Prof. Chuck Sturtevant on ‘Settler Citizens of a Settler State: The Constitution of Settler Sovereignty in the Bolivian Amazon’

CISRUL alumnus Professor Chuck Sturtevant will be visiting us from the American University on Wednesday 13th May at 10-11.30 in Edward Wright F61 and on Teams, to discuss his research on ‘Settler Citizens of a Settler State: The Constitution of Settler Sovereignty in the Bolivian Amazon’.

The Alto Beni region of Bolivia, part of Bolivia’s lowland Amazonian “frontier,” has been the site of long-running development projects that have encouraged colonists from Bolivia’s highlands to settle in the region. This settlement project is inherently eliminatory and works to erase the ongoing presence of the Mosetén indigenous people and their forms of political development. This talk draws on an analysis of the conceptions of history, time, development, and citizenship present in the preambles to two constitutional documents (the New Political Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia and the Organizing Charter of the Municipality of Palos Blancos). These constitutions depend on contrasting ideas of constituent power and popular sovereignty grounded in the right to revolution versus the right to settlement. Analysing these differences reveals that the settlement of the Alto Beni constitutes Bolivia as a settler state, while at the same time allowing for the disavowal of the settler colonial character of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

Chuck is a former CISRUL PhD candidate and he will be happy to meet afterwards with PhD researchers to discuss his post-PhD experiences.