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Research article

What’s at stake in the plurinational state debate? The case of Bolivia

Author
  • Chris Hesketh orcid logo (Assistant Professor, Department of International Relations, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK)

Abstract

The idea of a plurinational state is one that has gained currency in parts of Latin America in recent decades. Driven by the demands of Indigenous social movements and communities, countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador have rewritten their constitutions to acknowledge the diverse populations that make up the different ‘nations’ within their state. The notion of a plurinational state carries with it the potential to offer a set of counter-topographies and ways of being that challenge the Westphalian conception of sovereignty. Plurinationalism thus offers a means of worlding beyond the West. However, despite this promise, there remains a major debate between the more utopian horizons for plurinationalism, grounded in Indigenous self-determination, and what I term ‘actually existing plurinationalism’. The latter continues, in many ways, the colonial dominance of the nation-state in the politics of scale and furthers the practical realities of natural resource extraction, undermining the material basis for alternative sovereignties to be realised. This article therefore asks: what is at stake in the debate over plurinationalism, and what possibilities remain for its original decolonial impulse, driven by insurgent spatial praxis or counter-topographies?

Keywords: Bolivia, Indigenous, plurinationalism, state, space, sovereignty

How to Cite: Hesketh, C. ‘What’s at stake in the plurinational state debate? The case of Bolivia’. Radical Americas 10, 1 (2025): 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2025.v10.1.001.

Rights: 2025, Chris Hesketh.

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Published on
23 Apr 2025
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Introduction

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.

The promise of plurinationalism

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.

(Plurinational) state, power, socialism

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

We understand that the Plurinational State is a model of political organisation for the decolonisation of our nations and peoples, reaffirming, recovering and strengthening our territorial autonomy to achieve a full life, to live well, with a vision of solidarity, and in this way to be the engines of unity and social welfare of all Bolivians, guaranteeing the full exercise of our rights.36

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

Actually existing plurinationalism

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.

From constituent power to constituted power

The new constitution pronouncing Bolivia as a plurinational state was passed in 2009, seemingly as the culmination of struggles by subaltern social forces. The proposals informing this new state were developed by a constituent assembly from 2006–8, in which a range of social movements participated.79 The constituent assembly crucially served as a space to reconcile key differences among the various Indigenous movements that made up the Pact of Unity.80 The resulting constitution has been described as ‘probably the most extensive framework of indigenous rights ever recognised by a nation-state’.81 To provide some illustrative examples, in its preamble, the constitution makes reference to former conflicts over water and gas, the role of Indigenous activism and asserts that the re-founded state has ‘left the colonial, republican and neo-liberal state in the past’.82 Article 1 references the plurality of the country and Article 8 commits the state to promoting Indigenous ethical and moral principles.83 The idea of a unitary and homogenous mode of citizenship was to be abandoned and instead plural modes of belonging within the overall territory of the state were proclaimed.84 This was supposed to represent the basis of a transition to communitarian socialism.85 A key tenet of this new model was the right of Indigenous/Originario peoples to self-governance, which was a longstanding demand.86 An explicit aim of the plurinational state was therefore to achieve decolonisation (which was codified in law), and to recognise the reality of Bolivia in terms of what Zavaleta called a ‘socieded abigarrada’ (motley, or heterogeneous society).87 Indeed, the plurinational state was said to capture this motley society in its institutional form.88 However, from the outset, a politics of the national-popular sat in tension with demands at the community level or what has instead been termed the ‘community-popular horizon’ for emancipation.89 Constituent power sat in tension with constituted power,90 and the influence and political will of social movements sat in tension with the leadership of the MAS itself.91 In short, Indigenous autonomy was subordinated to the state in terms of a legal hierarchy.92 It is here that we can see the start of the MAS becoming a social movement from above. Illustrative of this is that more than 100 articles proposed by the constituent assembly were altered, weakening the project of plurinationalism from below pushed by subaltern social forces. The lava of the social eruption from 2000–5 was clearly beginning to solidify into the form of state power.93 Insurgent spatial praxis was therefore becoming ossified as the radical possibilities of plurinationalism coalesced into actually existing plurinationalism as a state-based project.

