Latin America was once described by historian Greg Grandin as ‘empire’s workshop’.1 This expression served to denote how the region was used as a testing ground for advancing the policies and strategies conducive to maintaining the dominant world order. However, equally, for at least the last three decades, Latin America has been a laboratory for thinking about radical, transformative possibilities. From participatory budgets, the inception of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre (Brazil), social movements such as the Zapatistas or the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or the experience of the Pink Tide era and countless more examples, Latin America has been central to the challenging and interrupting of neoliberalism.2 Moving from resistance to transformation, Latin America has also inspired reflection and debate on the possibility of socialism in the twenty-first century and what this might mean. There has been a change in the region that has reinvigorated a radical lexicon of politics, focusing on themes of anti-imperialism, decolonisation and emancipation.3 In relation to how emancipation and decolonisation can be realised, autonomy has also emerged as a frequent demand of many movements and communities.4 The above points to a broader politics of post-neoliberalism that has sought to challenge hegemonic configurations of state-formation and citizenship in Latin America.5 This can be interpreted through the notion of ‘border thinking’ where knowledge production from the margins challenges the colonial world order.6

The notion of plurinationalism is another contribution to such border thinking. In various countries, subaltern social forces attempted to fundamentally challenge, reconfigure and multiply the spaces of sovereignty.7 Driven by the demands of largely Indigenous social forces, countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador have rewritten their constitutions to acknowledge the diverse, historically original – and yet politically excluded – populations that make up the different ‘nations’ within their currently configured nation-states. Plurinationalism therefore carries with it the potential to offer an alternative set of cartographies that challenge the Westphalian concept of the sovereign state and provide new ways of thinking about democracy and justice, linked to an Indigenous episteme.8

This article focuses specifically on the case of Bolivia where plurinationalism has long been seen as a means of grappling with the legacy of colonial domination and racialised state structures. Exemplifying this notion, the former vice president of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera, described the country as a ‘living laboratory’ in the historical movement of transition from one form of state to another.9 However, despite this promise, there remains a major debate between the more utopian horizons for plurinationalism, grounded in Indigenous territorial self-government and what I term in this article ‘actually existing plurinationalism’. Drawing on Brenner and Theodore, the concept of actually existing plurinationalism serves to move from abstract theorisation to explore the real-world implementation of plurinationalism in practice, and as a hegemonic order.10 This has seen plurinationalism conjoined to the state as a political project, and has, in many ways, continued the colonial legacy of the nation-state in the politics of scale as well as furthering the practical realities of natural resource extraction in its major mode of accumulation. Such actions have undermined the material basis of enacting alternative sovereignties.11 The question of how nominally progressive governments interact with emancipatory social forces that facilitated their rise thus remains an urgent problem to be explored.12

This article therefore asks: what is at stake in the debate over plurinationalism, and what possibilities remain for a decolonial impulse, driven by insurgent spatial praxis? I seek to contribute to debates on plurinationalism more broadly by highlighting how Latin America offers a more radical contribution to the concept. Although plurinational projects have been the subject of reflections and analyses by scholars of the region, this is rarely done by paying attention to state-theoretical debates, a gap which I attempt to fill. I also extend the debate on plurinationalism in the Latin American context into wider conversations within Indigenous studies around the concept of sovereignty. Finally, in the conclusion, I discuss how plurinationalism remains largely ignored within international studies, despite offering some important contributions that might unsettle the dominant framings of global politics.

My argument will unfold in the following sections. First, I briefly set out the meaning of plurinationalism and the limitations of the dominant understandings of this concept. Here I demonstrate why the study of Latin America offers an important alternative conception of plurinationalism to that found in the mainstream literature. Second, I show why this notion holds such importance and radical potentiality in a country such as Bolivia, where a plurinational state was declared in 2009. Finally, I explore the contemporary contradictions and limitations around actually existing plurinationalism as it became codified into a state project, with a focus on issues of contested sovereignties and articulations of power from above and below. I make the case for why the concept and practice of plurinationalism needs to be decoupled from the state to realise its radical potential. This involves basing it in the constituent power of subaltern, Indigenous social forces.

