Rethinking Territory: Social Justice and Neoliberalism in Latin America’s Territorial Turn

The “territorial turn” in Latin America describes the trend towards state recognition of community property rights. This partial recognition of indigenous peoples’ and Afro-descendants’ demands for territory has become a focal point for expanding neoliberal approaches to governance through the extension of new property rights regimes. This partial recognition of social movements’ demands has resulted in widespread efforts to rethink territory by social movements and scholars alike in order to better understand the conceptual work that the term does, its historical constitution, and its relevance to struggles for social justice. Those debates provide a grounded critique of territory, drawing attention to the calculative techniques used to bring it into being and their role in marginalizing other understandings of space and rights with far-reaching implications for processes of subject formation. This review uses those debates to argue for a reconsideration of territory as process, highlighting the ways in which governing works through the term and how it constrains approaches to social justice.