UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

The right to be, to feel and to exist: Indigenous lawyers and strategic litigation over Indigenous territories in Guatemala

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.1080/13642987.2023.2279165

Authors

Lieselotte Viaene · María Ximena González-Serrano

Reported year

2023

Reported language

en

Source type

article

First detected

2026-11-09T19:14:25.150493+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:14:25.150493+00:00

Last HTTP verification

Not checked

Institutions reported by the source

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Documentary abstract — original language

Indigenous communities around the globe increasingly resort to courts to seek protection for their individual and collective rights. Not only has the use of strategic litigation by Indigenous peoples to defend their human rights been underexplored but the role of Indigenous lawyers and experts is also a blind spot. Drawing on interdisciplinary, qualitative and collaborative research with Indigenous lawyers, experts and legal activists who are involved in the legal defence of the rights of Indigenous peoples in Guatemala, we foreground a complex legal ethnographic landscape regarding their intergenerational legal-political battle in a society facing transition from recent mass violence and the imposition of extractive economies. This article explores how their Indigenous lawyering is rooted in their Indigenous being and embedded in Indigenous water and land ontologies. We demonstrate how these Indigenous litigators are advancing through counter-hegemonic legal practice that goes beyond dominant Euro-Western and colonial legal positivistic assumptions about human-water-life relationships embedded in a racialised neoliberal legal structure. We argue that in contrast to human rights activist lawyers, they are occupying and exercising a differentiated role, through their positionality and their non-conventional practices, as transformative connectors of worlds before the courts or political ontological knowledge brokers, without falling into romanticism.

Identifiers

OPENALEX

W4388574489

DOI

10.1080/13642987.2023.2279165

Documentary context

Documentary family

Scholarship

Source-reported types

article

Jurisdictions studied — explicit sources

GT

Natural entities mentioned

Landscape · Territory

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2 · Record 3

• Document · http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2023.2279165
• DOI · https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2023.2279165
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W4388574489

Documented bibliographic relations

Source-declared references and links; they do not establish legal support or UGLC qualification. Up to 20 outgoing references are displayed.

3 incoming references within the detected corpus

Documentary status

Relevance pending

Library

This identity is not yet included in the Legal Library.