CFP: Who Owns It: Land Claims in Latin America. Their Moral Legitimacy and Implications

Conflicts due to unresolved land claims are a pressing political and social issue throughout Latin America. The aim of this two-day bilingual seminar is to bring together different perspectives on the moral and political legitimacy of land claims in Latin America. We welcome contributions about both indigenous and non-indigenous groups making land claims in Latin America.

We invite submissions in Spanish or English that address the issue of land claims in Latin America both from a theoretical and applied perspective. Suggested topics of papers may include:

- The normative justification of land claims in Latin America

- Land claims in Latin America: What type of claims do the different groups make?

- Land claims in Latin America: Constitutional and legal perspectives

- Land claims in Latin America: What do current economic policies favor?

- The value of land in Latin America: as a means or an end?

- Land in Latin America: Its social and cultural importance for vulnerable populations

- Control and ownership of natural resources by indigenous communities/local groups

- Poverty, development and land tenure in Latin America

- Individual versus collective (or communal) land rights

- Social movements and land claims: Mapping diverse ways of resistance

- ‘Land-grabbing’ by agribusinesses and foreign investors: Tracing new ways of colonization

Abstracts should not exceed 500 words. Please send your submissions in PDF, Word or RTF formats to Alejandra Mancilla, at w[email protected], no later than the 15th March 2013. It is also possible to submit a short paper, which should not exceed 4000 words. The organizers will cover the costs of travel and accommodation in Bogotá for those authors whose abstracts/papers are selected for the seminar.

The seminar is organized by the project Who Owns It – Land Claims in Latin America, Their Moral Legitimacy and Implications, funded by the Research Council of Norway, and the Institute of Bioethics, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia.

The project Who Owns It – Land Claims in Latin America, Their Moral Legitimacy and Implications evaluates the soundness of the different claims being made in light of three different moral principles that seem to underlie them: (1) That, because the communities who now are claiming title to land (or their ancestors) were unjustly dispossessed of their land, and have consequently been kept in a state of poverty and deprivation due to their continued exclusion from the land, the State and those who currently occupy the land have a contribution-based responsibility to rectify this situation by reforming the current legal order which sustains it; (2) That because the community is in severe need and the State and affluent persons are in a position to alleviate their need at some cost, they have a assistance-based responsibility to do so; (3) That even if the State and current occupants of the land did not cause or could not have prevented unjust exclusion from the land from happening, they have benefited from these injustices, and thus have a beneficiary-based responsibility to compensate the wronged community. For more information about the project, visit our website: http://www.hf.uio.no/csmn/english/research/projects/who-owns-it/index.html

The Institute of Bioethics at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana has recently undertaken the research project Indigenous Traditional Knowledge and Collective Rights in Colombia. Since 2004 researchers from the Institute participate in CLACSO’S Working Group on Political Philosophy (which integrates colleagues from different Latin American countries). This group does research on the topics of integration and diversity in Latin America. For more information about the Institute, visit our website: http://puj-portal.javeriana.edu.co/portal/page/portal/Bioetica/INICIO

Any further academic enquiries should be directed to Alejandra Mancilla (w[email protected]), Eduardo A. Rueda, at [email protected],or to the project leader, Gerhard Øverland, at [email protected]