Unsettling Territory: Indigenous Mobilizations, the Territorial Turn, and the Limits of Land Rights in the Paraguay-Brazil Borderlands

The territorial turn in Latin America has resulted in the restitution of more than 200 million hectares of land to Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities since the 1990s. While the territorial turn has provided a juridical solution to numerous Indigenous land claims by legally demarcating collective property rights, title does not necessarily resolve territorial disputes. Such is the case with the Kue Tuvy Ache community in the Paraguay-Brazil borderlands that successfully won collective title only to be continually confronted with (extra-) legal challenges to their hard-won land rights. Drawing from qualitative research with Kue Tuvy community members, secondary-source data, and scholarship on territorial epistemologies from Latin American and Anglophone scholars, I analyze the grounded effects of territorial turn politics with attention to struggles that precede the turn and the conflicts that follow issuance of title. The paper shows how the territorial turn plays out in place, not merely as the product of neoliberal political economic reforms but as Indigenous efforts to unsettle territory to create communal spaces for more just futures. I argue that territorial assemblages are never finished, just as struggles for Indigenous justice do not end with territorial restitution.