted the term intends for the idea of ‘indigenous peoples’ rights’ to have universal applicability and legal force. For many states in Southeast Asia, except the Philippines, this move creates a problem. As noted by Kingbury (1995, 1998), for many Asian states “both elements of the term—‘indigenous’ and ‘peoples’—are contentious”, among others, because it does not fit with the politico-legal concepts already entrenched in the power and sovereignty of the national state (Kingsbury 1995; Kingsbury 1998).
The Philippines case, when I compare it with Indonesia, gives me an important lesson about the limit of the political process approach to explain the success of producing a national act. It is very important to understand that it is impossible to achieve the success without the strong motive and claim around indigenity, the capacity to organize the (various) indigenous peoples, to develop a network of supporter inside and outside the country, to utilize transnational connections and international organization (e.g. the UN), and—the most important —the ability to frame and seize national political opportunities.
But, I will argue, through the comparative lens with Indonesia, that (a) historico-geographical specifics play a decisive role in influencing all main factors mentioned; and (b) the moment at which people knit together disparate and apparently contradictory practices, beliefs, and discourses in order to give their world some semblance of meaning and coherence, is also decisive. As Li did for Indonesia case (Li 2000; Li 2001), I have tempted to use Stuart Hall’s articulation approach (Grossberg 1996; Hall 1980; Hall 1985; Slack 1996), and combine it with a historico-geographical explanation. From “articulation approach” I learn how and under what condition various forces—those may be contradictory or complementary—joint together in particular space and time. In other words, the approach helps me to explain how people make a unity at which is neither necessary nor previously determined. It is right to argue that “the existence of an indigenous people’s movement is a major factor in the diffusion and impact of ‘indigenous peoples’ as an international legal concept” (Kingsbury 1998:421). It can be also framed as policy outcome of the transnational network (Keck 1998). But for the thick explanation on the adoption of the international concept of ‘indigenous peoples’ in national legal structure, it should be understood as one result of various forces coming together at the particular moment. Once the national state has adopted the international concept, it opens a possibility for a group of peoples/communities to have a legal recognition for their “indigenous rights” within their national legal framework. As I learn from the Philippines case, there are complicated procedures to be legally and officially treated under the rubric of “indigenous peoples/communities” and the modern bureaucratic procedures can be afforded merely by the indigenous peoples/communities without assistance of the NGOs. In Hirtz words, “It takes Modern Means to be Traditional” (Hirtz 2003), and in some cases the NGOs plays as governmentality agent, who able “to facilitate”, “to elicit” or “to create” a particular type of conduct suitable with the larger frameworks (such as “sustainable resource use’) through enabling a condition under which the conduct will emerge and fit within its framework (Bryant 2003).
It is very interesting to understand how in Philippines’ IPRA the term “indigenous cultural communities/indigenous peoples (ICCs/IPs)” is used as a way to solve the unfinished debate—among others—around collective right of self-determination and rights to self-determination, and in the IPRA the term ICCs/IPs is defined as “a group of people or homogenous societies identified by self-ascription and ascription by others, who have continuously lived as an organized community on communally bounded and defined territory, and who have, under claims of ownership since time immemorial occupied, possessed and utilized such territories, sharing common bonds of language, customs, traditions and other distinctive cultural traits, or who have, through resistance to political, social and cultural inroads of colonization, non-indigenous religions and cultures, become historically differentiated from the majority of Filipinos” (Fitschen 1998).
I can compare it with how the term “indigenous peoples” is used in Indonesia. Most Indonesia activists agreed to use the term masyarakat adat as a common expression to refer to indigenous peoples in Indonesia. This term, known and used by many indigenous peoples in Indonesia, means: peoples who have ancestral origin in a particular geographical territory and have a system of values, ideology, economy, politics, culture, society and land management. The term has been used since 1990s by activists also because also it was seen as the most socially and politically acceptable in the context of 1993 under the authoritarian and oppressive rule of the Soeharto regime. But the consequences of using the term, combining with other forces inside and outside the country, there are huge limitation to acquire recognition from the national state after the regime fell in 1998 (Li 2001). It seems to me, the post-authoritarian national politic, including constitutional reform, not able to adopt the term as internationally is used. Instead of using the international standard, the constitutional reform, other legal changes, and government policies and programs adopt masyarakat adat term, and treat it not refers to international human right discourse of indigenous people, even the activist, Indigenous Peoples leaders and National Human Right Commission have pushed it to do so. Indonesia Indigenous People Aliiance (AMAN) has developed linkages with various international indigenous peoples organizations. In Asia, AMAN became a member of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP). During the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002), it joined the Indigenous Peoples Caucus, one of the most organized and effective civil society groups. AMAN has been working closely with International Working Group on Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA) both to support their work and join international advocacy. Besides joining the international networks as a group, AMAN also facilitates its members' participation in various international forums and networks.
Useful References
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[3] I use the version that appears in Peter Evans’ website: http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/evans/evans_pdf/McMichels-HdbkPoliSoc-Chapt-%20soc%20190.pdf. The page number for McMichael reference refers to this document, and not to the original book.
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