Article

Progress in Human Geography

1–25
Decolonising territory: ª The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132518777623
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knowledges and grassroots
strategies

Sam Halvorsen
Queen Mary University of London, UK

Abstract
Territory has been increasingly interrogated within Anglophone human geography, yet it has been little
examined beyond the context of the modern, Eurocentric state. Developing an open definition of territory,
the appropriation of space in pursuit of political projects, this paper opens epistemological dialogue with
diverse Latin America strategies to decolonise territory in thought and practice, oriented around the themes
of land, terrain and the state. In so doing it aims to contribute to the dismantling and reversing of colonial
hierarchies that are both reproduced through Anglophone scholarship and sustained through dominant
imaginations and practices of territory.

Keywords
decolonial, land, Latin America, state, terrain, territory

I Introduction territory in Western political thought and prac-

Territory has been increasingly interrogated
within Anglophone human geography: from cri-
tiques of assumptions of territory as a fixed,
sovereign ‘container’ (Agnew, 1994) and
acknowledgments of multi-scalar processes of
(re)territorialisation (Brenner, 1999) to recent
work highlighting the networked and relational
production of territory (Painter, 2010). Stuart
Elden’s (2013: 322) genealogy of territory
marks a milestone in understanding how the
modern notion of ‘a bounded space under the
control of a group of people, usually a state’
(Elden, 2013: 322) came to exist through ‘polit-
ical technologies’ for ‘measuring land and con-
trolling terrain’ (p. 323). Elden’s (2013: 15)
work is enormously helpful for emphasising the
historical and geographical specificity of
tice, acknowledging that ‘[o]ther traditions
would have very different histories, geogra-
phies, and conceptual lineages’. Only very
recently, however, have Anglophone geogra-
phers begun to examine territory beyond the
modern, Eurocentric tradition (Del Biaggio,
2015; Ince, 2012; Ince and De la Torre, 2016;
Routledge, 2015). In particular, Latin America
is starting to receive attention (Bryan, 2012;
Clare et al., 2017; Reyes and Kaufman, 2011;
Sandoval et al., 2016; Schwarz and Streule,
2017), a region where territory has been centre
Corresponding author:
Sam Halvorsen, School of Geography, Queen Mary
University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK.
Email: s.halvorsen@qmul.ac.uk
2 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
stage of political thought and practice in recent
decades.1 Building on these efforts, this paper
rethinks Anglophone scholarship through dialo-
gues with diverse Latin American attempts to
resist, rework and ‘reinvent’ (Porto-Gonçalves,
2012) the modern, colonial idea of territory.
I understand ‘decolonising’ as an attempt to
create what Bonaventura de Sousa Santos
(2014: 190) terms the ‘ecology of knowledges’:
intercultural epistemological dialogue that
‘challenges universal and abstract hierarchies
and the powers that, through them, have been
naturalized by history’. On the one hand, this is
an intellectual task of exposing the limits to
territory as a modern, Anglophone concept and
incorporating marginalised knowledges pro-
duced in other languages and cultures (Jazeel,
2016; Radcliffe, 2017). This does not involve
replacing the Anglophone tradition with alter-
native epistemologies – to do so is itself a form
of coloniality (Mignolo, 2000) – but examining
the co-existence of multiple ideas and practices
of territory structured by violent, colonial power
relations that create epistemological hierarchies
(Santos, 2014). On the other hand, this is a prac-
tical task of exposing and reversing the colonial
hierarchies that shape practices of knowledge
production (Smith, 1999; Tuck and Yang,
2012): from AngloAmerican hegemony (Aal-
bers and Rossi, 2009) and the ‘extraction’ of
southern knowledges (Grosfoguel, 2015) to
everyday, racialised forms of academic oppres-
sion (Noxolo, 2017a; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010,
2012), particularly relevant to me as a white,
male, British scholar. Opening dialogues with
the practical-intellectual experiences of Latin
America – or Abya Ayala, as it was commonly
known before Latin America’s ‘invention’
some 500 years ago (Mignolo, 2005) – is only
a first step, and this paper demands further
ethico-political reflections on decolonising dis-
ciplinary geography (Noxolo, 2017b; Radcliffe,
2017).