Surveying the political topography, a key contradiction running through all the above revolves around the spatial scale of resource appropriation and distribution. My argument now explores the contradictions of the accumulation strategy and hegemonic project of the MAS, linked to the usage of Marxist and Indigenous state theory.94 This contributes to other work that has sought to question whether the state can be used as an instrument for the sorts of radical change that subaltern subjects propose.95 A useful way of exploring these contradictions is to examine the writings of some of the major ‘intellectuals of statecraft’.96 In this case, I explore the writing of former Vice President Álvaro García Linera as well as current President Luis Arce (who also served previously as the finance minister). However, first it is useful to contextualise some important points via the state theory of Nicos Poulantzas outlined in his landmark text State, Power, Socialism. The influence of Poulantzas’s thinking on the intellectual justification for the process of change in Bolivia is acknowledged specifically to be García Linera’s writings.97 Poulantzas’s state theory provides several important postulates that comprise a crucial departure point for evaluating the emancipatory potential of the plurinational state. Poulantzas argues that (1) we must examine the ‘material substratum’ of the state to derive is character, (2) the state is always beset by class contradictions and is not a monolithic formation, (3) political struggles always take place within the state, (4) in thinking about issues of radical transformation, any transition to socialism should be a gradual rather than rapid process (which may involve the retention of capitalism for some time). Nevertheless, Poulantzas argues that (5) for a meaningful transition to occur, mass movements must remain in active support of this project and alternative grassroots forms of popular democracy must proliferate as a dual form of power of the Left. The last point especially remains deeply questionable in Bolivia.98

With the writing of the new constitution, Bolivia was recognised as a fundamentally plural society (both in terms of multiple nations and economically in terms of the state’s material substratum). The model of development was defined as following a ‘plural economy’ made up of four key sectors: the state, the private sector, the co-operative sector and the communitarian sector. The main goal of the plural economy was to move Bolivia away from its historic reliance on the exportation of primary commodities by building up industrial capacity. The state was therefore to play a key strategic role in integrating these various sectors, most notably in redistributing resources from ‘strategic sectors’ (which include hydrocarbons and the mining sector) to ‘employment and income generating sectors’ (which include industrial, farming, commercial and service sectors), as well as redistributing profits to fund key social programmes.99 However, despite the promise of pluralism, this strategy is reliant upon making the state the main ‘collective entrepreneur’ and geographically expanding the territorial presence of the state.100 As Perreault and Valdivia outline, ‘Popular imaginaries of natural gas and its role in the national story are in this way rooted in nationalist understandings of Bolivian resources as the fulcrum on which turn the country’s relations with the global economy.’101

The redistribution of rents from hydrocarbons has become essential to the hegemonic project of the MAS in what has widely been termed ‘resource nationalism’. For the MAS project, this recovery of natural resources by the central state is the basis for decolonisation and it provides the material basis for lifting the majority of the population out of poverty. On the one hand, this has been a popular strategy and the foundation for the substantial support the MAS enjoys.102 On the other, it instantly raises the question of whether this national spatial imagery clashes with an alternative spatial project of Indigenous autonomy that likewise makes claims over resources.103 As Tapia puts it, ‘the problem arises of who is the owner and sovereign of the territory and the resources.’104 In this respect, rather than transform the character of the state to one that reflects (and proliferates) Indigenous modes of organisation and customs, the MAS’s reforms have increased the bureaucratic presence of the state (often in areas where such state presence was formerly weak).105 Rather than the slow eroding of state power, by contrast this is a strategy for the consolidation of regulatory state power.106 To make the obvious point here, resource nationalism implies a singular spatial logic. Resource nationalism thus looks inherently different to resource plurinationalism.

As many have pointed out, therein lies a key contradiction between the resource-nationalist project of an extractivist, rentier state and the promise to respect territorial sovereignty, pluralism and difference.107 The former invokes an understanding of popular sovereignty against global capitalism as the key to decolonisation, whereas the latter remains concerned with the reality of internal colonialisation (resulting from the practices of state-led development).108 The reclaiming of territory and self-governance is central to this understanding of decolonisation.109 This differentiated understanding of decolonisation and sovereignty has also caused a split in the original historical bloc of subaltern social forces, with the peasant and urban Indigenous sectors more supportive of the MAS’s developmentalist agenda, and territorially rooted groups (exemplified by CONAMAQ and CIDOB), breaking from the Pact of Unity to oppose the government.110 Other Indigenous, Originario and Peasant social forces remained broadly supportive of the MAS meanwhile. This split can be linked to what Ravindran calls expansionist (nationally oriented) and revivalist (community-based) Indigenous demands.111 While expansionist demands are concerned with spatial mobility, for example, furthering the presence of Indigenous people within historically inaccessible spaces, revivalist demands seek protection of ancestral territories and the expansion of self-governing possibilities.

