Doctoral Dissertation Research: Sovereignty, Displacement, and Land Titling Strategies

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The increased dominance of large-scale, plantation-based production to meet global demand for commodities has contributed to the displacement of smaller communities, the loss of which has been well-documented as having adverse environmental and social impacts. Having possession of a land base is essential in order to generate revenues and prevent their own displacement, particularly for economically disadvantaged and minority communities. Legal titling and registration of those lands is often considered to be a critical method for ensuring a land base, yet titling does not always translate into real possession of those lands. Government policies, private sector forces, and natural disasters, may gradually erode of a land base as they legally or economically compel community members to sell or vacate their titled lands. Without the ability to decide who can use the lands, manage the purposes for which they are used, and enforce those policies, such communities have little security over their land bases. This project, which supports the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, explores how such communities establish authority over land in order to prevent their displacement. This doctoral dissertation research centers the experiences of nine Indigenous Rama and Afrodescendant Kriol communities in southeastern Nicaragua that received a communal title to a territory that is four-fifths the size of Delaware in 2009. This site is particularly appropriate for this project due to the recency of the issuing of a title and the researcher's engagement with these communities during a majority of the period since the title was issued, providing for an analysis of the changing conditions of territorial control since that time. While Nicaraguan law guarantees that communal lands under the title may not be sold, mortgaged, or otherwise alienated except in extremely limited circumstances and after consultation with the communities, the Rama-Kriol Territory is being impacted by mestizo settlers from the interior of the country, who are seizing growing segments of the territory for crops and ranching. This has destroyed Rama-Kriol agricultural areas and hunting grounds, contaminated rivers, and wholly displaced one Rama community. The investigation will focus on how the Rama-Kriol Territorial Government and its constituent communities are seeking to effectively use their territory through three key areas: the management of the physical occupancy of the territory; the gathering and management of information about the occupancy of the territory; and the contestation of the capacity of different levels of government to decide on the management of the territory. To do so, the researcher will interview community members, Rama and Kriol forest rangers, communal and territorial leaders, government officials, and mestizo settlers in the territory and carry out participant-observation in the daily activities of land governance in the Rama-Kriol Territory. This will allow for a fine-grained understanding of ways in which people experience and participate in these processes. Archival research at the Nicaraguan national archives will also add historical depth to this study of the processes of colonization and dispossession under way in the Rama-Kriol Territory. The resulting research products will contribute an understanding of the practices through which Indigenous and Afrodescendant sovereignty is formed and preserved, which has implications both for Indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples worldwide and for the study of sovereignty, autonomy, and state formation across the social sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.