From the Paris Commune13 and the Zapatista rebellion,14 radical experiments at different economic sites of activity,15 to the current struggles still unfolding in places such as Rojova,16 the Left has long debated the potential and possibilities of transformative politics emanating from subaltern social forces, enacted below the level of the nation-state, that seek to explicitly challenge such logics of political power. In recent years, the concept of plurinationalism has added to this debate.17 Plurinationalism is usefully defined by Keating as ‘the coexistence within a political order of more than one national identity, with all of the normative claims and implications this entails’.18 However, while providing a useful discussion of the concept, Keating’s work remains restricted in a number of respects. First, it focuses solely on transformations within liberal democracies, which are seen as markers of a new potential normative order. Indeed, liberalism is elevated to a ‘universal principle’.19 Second, there is little focus on popular agency from below. Keating’s discussion of plurinationalism is largely about how abstract demands are mediated by already constituted power, rather than about how it could be a political project driven by constituent power from below. Finally, his work remains explicitly Eurocentric in nature.20 Little is said, for example, about Indigenous challenges to the idea of the nation-state form (despite Canada being invoked as an example of plurinationalism). Indigenous modes of nationalism remain both understudied and under-theorised.21 This is a major lacuna given that place-based struggles by Indigenous movements across the Americas have unsettled the logic of state sovereignty.22

In mainstream accounts of plurinationalism, the term is understood largely as a means of political accommodation within existing power relations. I will argue that, by contrast, in the Latin American setting, plurinationalism was invoked by Indigenous social forces precisely to challenge liberal means of inclusion, as well as the hegemonic neoliberal political economy more fundamentally.23 The Latin American context, therefore, offers a new window for thinking about plurinationalism and can give the concept a more radical impulse. As mentioned, plurinationalism in the region has been driven from below by the demands of Indigenous social forces. As well as acknowledging the diverse Indigenous/Originario populations that make up the different ‘nations’ within their state, notions such as that of ‘living well’ (vivir bien or buen vivir) have been anchored within the new constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador in an explicit acknowledgement of the need to think differently about development and being in the world.24 Plurinationalism in this context therefore immediately challenges Western norms. In theory at least, plurinationalism in Latin America represented a move beyond the limited recognition of Indigenous cultural practices and language rights, as signified by the era of liberal multiculturalism that took place in many parts of Latin America during the 1990s and early 2000s.25 It did so by explicitly advancing the goal of Indigenous autonomy as central to the project of plurinationalism – thereby moving beyond what Hale referred to as ‘lo-Indio permitido’, whereby limited means of recognition were provided, but with no major alterations in the wider power relations.26 In a broad brush stroke, plurinationalism offered the basis for a political project that would provide material recognition to Indigenous territorial claims and thus radically unsettle dominant ideas of how nation-states appear and operate.27 In doing so, a different form of power, politics and political economy was to be fostered, which would challenge the colonial legacies of exclusion and alienation. As Tockman and Cameron summarise, ‘plurinationalism has emerged as a way of reconceiving the nation-state, positing a departure from a liberal multicultural framework for constructing state-society relations to a conceptualisation of the state as the composite of multiple nations to which greater rights are extended.’28

However, despite the radical possibilities held out by plurinationalism, which also came with associated discourses of vivir bien, communitarianism and a move towards the decolonisation of the state, the reality of the proceso de cambio (process of change) in Bolivia has led many radical Bolivian intellectuals to distance themselves and become more critical of its practice.29 Others have explicitly argued that the period of rule by the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia from 2006, far from leading to emancipation, has in fact led to aggressive, colonial regressions.30 This is the conundrum with which the article engages, namely the gap between plurinationalism as a theory and the possibility of radical emancipation that was proposed to grapple with difference and engage in decolonisation, versus the reality of reinscribing the power of the centralised state (justified in the name of safeguarding the broader politics of change). I now turn to the specific case of Bolivia to see why the radical possibilities of this concept were so important.

