Presentation short abstract

Mapuche communities in southern Argentina face renewed dispossession amid extractive pressures and a far-right turn driving administrative rollbacks. The paper analyses territorial claims and resistance through a grounded political ecology lens.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines contemporary processes of land dispossession affecting Mapuche communities in the southern Andes, focusing on intensifying disputes over territorial claims in the South of the Province of Mendoza, in Argentina. Building on grounded political ecology and classic peasant studies, the analysis situates these struggles within broader regimes of dispossession shaped by extractive expansion, land concentration by economic and political elites and shifting state agendas.

Since the 1990s, legal recognition frameworks (impulse by the ILO 169) enabled the formation and legal recognition of Mapuche communities with collective landholding structures, improving livelihoods and territorial security. These gains, however, have become increasingly fragile. Argentina’s recent far-right turn has triggered administrative rollbacks in the recognition of Mapuche communities, accompanied by public campaigns aimed at delegitimising their territorial claims and facilitating access to lands sought for mining, hydrocarbons, and tourism development.

Through ethnographic insights and discourse analysis, the presentation explores how administrative procedures themselves become instruments of dispossession, reshaping the political terrain in which territorial claims are negotiated. At the same time, Mapuche communities mobilise legal strategies, alliances, and everyday forms of resistance to defend ancestral territories and sustain rural livelihoods.

By foregrounding the interplay between land rights, extractive interests, and state power, this study challenges reductionist explanations of conflict and demonstrates how the Mapuche case illuminates the nexus between dispossession, agrarian political economy, and territorial struggle.