For the intellectuals of statecraft under the MAS, their strategy has been a justifiable one in leftist terms. If the old Bolivian state was only an ‘apparent’ state, the creation of the plurinational state was argued to represent a move to create an integral state (in the Gramscian sense of the word), capable of recognising the majority of subaltern interests in Bolivia.112 In this conception, the role of the state was vital to the unification of social forces that, on their own, were only able to exercise localised forms of power.113 As Webber has documented, the MAS shifted their stance from a largely extra-parliamentary force to one that prioritised the electoral arena.114 This brought with it a spatial and political strategy to win over a cross-regional and cross-class constituency. However, a clear tension has existed around the meaning and scope of autonomy, between a state-based understanding and that emanating from below via the Pact of Unity.115 From the outset of the foundation of the plurinational state, the original demands for Indigenous autonomy, which were conceived of as parallel and equal to state authority, were watered down and tempered by constituted forms of power. Moves to autonomy in Bolivia have since taken place on a political terrain circumscribed by the state, whereby radical Indigenous proposals have become ‘domesticated’.116 Such domestication of insurgent social forces by the state has been recognised as a hallmark of a passive revolutionary form of statecraft.117

The new constitution as well as the Framework Autonomies Law (Ley Marco de Autonomías y Decentralización) set out the scope for achieving Indigenous, First Peoples and Peasant autonomy (Autonomía Indígena Originario Campesina, AIOC). This can be achieved through the conversion of an existing municipality or the conversion of a region (both by popular referendum) or through the consolidation of already existing titled Indigenous lands known as Territorio Indígena Originario Campesino (Indigenous Originary Peasant Territory, TIOC) via the appropriate norms and customs of that community.118 However, state support for this process has been, at best, ambivalent. It has often been tied to questions of electoral support for the MAS and the reality of whether it makes certain political subjects more governable.119 Owing to the clear limits to self-determination, this has led some to question the professed break with liberalism.120 As a result of these limitations, many communities have eschewed the bureaucratic entanglements and conflicts that the autonomy process has required and stuck with the status quo.121 Only a limited number of AIOCs (see Table 1 below) have thus far been established (although a further 25 remain in process). A key criticism that has been made of the autonomy process is that it has remained within the bounds of dominant cartography (in the form of municipalities, which new autonomous regions may not bisect). Actually existing plurinationalism thus fails to respond to the initial demand to recuperate pre-colonial Indigenous territories.122

Table 1

Established autonomous governments in Bolivia (Source: https://cejis.org/cpta/territorios-y-autonomias-indigenas/) 

Municipality and department Region Form of autonomy
Charagua (Santa Cruz) Lowlands Municipal
Kereimba (Santa Cruz) Lowlands Municipal
Uru Chipaya Highlands Municipal
Salinas (Oruro) Highlands Municipal
Raqaypampa (Cochabmba) Highlands Territorial

Such tension has led to a fracturing of the historical bloc that made up the MAS’s support base and the broader plurinational project. Articulating a left critique of the MAS, Tapia argues that ‘it is not that the main leaders of the MAS are being co-opted by the old dominant patrimonialist and bourgeois bloc in Bolivia, but that they themselves are becoming the leading nucleus of a new capitalist project in the country’.123 In short, the MAS has moved from its original purpose as a political instrument of social movements to becoming a social movement from above.124 Its chief purpose has been to consolidate its own hegemonic position underpinned by a strategy of ‘resource nationalism’ or extractive development. Such extractive development is presented by the MAS government as a necessary policy to reduce poverty. However, Tapia’s argument is that this has meant that socio-economic horizons have come to displace ethico-political horizons.125 In keeping with broader regional trends linked to neo-extractivism, the negative environmental consequences are either denied, minimised or accepted as part of a greater overall good.126 In this situation, communities opposing this mode of development have been labelled as an enemy and as obstacles to progress.127 The stark reality is that, although the state has indeed managed to capture larger amounts of rents derived from primary commodities, it has done so while failing to challenge the fundamental dependency of Bolivia on such primary commodities and thus its subservient position in the global political economy. Indeed, under the MAS government, Bolivia has increased such dependency.128 MAS policy thus far has also favoured capital-intensive sectors above the more labour-intensive manufacturing sectors.129 Limited progress has been made in expanding the social, co-operative sectors, and the MAS government has shied away from pursuing land reform that would challenge the power of large landholders.130 Indeed, rapprochement with elites in the countryside was actively pursued, further demobilising the power of social movements.131 The character of the state thus remains tied to its resource dependence and its role in reproducing the exploitative conditions for surplus appropriation.132 Actually existing plurinationalism, despite its radical discourse, has reinforced capital accumulation rather than challenging it.

Unsettling sovereignty?