To understand why a concept like plurinationalism matters in a place such as modern Bolivia, it is useful to provide what geographer Cindi Katz refers to as a critical ‘topography’ for political engagement.31 Topographies in this sense involve a detailed examination on a particular scale to understand its key features and broader relationships, and can reveal their ‘tensions, contradictions and affiliations’.32 The main argument to be advanced here is that plurinationalism represents a major decolonising impulse that stems from Indigenous movements from below in response to the contradictions of a racist, colonial state order. It is a fundamental attempt to pose an alternative set of territorial arrangements to those of a modern, centralised nation-state. Plurinationalism thus has the potential to create a set of counter-topographies33 or what Henri Lefebvre referred to as ‘differential space’, counterposed to the logic of capitalist development.34

The words of the Pact of Unity, which comprised the most significant Indigenous, Originario and Peasant social forces in Bolivia, are significant as a departure point to this endeavour as they represent the most important statement of subaltern collective will.35

Like broader Indigenous struggles taking place across the Americas, the sovereign state is problematised in this strategy as a colonial construct.37 Writers in the Marxist tradition have long argued that the state should be conceived of as a form of social relations.38 However, beyond an abstract characterisation of a state as a capitalist form of social relations, a nuanced application of state theory also requires a close analysis of actual societies and their specific differences.39 As Poulantzas explained, ‘The theory of the capitalist state cannot be simply deduced from general propositions on the state.’ Rather, the basis of a particular capitalist state has to be found in ‘the relations of production and social division of labour.’ 40 In the case of Bolivia, the social terrain, both metaphorically and literally, becomes complicated, as there is no simple story about social relations conforming to capitalist imperatives, but rather what inhered was the co-existence of multiple modes of production.41 What does this mean politically? To answer this, we need to recognise the colonial origins of the modern nation-state as the beginnings of any topographical analysis.

State formation in Latin America was only made possible from concomitant processes of dispossession of the Indigenous population.42 From its birth, the Bolivian state was not grounded in a sense of the national-popular, but rather was constructed against the majority (Indigenous) population.43 Zavaleta Mercado thus talks of the ‘incapacity for an experience of space as national reality’ in Bolivia. He distinguishes the cartographic fact of a state’s claimed territory versus the actuality of what he calls ‘socially incorporated space’.44 The result of this weak state formation in Bolivia meant that the state was not an integral state, as theorised by Gramsci,45 but rather an ‘apparent state’ that lacked hegemony within civil society.46 Taking up Zavaleta’s thesis, Luis Tapia identifies what he calls a ‘non-correspondence’ between the Bolivian state and the lived reality of Indigenous, Originario and Peasant communities, who maintained self-organised, governing authorities.47 Importantly, this demonstrates the practical existence of non-state forms of power, not separated from society, and in which the form of the community assembly remained as the highest organ of authority.48 Modern state formation in Bolivia thus remained elusive.49 In simple terms, the classical model of modern state formation is one in which a single sovereign source of power exists and in which citizens are granted formal equality before the law. This public equality versus private means of exploitation is vital to the functioning of capitalism.50 However, in Bolivia the idea of a singular, national space has never existed, owing to the colonial legacies of racism and class exploitation. Fausto Reinaga referred to this as the problem of ‘two Bolivias’: a white/mestizo Bolivia (which was dominant) and an ‘Indian Bolivia’ (which remained excluded).51 Plurinationalism as an insurgent spatial praxis, defined in terms of a counter-proposal of sovereignty, represents a project to overturn the historical legacy of oppression through a revival of Indigenous practices and customs. This is sometimes referred to as the pachakuti (meaning turning the upside-down world of colonialism on its head).52