The paper starts with an overview of progress
in Anglophone work on territory, highlighting
key insights while noting their implicit con-
straints within modern, colonial conceptualisa-
tions. Building on Latin American scholarship,
it then develops an open definition of territory –
the appropriation of space in pursuit of political
projects – in which multiple (from bottom-up
grassroots to top-down state) political strategies
exist as overlapping and entangled. The remain-
der examines Latin American struggles over ter-
ritory via three themes: terrain, land and the
state. These are chosen both to reflect key deco-
lonial strategies of territorial struggles and as a
means of opening dialogue with the Anglo-
phone concept of territory as outlined by Elden
(2010). I argue that terrain involves more than
political-strategic relations of state sovereignty,
that land contains social relations and values
that exceed modern private property and
exchange value and that the state is itself con-
stituted of grassroots struggles to (re)appropri-
ate territory from below. The conclusion
reflects on some implications for Anglophone
geographical scholarship.
II Territory in Anglophone
geography
Territory has come to be defined as ‘a bounded
space under the control of a group of people,
usually a state’ (Elden, 2013: 322), and recent
years have seen several attempts by Anglo-
phone geographers to deepen our understanding
of the concept. Textbooks on territory provide
helpful overviews that draw out key debates
such as the tension between fixity and motion
in producing territory (Cox, 2002) or the ques-
tion of scale and the challenge of globalisation
for territory (Storey, 2012). Delaney’s over-
views (2005, 2009) provide some of the most
expansive readings of territory in Anglophone
literature, relating it to the concept of territori-
ality that has previously received significant
attention (Soja, 1971; Sack, 1986), allowing
him to incorporate grassroots territorial prac-
tices (e.g. squatters). Nevertheless, there
Halvorsen
remains a constraint implicit to most Anglo-
phone readings of territory that ties it to the
top-down control and regulation of space by
dominant forms related to the modern, colonial
state, as seen in contemporary Anglophone
developments.
John Agnew’s (1994) warning against the
‘territorial trap’ – in which territory is seen as
an ahistorical and fixed unit of sovereign space,
with a clearly demarcated inside/outside and as
providing a ‘container’ for society – is a land-
mark text in contemporary Anglophone scholar-
ship on territory. Agnew (1994: 77) opened up
territory to the ‘broader social and economic
structures’ in which it is produced, such as cap-
ital mobility or information technology, and
rendered territory a historically and geographi-
cally contingent process, a crucial starting point
for decolonial analysis. Yet there is little inter-
rogation of the modern concept of territory
itself, implicitly understood as ‘the exercise of
power’ by states, the production of ‘national
political identities’ and other (inevitably
flawed) attempts to bound political and eco-
nomic life. Elsewhere he is explicit about the
‘spatial ontology’ at play (Agnew and Cor-
bridge, 1995: 13–15), critically engaging with
the Eurocentric narrative of the ‘modern system
of territorial states’. Beyond critique, however,
there is no attempt to open up territory to other
epistemological starting points.
Interest in processes of globalisation
and state restructuring during the 1990s led
to research on the changing geography of terri-
tory (Paasi, 1996; Swyngedouw, 2004). Neil
Brenner (1999: 50) argued that territory be
understood as a multi-scalar process of territor-
ialisation, ‘historically specific, contradictory
and conflictual’. Building on Agnew (and also
Taylor, 1994), Brenner (1999: 50) criticises
‘state-centric epistemologies’, and the methodo-
logical constraints that go with them, arguing that
contemporary forms of territory be rethought via
processes of de/re-territorialisation. This is help-
ful for understanding territory as constantly
3
reconfigured through practices operating at mul-
tiple scales (e.g. industrial districts, transnational
economic blocs). Again, there is little interro-
gation of the epistemological basis of territory
and it is implicitly understood as a tendency
(contradictory and incomplete, but neverthe-
less striving) towards the domination by
what Lefebvre (1991) terms ‘abstract space’,
a strategy of ‘parcelization, centralization,
enclosure and encaging’ (Brenner, 1999: 49).