A key tension at the heart of the plurinational-state has been the question of sovereignty.133 Notions of Indigenous sovereignty, grounded in territorial autonomy, have often come into conflict with the desire to create a stronger national sovereignty.134 According to García Linera there is a need to construct both homogenous territoriality and polycentric territoriality.135 He does not specify, however, how contradictions between these different logics are to be adjudicated. Rather, issues such as the struggle between the state and social movements are described as ‘creative tensions’ which are capable of driving the ‘process of change’ forward.136 However, as Simpson has argued, ‘In situations in which sovereignties are nested and embedded, one proliferates at the other’s expense.’137 The question has to be asked whether we are in fact dealing with ‘incommensurable sovereignties’.138 Luis Tapia warned early in the era of the MAS government that, ‘If plurinational unity takes the form of a state, political unification will take place around the political form of the old dominant culture; that is, communitarian or non-statist cultural diversity will be unified in a form external to its organisational principles.’139

Here debates on the plurinational state resonate with broader contemporary discussions within Indigenous studies around challenging colonial logics. One issue to address here is the very notion of sovereignty itself, which has been problematised by some scholars.140 In Alfred’s view the concept of sovereignty is a European discourse distinct from Indigenous traditions.141 The latter, he argues, contains no absolute authority, hierarchy, coercive enforcement of decisions and, finally, does not rule as an entity separate from the people. However, this rejection of sovereignty is contested by other Indigenous scholars such as Simpson, who conversely argues that the issue of sovereignty matters ‘because it speaks from jurisdictional authority’.142 On closer inspection, Alfred’s position seems primarily to be about the rejection of sovereignty associated with the state model.143 In his own words, ‘The challenge, then, is to de-think the concept of sovereignty and replace it with a notion of power than is based on more appropriate premises.’144 This has become a major point of debate within the field of Indigenous studies.145 One method of thinking through a different vision of power comes from Manuela Picq’s notion of ‘vernacular sovereignties’. This is a non-state-centric notion of power which not only challenges the authority of individual states but also the broader notion of the Westphalian system.146 This can be seen as important for a number of reasons. First, it removes the locus of political authority away from the state. This is a vital task in recognising Indigenous forms of social organisation that pre-date the state form and have remained integral features of localised governance.147 Second, this notion of vernacular sovereignty captures well the more recent Indigenous struggles in Latin America. Svampa has noted, for example, that a major response to extractive development in Latin America has been an explosion of socio-environmental movements characterised by assembly-style decision-making and demands for autonomy.148 In the Bolivian context, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, surveying the period 2000–5, argued that a new ‘epistemic horizon of desire’ opened during this time.149 This saw an emergent ‘community-popular’ perspective which emphasised a new relationship between communities and wider society, proposals for autonomy and the decentralising of power. However, rather than struggle within and through the state serving to empower such communities, many scholars have highlighted how the social movement component of the state has become increasingly disciplined by the MAS’s electoral focus.150 Alternative forms of organisation have not proliferated but rather have been subdued, at times actively repressed by the MAS and at other times supportive of their policies that enable a greater flow of immediate economic resources to their communities.

As Nancy Postero has argued, Indigeneity has been transformed from a site of radical emancipation into one of state-building and legitimation.151 In an excoriating critique, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui refutes the notion that Indigenous liberation has taken place in Bolivia and instead submits that the role of the MAS has been to ‘appropriate the symbolic surplus value of their ancestors in centuries of struggle, to use these tools in the consolidation of new and old elites in power’.152 The task of constructing state hegemony has thus limited the possibility of pluralism.153 In short, the MAS has largely reproduced the colonial structures of power.154 Contesting this line of thought, García Linera argues that the role of the state is vital in its ability ‘to articulate expectations and collective needs’.155 Here the importance of a centripetal rather than centrifugal force is essentially postulated. García Linera thus argues that the state is essential in overcoming Indigenous factionalism by providing a country-wide scale for the articulation of a hegemonic project in the Gramscian sense of having moral and intellectual leadership and the ability to construct a broader historical bloc.156 In a revealing passage, García Linera – who was at the time writing in his capacity as Vice-President of Bolivia – argued that the country was in a process of transition. The Bolivian state had gone through a period of crisis (dated from 2000). However, in his view a new power bloc had emerged, transforming class relations in the country.157 He called this process of overcoming the crisis of the state with a newfound stability the ‘point of bifurcation’.158 García Linera explicitly poses the logic of the state as crucial to the harmony of social life, as revealed in the following quote: ‘to the extent that no society can live perpetually in a state of generalised and antagonized struggle for power, society, sooner or later, must lean towards the stabilisation of the system or construction of a state order that returns certainty to the structures of domination and political leadership’.159 The project of both pursuing state power and autonomy are not viewed as contradictory but rather are said to form a ‘living tension’.160 It should be noted that this represents a drastic change of position for García Linera. In an earlier work, he stressed the autonomist, anti-statist character of radical transformation, and argued that ‘We must abandon, once and for all, the vulgar idea of the “conquest of power” that has resulted in the occupation of an alien power.’161 The crucial question, therefore, is whether that country-wide scale must necessarily take on the form of a state, or whether in fact a state as a mode of sovereignty is antithetical to Indigenous forms of sovereignty.162