The outright exclusion of Indigenous peoples in Bolivia was challenged somewhat with the national revolution of 1952. However, while the revolution did address the direct disenfranchisement of the Indigenous population, it also resulted, more broadly, in a state-managed process from above where ethnic identities were subsumed under class identities to better satisfy the requirements of the corporate tutelage of the ruling Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR).53 In this era, to hegemonise was to homogenise. This found expression in the politics of mestizaje (the mixing of Indigenous and European peoples). However, this was not a straightforward case of incorporation, and resistance remained an important feature. To that end, a revival of Indigenous culture as a political movement started taking place in Bolivia from the 1970s.54 Intellectuals such as Fausto Reinaga, political groups such as the Kataristas and organic intellectuals associated with the Taller de Historia Oral Andina helped promote this revival of Indigenous identity and cultural practices.55 Proposals for reconfiguring sovereignty began to be put on the agenda from this time. Central to this project was a revival of the Indigenous ayllu as a political form. This is a model of organisation based on the pre-Hispanic past of Indigenous communities and collective ownership of land that is inalienable, where kindship ties are fundamental to the political system.56 Although Indigenous communities had been the victims of waves of territorial dispossession since the time of colonialism, their own forms of authority had remained as a form of practical governance and as a source of resistance.57 The Indigenous resurgence in Bolivia provided politics with a new conceptual vocabulary – away from class and union (the dominant terms post Revolution) to notions of community, the right to territory and the claiming of autonomy.58 In short, it was via the agency of Indigenous, Originario and Peasant communities that state, space and territory began to be rethought.59 Luis Tapia has thus argued that the context of the national-popular of Bolivia is unique as it comprises an anti-statist form of struggle that aims to unify diverse, excluded political subjects.60 The idea of the plurinational state is therefore an effort to grapple with the historical legacy of colonial imposition and an order that has marginalised Indigenous peoples. Crucially, however, unlike European nationalist movements, this generally did not translate into demands for secession.61 Proposals from Indigenous movements instead called for the rethinking and refounding of Bolivia in terms of its territorial geography. This explicitly included the transcending of the liberal and monocultural model of state formation based on individual citizenship. Instead, a break was demanded from vertical forms of state power. In its place were calls for Indigenous autonomy, popular votes, the possibility of revoking mandates and respect for Indigenous/Originario customs. Crucially, autonomy would include the right to decide on exploration and exploitation of resources found within Indigenous territories, which would link to place-based consultations and studies around their environmental and socio-economic impact. Finally, three scales of authority were proposed. These were (1) local (Indigenous/Originario/Peasant autonomy), (2) intermediate (regional/urban) and (3) national.62

Demands for Indigenous territorial autonomy as a centrepiece of emancipation can be traced back specifically to the Indigenous March for Territory and Dignity in 1990 from the Bolivian lowland communities.63 Such demands continued to be central to Indigenous protest movements over the next two decades.64 As Anthias summarises, ‘After long histories of dispossession, ethnic territories may represent the spaces indigenous peoples can fight for and from.’65 Such proposals were a key part of the broader social demands that began to be articulated during the period of social uprising from 2000–5, referred to as the ‘Left-Indigenous insurrectionary cycle’, which would ultimately bring the MAS to power.66 Alongside claims linked to territory and self-governance, proposals for a plurinational project in Bolivia were also grounded in an alternative vision of political economy. At its heart this was a call to base a new Bolivia in a plural political economy.67 This was to signify a fundamentally different set of relationships in terms of ownership, regulation and usage of natural resources. The 2000–5 insurrectionary cycle, inspired by the contestation over natural resources (namely water and gas), effectively ended the neoliberal period in Bolivia, opening a new ‘horizon of desire’.68

Prior to the election of the MAS it must be remembered that the momentum for political transformation came from below.69 Drawing from Gramsci, Luis Tapia refers to this time as a moment of ‘catharsis’, defined by a more extensive revolutionary consciousness among the population.70 At the heart of this mobilisation, led by Indigenous groups allied with Peasant and workers’ unions, was the question of who gets to participate in decision-making surrounding resources and development.71 In short, this can be defined as a struggle for the communal (lo común), which, while often being generative from Indigenous struggles, also went beyond them to include a wider variety of social groups seeking to generate alternative social relations.72 Let us now explore the difference between the rhetoric and the reality of the plurinational state, the competing visions for transformation and the premises that underlay these. At the heart of this is a question of whether autonomy is gained through the state or whether autonomy should be realised outside of the state.73