Understanding strategies of abstract space is a
necessary task, yet this is only one vantage
point – rooted in modern/colonial practices of
occupation and control – from which territory
is understood and practised.
There have been three major Anglophone
interventions since the 1990s that have
expanded spatial understandings of territory.
First, in light of the relational turn in human
geography – a widespread awareness that
extra-local relations, flows and topologies are
key to how seemingly fixed and bounded forms
are produced (see Massey, 2005) – there has
been a concerted effort to ‘de-territorialise’ the
concept of territory. Joe Painter (2006a, 2006b,
2010) provided key interventions that reject
implicit oppositions between territorial and net-
worked thinking, arguing that territory can be
theorised as ‘an effect of networks’ (Painter,
2006a: 28). Painter (2010: 1103) combines
nuanced conceptual and empirical material to
critique reductionist definitions of territory as
‘delimited, contiguous and coherent political
spaces’. Territory is a relational practice that
stretches well beyond the perceived material
forms that immediately strike the eye (see also
Dell’Agnese, 2013; Beaumont and Nicholls,
2007; Kärrholm, 2007; McCann and Ward,
2010), an argument that takes forward work
on the relational and flexible nature of bound-
aries and borders (Paasi, 1996, 2009; Novak,
2011). Despite his nuanced rethinking of terri-
tory as networked, which includes a helpful dis-
cussion of overlapping and competing uses in
Francophone geography, Painter (2010)
4 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
remains confined to a modern, Eurocentric con-
ceptualisation of territory. His discussion begins
and ends with a discussion of territory as a strat-
egy of state spatiality (albeit provisional and
incomplete), and the main case study used is
English administrative regions, closely tied to
the politics of the UK government.
Second, John Allen (2003, 2009, 2016) has
interrogated the relationships between geogra-
phy and power. Having meticulously examined
the multiple modalities of power, Allen (2003)
pushes geographers to move beyond ‘one
dimensional’ territorial forms of power, forms
of domination based on ‘a geometric landscape
in which power is extended over fixed distances
with more or less uncomplicated reach over a
given territory or area’ (Allen, 2009: 199).
Drawing on ideas of topology, Allen (2016)
urges a consideration of the open and ambigu-
ous functionings and outcomes of power.
Allen’s generous account of the multiple mod-
alities through which power and space intersect
provides much scope for an open, decolonial
revisiting of territorial power (beyond domina-
tion, authority and power-over). Nevertheless,
rather than interrogating territorial power, Allen
(2016: 155) argues that it is a ‘spatial frame’ that
remains part of a geometric modality of power,
implicitly tied to spatialities of ‘authority’ and
‘leverage’ which are of limited use in ‘today’s
spatially ambiguous world’. Despite critical
insights into the geography of power, territory
is left in a similar ‘state’ to previous work.
Finally, Stuart Elden (2013) has provided the
most substantial intervention with his impres-
sive conceptual genealogy of territory. Through
a close reading of Western political texts, Elden
(2013) demonstrates how territory’s modern
definition was made possible in the context of
historically and geographically specific politi-
cal technologies, in particular techniques of
‘measuring land’ (e.g. cartography) and ‘con-
trolling terrain’ (e.g. legality), clearly establish-
ing itself in European thought by around the
16th to 17th century. Territory is a particular
form of ‘spatial ordering’ (Elden, 2013: 328)
made possible once space was technically and
ontologically graspable as something that could
be controlled and calculated (see also Cramp-
ton, 2010; Elden, 2007). Elden (2013) demon-
strates how this hierarchical ordering of space
became dominant and dominating in the West,
and was deepened and developed through prac-
tices of colonialism (see Kearns, 2017). Elden’s
(2013) text is a powerful demonstration of the
need for historically and geographically specific
analyses of how territory (indeed any concept)
comes to be. The breadth and depth of Elden’s
achievement cannot be overstated, covering
political thought from the ancient Greeks to the
17th century, alongside parallel work on the
contemporary war on terror (Elden, 2009).