This issue is best illuminated in the dispute over the MAS government’s proposed highway construction through the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Secure (TIPNIS), a protected national park, and home to several lowland Indigenous communities. As Laing explains in relation to this proposal, ‘the road is intimately tied in to the MAS’s economic model based on the appropriation of land and natural resources’.163 This conflict, which would lead to a major fracture within the Pact of Unity, is thus tied to what she describes as ‘resource sovereignties’. García Linera defended the state’s proposals on the basis of expanding the national state’s sovereignty.164 The proposed highway, he said was ‘a mechanism for territorialisation of geography by the state and the establishment of sovereignty’, against what he termed ‘hacendado-patrimonial power’. However, in this argument, the social dynamics were reduced to a struggle between the sovereign state and the capitalist class over territory. The possibility that there might be separable Indigenous interests for territorial sovereignty – and their own agenda for development – was therefore elided. This episode is emblematic of the many ways in which the promise of pluralism has been replaced with a single emancipatory subject, the politics of dialogue replaced with a politics of monologue and the polyphonic replaced with the monophonic.165 Alternative sovereignties have been precluded by the expansion of the resource frontier.166 As Bret Gustafson concludes, ‘The gaseous state has now overtaken the social movement state.’167

Conclusion: a new dialectic of struggle?

‘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.

Funding

The ideas in this article were developed as a result of a Political Economy Fellowship granted by the Independent Social Research Foundation that I gratefully acknowledge.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Adam David Morton for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article as well as two anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions from. Any errors, omissions or oversights remain my own.

Declarations and conflicts of interest

Research ethics statement

Not applicable to this article.

Consent for publication statement

Not applicable to this article.

Conflicts of interest statement

The author declares no conflict of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently anonymise the author during peer review of this article have been made. The author declares no further conflicts with this article.

