Rethinking international law along with Amazonian ontologies: Human non-human divisions in the resistance of the Kukama-Kukamiria people to the Amazonian Waterway project

This thesis focuses on the nature-culture dimension in the Amazonian territory as an ontological question. It examines how international law operates in the face of Amazonian Indigenous ontological diversity regarding the human-non-human divide. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to existing explanations of why international law's responses to Indigenous resistance end up contributing to the elimination of Indigenous worldviews and dashing the hopes of those who resist in the Global South. On this basis, the research sets out to analyse the dynamics of the operations of international law in the Amazonian context through the case of the Kukama-Kukamiria people’s resistance to protect the Marañón River against the Amazonian Waterway, an infrastructure project in Peru. In analytical terms, the study employs an interdisciplinary approach, theoretically informed by Amazonian studies and critical approaches to international law. In terms of the empirical component, a case study method is used, based on qualitative analysis of documentary and visual information, as well as semi-structured in-depth interviews. The research reveals that, in the Amazonian context, internal forms of oppression through international law involve the hitherto-unnoticed reproduction of assumptions about how divisions are made between the human and the non-human, or more generally, between nature and culture. These are assumptions taken for granted by modern Western thinking, not necessarily shared by Amazonian societies. The thesis looks at this subtle operation and problematises it to understand the struggles and dilemmas of Indigenous people's resistance. The study reveals, through the case study, how international law is implicated in reproducing premises about the human-non-human that, while acting inadvertently, operate against the grain of Indigenous resistance. In doing so, it contributes to make visible and destabilise the conditions of possibility of the injustices in which international law is implicated in the Amazon, as a necessary step towards overcoming them.