Nevertheless, the strength of Elden’s work is
also its limitation. By carefully tracing how the
modern concept of territory came to be, Elden
delimits and, in a sense, ‘territorialises’ the con-
cept in a very particular set of ideas and prac-
tices tied up with the birth of sovereignty and
the modern state. This brackets off alternative
understandings and practices of territory as, by
definition, non-territorial. Elden (2013: 15) is
explicit about his focus on ‘Western political
thought’, and it is unfair to criticise his work for
lacking content. Yet the explicit tracing of the
modern, Western concept of territory has impli-
cations (see Minca et al., 2015; Sultana, 2014)
tending to marginalise or exclude the overlap-
ping and entangled existence of alternative
ideas and practices of territory. A greater sensi-
bility to how the modern political technologies
of controlling terrain and measuring land have
been resisted, appropriated and (re)defined by
political actors from below in different histori-
cal and geographical contexts provides reason
for taking Elden’s impressive project forward.
Doing so requires starting from a more open
definition of territory that acknowledges the
limits to the Anglophone concept and takes seri-
ously diverse epistemologies grounded in their
historical-geographical context.
Halvorsen
III Decolonising territory: Towards ‘ecology of knowledges’: a pragmatic attempt
an ecology of knowledges to create ‘decolonial contact zones’ that over-
Territory – as idea and practice – has been
(re)produced in multiple contexts beyond the
narrow confines of the modern, Western state.
In particular, and the focus of this paper, it has
been radically ‘reinvented’ by contemporary
social movements in Latin America that have
explicitly mobilised territory in tension with the
(post)colonial state (Porto Gonçalves, 2012).
Such alternative understandings of territory
have been marginalised within Anglophone
geography, producing an ‘epistemology of
absences’ (Santos, 2014) around territory. On
the one hand, these absences reflect ongoing
universalising tendencies in Anglophone geo-
graphy that have been criticised from various
perspectives including: gender (Hyndman,
2001, 2004; Koopman, 2011; Rose, 1997), race
(McKittrick, 2011; McKittrick and Woods,
2007) and sexuality (Di Pietro, 2016). Recent
attempts to ‘decolonise geography’ and rethink
knowledges from marginalised areas and lan-
guages (Jazeel, 2016; Noxolo, 2017a; Radcliffe,
2017; Robinson, 2016) speak to core concerns
of this paper. On the other hand, however, these
absences may be precisely explained by an
insistence on the specificity (and thus non-uni-
versality) of territory as a concept rooted in
Western political thought (Elden, 2013). The
implication is that non-Western/state-centric
readings of territory refer to a different concept,
as Elden suggests (2010: 811). While I agree
that contrasting uses of territory are likely based
on quite different genealogies – opening up
exciting research projects beyond the scope of
this paper – I argue that they can be brought
together with dominant Anglophone approaches
from a decolonial perspective.
I understand decolonising territory as open-
ing up territory to multiple overlapping and
entangled practices and ideas that exist within
any historical and geographical context, striving
towards what Santos (2014: 354) terms an
5
come the ‘abyssal thinking’ inherent to modern,
Western thought. As a starting point I propose an
open definition of territory as the appropriation
of space in pursuit of political projects. This def-
inition is common within Latin American litera-
tures (e.g. Giménez, 1999; Manzanal, 2007; Reis,
2005; Sandoval et al., 2016; Schneider and Tar-
taruga, 2006; Souza, 1995) where it is frequently
traced to Swiss geographer Claude Raffestin’s
notion of territory developed in his Pour une ge´o-
graphie du pouvoir (1980), yet to be translated
into English, which draws on Lefebvre’s under-
standing of the social production of space and
Foucault’s work on power (see Klauser, 2012;
Raffestin, 2012). This definition overlaps with
Sack’s (1986) notion of territoriality, although it
goes further in emphasising the plurality of power
relations and political projects (both emancipa-
tory and dominating) through which territory is
produced. Territory takes on multiple forms
across different scales and involves different
political projects: both state-centred strategies to
exercise control and domination and bottom-up
attempts to appropriate space in less hierarchal
forms of political organisation. Although domi-
nant, state-based territories are frequently the
most visible (due to their hegemony in spaces
of representation), there are nevertheless multiple
‘protagonists’ of territory (Porto-Gonçalves,
2009), producing what I term overlapping and
entangled territories. This open reading of
territory – overlapping and entangled political
appropriations of space – allows contrasting
understandings of territory to be reconciled with-
out negating the hierarchal and violent relations
between different usages.