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Notes

  1. Grandin, Empire’s Workshop. ⮭
  2. Goodale and Postero, Neoliberalism Interrupted. ⮭
  3. Svampa, ‘Movimientos Sociales’, 4. ⮭
  4. Burguete Cal y Mayor, ‘Autonomía’; Dinerstein, Politics of Autonomy, 31. ⮭
  5. Elwood et al., ‘Learning from postneoliberalisms’; Peck, Theodore and Brenner, ‘Postneoliberalism’. ⮭
  6. Mignolo, Local Histories. ⮭
  7. González, ‘Autonomías territoriales indígenas’, 36. ⮭
  8. Jameson, ‘The indigenous movement’; Lupien, ‘The incorporation of indigenous concepts’; Rivera Cusicanqui, Un mundo ch’ixi es posible, 11. ⮭
  9. García Linera, ‘El estado en transición’, 5. ⮭
  10. Brenner and Theodore, ‘Actually-existing neoliberalism’. ⮭
  11. Hesketh, ‘Indigenous resistance’. This has been identified as part and parcel of a broader process of ‘transformism’ and ‘passive revolution’ in Bolivia, referring to the manner in which the state has displaced social groups and expanded processes of capital accumulation. See also Hesketh, ‘Between Pachakuti and passive revolution’; Hesketh and Morton, ‘Spaces of uneven development’; Tapia, El estado. ⮭
  12. Dinerstein, Politics of Autonomy, 6. ⮭
  13. Marx, ‘Civil war in France’. ⮭
  14. Hesketh, Spaces of Capital. ⮭
  15. Gibson-Graham, Post-capitalist Politics. ⮭
  16. Küçük and Özselçuk, ‘The Rojava experience’. ⮭
  17. Keating, Plurinational Democracy; Oksanen, ‘The rise of indigenous (pluri-)nationalism’; Tapia ‘Una reflexión’; Tapia, El estado. ⮭
  18. Keating, Plurinational Democracy, 26–7. ⮭
  19. Keating, Plurinational Democracy, 2. ⮭
  20. Keating, Plurinational Democracy, 169. ⮭
  21. Oksanen, ‘The rise of indigenous (pluri-)nationalism’, 142. ⮭
  22. Lightfoot, ‘Decolonizing self-determination’; Picq, Vernacular Sovereignties; Tapia, ‘Una reflexión’; Wildcat and De Leon, ‘Creative sovereignty’. ⮭
  23. Merino, ‘Reimagining the nation-state’; OSAL, ‘Propuesta’; Tapia, El estado, 34. ⮭
  24. Escobar, ‘Thinking-feeling’, 51; Gudynas and Acosta, ‘La renovación’. ⮭
  25. Hale, ‘Neoliberal multiculturalism’. ⮭
  26. Hale, ‘Rethinking indigenous politics’. ⮭
  27. Garcés, ‘The domestication of indigenous autonomies’, 53. ⮭
  28. Tockman and Cameron, ‘Indigenous autonomy’, 46. ⮭
  29. Solón, ‘Vivir Bien’; Tapia, ‘Una reflexión’; Tapia, El estado. ⮭
  30. Rivera Cusicanqui, Mito y desarollo en Bolivia; Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘Indigenous peoples and women in Bolivia’, 8–10. ⮭
  31. Katz, ‘On the grounds of globalization’. ⮭
  32. Katz, ‘On the grounds of globalization’, 1228. ⮭
  33. Katz, ‘On the grounds of globalization’, 1230. ⮭
  34. Lefebvre, ‘Space and state’, 248. ⮭
  35. Tapia, El estado, 43, 93, highlights that the role of the Pact of Unity was vital as a collective ‘organic intellectual’ representing peasants and Indigenous peoples, driving the project of the plurinational state in Bolivia. Indigenous, Originario and Peasant refer to different markers of identity in Bolivia. ⮭
  36. OSAL, ‘Propuesta’, 167. ⮭
  37. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks; Simpson, As We Have Always Done. ⮭
  38. Holloway and Picciotto, ‘Capital, crisis and the state’. ⮭
  39. Radhuber, ‘Indigenous struggles’, 169. ⮭
  40. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism, 22, 14. ⮭
  41. Hesketh, ‘Modes of production debate’. ⮭
  42. Castro and Picq, ‘Stateness as landgrab’. ⮭
  43. Zavaleta Mercado, History of the National Popular. ⮭
  44. Zavaleta Mercado, History of the National Popular, 28. ⮭
  45. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 260. ⮭
  46. Tapia, ‘El Estado en condiciones de abigaramiento’, 102; Zavaleta Mercado, ‘El estado en América Latina’. ⮭
  47. Tapia, ‘Una reflexión’, 50. ⮭
  48. Zibechi, Dispersing Power, 7. ⮭
  49. Hesketh, ‘Modes of production debate’, 10. ⮭
  50. Marx, ‘On the Jewish question’. ⮭
  51. Reinaga, La Revolución India. ⮭
  52. Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa, 48. ⮭
  53. Hesketh and Morton, ‘Spaces of uneven development’, 151–8. ⮭
  54. Albó, ‘El retorno del indio’. ⮭
  55. Dangl, Five Hundred Year Rebellion, 89–90. ⮭
  56. Choque and Mamani, ‘Reconstitución del ayllu’. ⮭
  57. Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘Liberal democracy and ayllu democracy’. ⮭
  58. Albó, ‘El retorno del indio’, 302. ⮭
  59. Fabricant and Gustafson, ‘Introduction’; Marmani Ramirez, ‘Cartographies of Indigenous power’; Tapia, El horizonte plurinacional. ⮭
  60. Tapia, ‘Una reflexión’, 56. ⮭
