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Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores state-directed ‘colonisation’ projects in twentieth century Bolivia, focusing on the entanglements between Indigenous-peasant ecologies and the non-human within agrarian landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation explores state-directed ‘colonisation’ projects in twentieth century Bolivia, focusing on the entanglements between Indigenous-peasant ecologies and the non-human within agrarian landscapes. Agricultural colonisation projects accelerated in Bolivia in the wake of the 1952 Bolivian National Revolution, with extensive assistance from the US, British and European governments. The Revolution’s architects envisaged a grand programme of internal colonisation of the lowlands known as the March to the East. Settling the sparsely populated, resource-rich lowlands with migrants from the Andean highlands both responded to demographic pressures in the highlands and valleys partly produced by climate change, and also provided an opportunity for the post-revolutionary state to initiate a new agrarian extractivism based around tropical agriculture on the Eastern frontier. Based on archival research in Bolivia and drawing on a multispecies, decolonial and posthuman theoretical framework, I argue that colonisation dramatically changed the ways in which highland Indigenous-peasants related to their agrarian landscapes. The peasantry’s role in the expansion of the agrarian frontier must be understood, therefore, as contributing to a dramatic transformation in both land tenure practices and ecological cultures in twentieth century Bolivia. Colonisation processes expose the fissures that emerged in the late twentieth century within and between Indigenous organisations regarding land, territory and development. By bringing to the fore the other-than human including insects, trees and pathogens this presentation further offers a multispecies approach to understanding historical agrarian colonisation projects in Latin America.