First, space is not appropriated as an empty,
ahistorical form in the pursuit of political proj-
ects: it is layered over already constituted forms
of socio-spatial appropriations in which the
modern state and capitalist relations of produc-
tion are hegemonic (Harvey, 2006; Lefebvre,
2001; Soja, 1996). A weakness of Raffestin’s
6 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
(1980: 173) definition is his argument that
‘space is the prior term to territory’, thus imply-
ing a monolithic plane onto which power rela-
tions are projected (Souza, 1995). Territory is
always a (re)appropriation of what Milton San-
tos (2005) terms ‘territorial configurations’: his-
torically existing forms, practices, institutions,
memories, etc., that are inscribed in space. The
production of territory always overlaps with
other appropriations (across multiple scales or
through diverse networks) that co-exist at any
one time, creating what Haesbaert (2004) terms
‘multi-territoriality’. Crucially, attempts to
appropriate space inevitably engage with domi-
nant ideas and practices of territory tied to the
birth of the modern state (Elden, 2013), a pro-
cess that, in its colonial context, is based on
racial classification (Mignolo, 1995; Quijano,
2000) and associated hierarchies of gender and
class (Asher, 2013; Lander, 2000; Lugones,
2010; Wainwright, 2008)
Second, territory is entangled across different
political projects in the course of strategies to
appropriate and occupy space within a (post)co-
lonial context. Historically, these strategies are
responses to violent/racial processes of dispos-
session and expulsion against which fragmented
and hybrid territories have been produced as a
means of survival, such as the quilombos of
African fugitive slaves in Brazil or the many
indigenous communities forced from their land
into cities. Recently, the modern concept of ter-
ritory has been explicitly redefined and ‘rein-
vented’ from below (Porto Gonçalves, 2012),
for example through cartographic-legal strate-
gies for claiming property rights to ancestral
lands by indigenous and afro-descendent social
movements (Bryan, 2012). As I examine, grass-
roots decolonial strategies are often explicitly
entangled with dominant practices and discourses
of territory in the course of struggles (cf. Moore,
2005). At the same time, however, the entangle-
ment of territory refers to the co-existence
of domination and resistance (Sharp et al.,
2000) within any territory. From a decolonial
perspective, this directs attention to the numerous
internal hierarchies (across race, gender, class,
etc.) that are reproduced within subaltern strate-
gies, sometimes referred to as ‘internal colonial-
ism’ (Mignolo, 2000; Espinosa-Miñoso et al.,
2014; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012).
Territory is produced as overlapping and
entangled in the process of appropriating space
for political projects, and it is this multiplicity
that highlights the limits of dominant Anglo-
phone conceptualisations. Territory is a hybrid
notion, caught between an incomplete colonial
project, represented in the modern state and its
political technologies (Elden, 2010), and
multiple strategies to appropriate space in
pursuit of different political projects, what
Santos (1994) terms ‘used territory’. While
territoriality – a ‘powerful geographic strategy’
that ‘asserts control over a geographic area’
(Sack, 1986: 5) – may appear as an ahistorical
human characteristic (cf. Soja, 1971), territory
takes on specific geographical and historical
meanings that cannot be isolated from, nor
reduced to, the birth of the modern state. Rather
than rejecting territory’s modern, Eurocentric
genealogy, the task is to acknowledge the
incompleteness of all knowledges and the need
for greater epistemological dialogues (Santos,
2014). In opening dialogues between Anglo-
phone territory and Latin American territorios,
language and ‘intercultural translation’ (Santos,
2014) become concerns. It has been noted that
contemporary uses of territory in Romance lan-
guages are more expansive than Anglophone
definitions, incorporating a broader social com-
ponent, such that territorio may sometimes be
better translated as ‘place’ (Del Biaggio, 2015;
Painter, 2010). I argue that maintaining a focus
on territory (in English) is helpful, first, in ref-
erence to the definition used here that distin-
guishes itself from place by focusing on the
political projects/strategies that appropriate
space and, second, in acknowledgement of
grassroots strategies to contest the modern
notion of territory precisely by expanding and
Halvorsen
(re)inventing its definition in the course of
struggle (Porto-Gonçalves, 2012).