  61. Albó, ‘El retorno del indio’, 302; Oksanen, ‘The rise of indigenous (pluri-)nationalism’, 100. ⮭
  62. OSAL, ‘Propuesta’. ⮭
  63. Tapia, El estado, 82. ⮭
  64. Cameron and Plata, ‘Indigenous autonomy’, 127. ⮭
  65. Anthias, Limits to Decolonization, 38. ⮭
  66. Webber, Red October, 147. ⮭
  67. Andreucci and Radhuber, ‘Limits’, 287. ⮭
  68. Gutiérrez Aguilar, Rhythms of the Pachakuti, xx. ⮭
  69. Salazar Lohman, ‘The anticommunalism of the plurinational state’, 153. ⮭
  70. Tapia, El estado, 79. According to Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 366, ‘The term “catharsis” can be employed to indicate the passage from the purely economic (or egoistic-passional) to the ethicopolitcal moment.’ ⮭
  71. Postero, The Indigenous State, 32. ⮭
  72. Gutiérrez-Aguilar, ‘Statisation of the social’. ⮭
  73. Doyle, ‘The contentious politics of vivir bien’, 4. ⮭
  74. Brenner and Theodore, ‘“Actually-existing neoliberalism”’. ⮭
  75. Brenner and Theodore, ‘“Actually-existing neoliberalism”’, 361. ⮭
  76. Cox and Nilsen, We Make Our Own History. ⮭
  77. Hesketh, ‘Between Pachakuti and passive revolution’; Webber, From Rebellion to Reform. ⮭
  78. Gutiérrez-Aguilar, ‘Statisation of the social’. ⮭
  79. Anthias, ‘Pluri-extractivist state’, 128. ⮭
  80. Prada, ‘Entrevista a Raúl Prada’, 48–9. ⮭
  81. Anthias, Limits to Decolonization, 7. ⮭
  82. Bolivia, ‘Bolivia (Plurinational State of) 2009’. ⮭
  83. Bolivia, ‘Bolivia (Plurinational State of) 2009’. ⮭
  84. Cordero Ponce, La Plurinacionalidad desde abajo, 5. ⮭
  85. Arce, ‘El nuevo modelo económico’, 3. ⮭
  86. Augsburger and Haber, ‘Constructing indigenous autonomy’, 54; Merino, ‘Reimagining the nation-state’, 782. ⮭
  87. Zavaleta Mercado, ‘Las masses en Noviembre’. ⮭
  88. García Linera, Socialismo comunitario, 8. ⮭
  89. Gutiérrez Aguilar, Rhythms of the Pachakuti. ⮭
  90. Opposing the idea of a fixed constituted power, Negri argues that a hallmark of democracy is the constituent power of people to alter their form of governance: ‘the paradigm of constituent power is that of a force that bursts apart, breaks, interrupts, unhinges any preexisting equilibrium and any possible continuity. Constituent power is tied to the notion of democracy as absolute power. Thus, as a violent and expansive force, constituent power is a concept connected to the social preconstitution of the democratic totality.’ Negri, Insurgencies, 10. ⮭
  91. Prada,‘Entrevista a Raúl Prada’, 35, 40. ⮭
  92. Cameron and Plata, ‘Indigenous autonomy’, 138. ⮭
  93. García Linera, Hacia el Gran Ayllu Universal, 313. ⮭
  94. As Jessop explains, ‘An accumulation strategy defines a specific economic “growth model” complete with its various extra- economic pre- conditions and also outlines a general strategy appropriate to its realisation.’ Jessop, State Theory, 98. ⮭
  95. Doyle, ‘Can states be decolonized?’; Salazar-Lohman, ‘The anticommunalism of the plurinational state’; Tapia, ‘Una reflexión’; Zibechi, Dispersing Power. ⮭
  96. Tuathail and Agnew, ‘Geopolitics and discourse’. ⮭
  97. García Linera, Forma valor y forma comunidad. ⮭
  98. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism. ⮭
  99. Arce, ‘El nuevo modelo económico’; McNelly, ‘Neostructuralism’, 420. ⮭
  100. García Linera, ‘El Estado en transición’, 23–5. ⮭
  101. Perreault and Valdivia, ‘Hydrocarbons, popular protest’, 694. ⮭
  102. Angosto-Ferrández, ‘Reframing resource nationalism’, 114–15. ⮭
  103. Marston and Kennemore, ‘Extraction, revolution, plurinationalism’; Postero, The Indigenous State, 5. ⮭
  104. Tapia, ‘Una reflexión’, 60. ⮭
  105. Doyle, ‘Can states be decolonized?’, 5. ⮭
  106. Svampa, ‘Movimientos Sociales’, 18. ⮭
  107. Anthias, Limits to Decolonization; Fabricant and Gustafson, ‘Introduction’, 2. ⮭
  108. Riofrancos, Resource Radicals, 45. ⮭
  109. Doyle, ‘Can states be decolonized?’, 23. ⮭
  110. Marston and Kennemore, ‘Extraction, revolution, plurinationalism’; Postero and Fabricant, ‘Indigenous sovereignty’, 103. ⮭
  111. Ravindran, ‘Geographies of indigenous identity’. ⮭
  112. García Linera, ‘El Estado en transición’, 8; García Linera, Forma valor y forma comunidad, 318. ⮭
  113. García Linera, Forma valor y forma comunidad, 226. ⮭
  114. Webber, From Rebellion to Reform, 63. ⮭
  115. Cordero Ponce, La Plurinacionalidad desde abajo, 80, 200; Merino, ‘Reimagining the nation-state’, 789. ⮭
  116. Garcés, ‘The domestication of indigenous autonomies’; Tapia, La sustitución del pueblo; Zuazo, ‘¿Los movimientos sociales en el poder?’, 134. ⮭
