Global transformations, local tensions : on place and socio-legal mobilisations in environmental conflicts in Colombia. The cases of popular consultation and litigation for the defence of territory

From a situated perspective, this research addresses environmental conflicts related to transnational mining in the Colombian context. It explores the political uses of law, rights and judicial arenas by social actors mobilised around the defence of territory, as well as their collective and environmental rights. Specifically, the research addresses the meaning-making processes around ‘place’/‘territory’ that sustain the activation of legal and rights-based strategies and the effects that such action generates in territorial, social, and institutional terms. In the process, the thesis studies the emergence of new place-based networked actors and the configuration of multi-scalar alliances that challenge the spatialities of mainstream environmental and resource governance frameworks. To do so, this research uses comparative qualitative case analysis to evaluate legal mobilisations and framing processes over the notion of ‘place’ in two emblematic environmental conflicts: the citizen-led popular consultation in Cajamarca, and the litigation case in defence of the Santurbán Páramo (Andean highland socioecosystem). The cases show that socio-legal mobilisations cannot be reduced to a demand for rights in environmental struggles. Drawing from knowledges and practices that foreground the socio-ecological connection to the places or territories that people inhabit, a contingent space is opened to challenge anthropocentric, State-centred visions and legal definitions over ‘territory’ as appropriable – vacuum – space, and over nature as a resource that can be objectified, enclosed, and exploited. Iteratively, and through the process of contention, understandings of ‘place’ or ‘territory’ are contested, broadened, expanded, and can therefore be grasped as a process of place-making, in which law and rights-based strategies also play a key role. By bringing ‘place’ within the perspective of framing processes, this thesis aims to open the possibility for combined inquiry between legal mobilisation studies and political ecology through the notion of place-framing processes. With this, the research aims to address the call for a more embedded and relational perspective based on observing social actors’ contentions against the emptying, abstraction, and commodification of territory into mere ‘resources’.(POLS - Sciences politiques et sociales) -- UCL, 202