If the previous section set out the possibility of radical transformative politics offered by plurinationalism in a theoretical sense, this section explores the reality of actually existing plurinationalism in the context of Bolivia. As noted in the introduction, I draw inspiration from Brenner and Theodore’s notion of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’.74 As opposed to any pure version of neoliberalism, ‘the notion of actually existing neoliberalism is intended to illuminate the complex, contested ways in which neoliberal restructuring strategies interact with pre-existing uses of space, institutional configurations, and constellations of socio-political power’.75 In a similar vein, I want to move from the ideal theorisation of what plurinationalism was supposed to look like and examine its complex, contested reality as a political project as it became instantiated into a state form. I argue that we can understand the contestation over plurinationalism as a struggle between social movements from below and a social movement from above.76 Social movements fighting for plurinationalism from below have been co-opted and constrained by the MAS which has acted as a social movement from above.77 In short, there has been a statisation of social struggles.78 This should provide for reflection about the meaning and scope of plurinationalism and whether it can be reinvigorated in the future. I turn to those issues in the conclusion.

‘A brief period of mass euphoria’ that ‘gave the regime a lasting dose of legitimacy but also concealed the mechanisms through which the state usurped the popular will.’168 This description by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is of the 1952 Revolution in Bolivia. However, it could equally apply to the period from 2006 onwards. Plurinationalism as a proposal for alternative sovereignty/ies remains an unfinished business and with competing understandings and meanings.169 In the context of Bolivia, as I have shown, the promise of plurinationalism was an idea, a method and a practice to confront the homogenising effects of colonialism and to reassert a political economy of unity in diversity. Beyond Jose Carlos Mariátegui’s recognition of the survival of ‘practical socialism within Indigenous communities’ in Latin America,170 plurinationalism appeared to offer a means for actively building a political project for emancipation by and for Indigenous movements, peoples and communities. This was obviously not expected to be a straightforward or non-contested process, and yet worryingly it does look like its radical potential has been arrested. Most immediately, therefore, there is a political question to be answered in Bolivia: can decolonisation be achieved through the state? The answer to that question would appear to be ‘no’.171 There remains a substantive difference between political projects that come from the world of social movements and those that come from government programmes.172 There remains a challenge to organise a mode of plurinationalism that is social-movement driven and that has real respect for autonomies at its heart.173 Such a recognition has even come from the MAS itself since their return to power after the coup of 2019, with a public professing of a new commitment to grassroots forces.174 A huge difficulty here is how to foster a form of unity without the state form – a project that is locally sensitive but multi-scalar in articulation. A politics, in other words, that is place-based but not place-bound. When thinking about the production of counter spaces, we have a clear choice: ‘either reconstitute society as society, or reconstitute the state; either action from below, or acts from the top down’.175

Here I would suggest that the political terrain has shifted to a new dialectic of struggle. Previously a plethora of radical social forces, including both pro- and anti-extractivist positions, could unite under the banner of opposing neoliberalism and the private appropriation of resources this implies.176 The challenge now is for those social forces grounded in the defence of territory to become hegemonic in their struggle for a non-state-centric project of plurinationalism. This will require the forging of a new political project that is able to account for concerns of true plurality of interests, which include territorially rooted Indigenous groups, but also urban Indigenous peoples, especially Indigenous women who are still lacking in rights.177 Concurrent with a variety of critical intellectuals within Bolivia, to revive the political dynamic of 2000–5 requires not simply the euphoria of the time, but critical reflection on the experiences of what has followed and what the limitations of this have been in terms of decolonisation and emancipation.178 Any such struggle for a counter-topography in Bolivia will also have to consider how it relates to broader socio-spatial struggles elsewhere in terms of its material connections or what Katz refers to as contour lines.179 However, in relation to a broader, global struggle, the struggle for plurinationalism in Bolivia also offers a window into social forces often considered peripheral to world politics. Indigenous peoples are recast: as creative and active agents within world politics who are challenging established shibboleths, rather than as victims or simply recipients of global dynamics. The debate over the plurinational state is thus one that is not over but has the capacity to define the horizons of Indigenous and subaltern emancipation in the twenty-first century and provide an alternative set of possibilities for rethinking participation and belonging in world politics.