  117. Hesketh, ‘Between Pachakuti and passive revolution’; Hesketh and Morton, ‘Spaces of uneven development’; Morton, Revolution and the State, 254. ⮭
  118. Alderman, ‘Indigenous autonomy’, 4; Tockman, ‘Decentralisation’, 156. ⮭
  119. Augsburger and Haber, ‘Constructing indigenous autonomy’, 54; Tockman and Cameron, ‘Indigenous autonomy’, 48. ⮭
  120. Cordero Ponce, La Plurinacionalidad desde abajo, 73, 201. ⮭
  121. Cameron and Plata, ‘Indigenous autonomy’; Tockman, ‘Decentralisation’, 154. ⮭
  122. Cameron and Plata, ‘Indigenous autonomy’, 141; Tockman, ‘Decentralisation’, 163. ⮭
  123. Tapia, El estado, 125. ⮭
  124. The full name of party is the Movement for Socialism – Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (Movimiento al Socialismo – Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos, MAS-IPSP). ⮭
  125. Tapia, El estado, 35. Indeed, the possibility of obtaining enhanced funding from the government within the existing municipal structures has been cited as one major factor as to why many municipalities led by Indigenous leaders have rejected further moves towards autonomy, Cameron and Plata, ‘Indigenous autonomy’, 136. ⮭
  126. Gudynas, ‘Diez tesis urgentes’, 205. ⮭
  127. Anthias, Limits to Decolonization, 143; Riofrancos, Resource Radicals, 12. ⮭
  128. Andreucci and Radhuber, ‘Limits’, 280–1; Veltmeyer, ‘Between voluntarist developmentalism’, 84. ⮭
  129. McNelly, ‘Neostructuralism’. ⮭
  130. Arze and Gómez, ‘Bolivia’, 100, 92. ⮭
  131. Webber, ‘Consolidation of agrarian capitalism’, 331. ⮭
  132. Hamilton, Limits of State Autonomy, 7. ⮭
  133. Tapia, ‘Una reflexión’. ⮭
  134. Postero and Fabricant, ‘Indigenous sovereignty’, 102. ⮭
  135. García Linera, Hacia el Gran Ayllu Universal, 332. ⮭
  136. Garcia Linera, Las tensiones creativas. ⮭
  137. Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus. ⮭
  138. Moreton-Robinson, ‘Incommensurable sovereignties’. ⮭
  139. Tapia, ‘Una reflexión’, 61. ⮭
  140. Alfred, ‘Sovereignty’; Alfred, ‘Sovereignty: an inappropriate concept’; Salgado, ‘Against sovereignty’. ⮭
  141. Alfred, ‘Sovereignty’, 467. ⮭
  142. Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus, 104. ⮭
  143. Alfred, ‘Sovereignty: an inappropriate concept’, 323. ⮭
  144. Alfred, ‘Sovereignty’, 471. ⮭
  145. Wildcat and De Leon, ‘Creative sovereignty’. ⮭
  146. Picq, Vernacular Sovereignties, 23. ⮭
  147. Tapia, ‘El estado en condiciones de abigaramiento’, 101. ⮭
  148. Svampa, ‘Consenso de los commodities’, 20. ⮭
  149. Gutiérrez Aguilar, Rhythms of the Pachakuti, 176–8. ⮭
  150. Salazar-Lohman, ‘The anticommunalism of the plurinational state’. ⮭
  151. Postero, The Indigenous State. ⮭
  152. Rivera Cusicanqui, Un mundo ch’ixi es posible, 15. ⮭
  153. Arze and Gómez, ’Bolivia’, 159. ⮭
  154. Hesketh, ‘Indigenous resistance’; Radhuber and Radcliffe, ‘Contested sovereignties’, 557. ⮭
  155. Garcia Linera, Forma valor y forma comunidad, 23. ⮭
  156. García Linera, Hacia el Gran Ayllu Universal, 226, 316. ⮭
  157. García Linera, ‘El estado en transición’. ⮭
  158. García Linera, ‘Empate catastrófico’. ⮭
  159. García Linera, ‘El estado en transición’, 32, emphasis added. ⮭
  160. García Linera, Hacia el Gran Ayllu Universal, 316. ⮭
  161. García Linera, Forma valor y forma comunidad, 46. ⮭
  162. Moreton-Robinson, ‘Incommensurable sovereignties’, 264. ⮭
  163. Laing, ‘Resource sovereignties’, 151. ⮭
  164. García Linera, Geopolítica de la Amazonía, 60. ⮭
  165. Gutiérrez-Aguilar, ‘Statisation of the social’. ⮭
  166. Anthias, Limits to Decolonization, 143; Hesketh, ‘Indigenous resistance’. ⮭
  167. Gustafson, Bolivia in the Age of Gas, 174. ⮭
  168. Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘Liberal democracy and ayllu democracy’, 103. ⮭
  169. Merino, ‘Reimagining the nation-state’, 792. ⮭
  170. Mariátegui, Seven Interpretative Essays. ⮭
  171. Doyle, ‘Can states be decolonized?’. ⮭
  172. Tapia, ‘El estado en condiciones de abigaramiento’, 119. ⮭
  173. Tapia, ‘Una reflexión’, 60. ⮭
  174. Bjork-James, ‘“We are MAS 2.0”’, 10. ⮭
  175. Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism, 125. ⮭
  176. Riofrancos, Resource Radicals, 14. ⮭
  177. Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘Indigenous peoples and women in Bolivia’. ⮭
  178. Garcés, ‘The domestication of indigenous autonomies’, 56; Rivera Cusicanqui, Un mundo ch’ixi es posible, 24; Tapia, El estado. ⮭
  179. Katz, ‘On the grounds of globalization’. ⮭