Decolonising territory via epistemological
dialogues demands a pragmatic approach that
exposes and politicises the hierarchies between
different sites of knowledge production with the
aim of furthering social (e.g. racial, gendered,
class) justice (Santos, 2014). Decolonising terri-
tory from within disciplinary geography cannot,
and should not, be abstracted from the modern/
colonial institutional structures (e.g. journals,
universities, conferences) through which knowl-
edges are produced (Aalbers and Rossi, 2009;
Paasi, 2015; Robinson, 2003). This raises diffi-
cult questions over how academics relate to
decolonial struggles in practice (Esson et al.,
2017; Jazeel, 2016; Noxolo, 2017a, 2017b),
reflecting on our positionalities in the context
of colonial hierarchies (Tolia-Kelly, 2017; Tuck
and Yang, 2012). This article is inevitably con-
tradictory, trapped within colonial epistemologi-
cal practices of extraction and citation
(Gosfoguel, 2016; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010,
2012) while also seeking to create space for epis-
temological dialogue with decolonial ambitions.
The writing process has been accompanied by
ongoing reflection on the ethico-political conse-
quences of my research and the need to consider
its value for different publics, an issue I am cur-
rently elaborating on elsewhere. Acknowledging
the limits of this paper, I have nevertheless made
an effort to decentre the colonial-academic voice
(extracting, abstracting and citing) and orientate
the remaining discussion from the vantage point
of multiple Latin American protagonists who
have struggled to reinvent territory, pointing the
reader to relevant academic texts and debates that
provide context.
IV (Re)inventing territory from
below: Dialogues with Latin
America
Territory has been contested throughout Latin
America/Abya Ayala’s (post)colonial history.
7
Over the last five hundred years the majority
of original peoples saw their territories occupied
and fragmented (by modern borders), being vio-
lently forced to assimilate within the modern
state, while African slaves were simultaneously
uprooted from their homelands and forced into
submission within the colonial state. Colonial
territories were imposed on indigenous and
afro-descendent peoples through racialised
classifications founded on principles such as
‘purity of blood’ and ‘rights of the people’
(Mignolo, 2000). From the outset Western
claims to colonial territory had been met with
resistance and alternative claims to space, such
as the Mapuche rebellions in the 15th and 16th
centuries that forced the Spanish crown to
recognise their autonomous territorial govern-
ance (Llancaqueo, 2006), or the quilombos of
escaped slaves in Brazil (Anjos, 2009). It is
since the 1970s/’80s, however, that the modern
concept of territorio has been widely and expli-
citly re-invented by social movements across
the region (Porto-Gonçalves, 2012). Mobilisa-
tions such as the 1990 ‘March for Dignity and
Territory’ in Bolivia, the 1992 march for ‘Ter-
ritory and a Plurinational State’ in Ecuador and
the ‘rebel territories’ occupied by the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation in 1994 mark his-
torical turning points in grassroots struggles
over territory. Although each struggle has its
own, unique territorial genealogy to be written,2
territory has become a central axis – in dis-
course and practice – of many Latin American
social movements in recent decades (Zibechi,
2012).
This section engages with contemporary
struggles to reinvent territory beyond its narrow
colonial/modern usage in both rural and urban
contexts and is divided into three themes – ter-
rain, land and the state – for two reasons. First,
they represent core (inter-related) strategies of
Latin American social movements that have
mobilised territory in discourse and practice.
Second, they represent central pillars of the
Anglophone concept of territory. Territory,
8 Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
understood as the spatial extent of the state’s
sovereign power (Brenner and Elden, 2009;
Elden, 2009), historically emerged as a political
technology that ‘comprises techniques for mea-
suring land and controlling terrain’ (Elden,
2010: 811). Land, a political-economic relation
centred on private property (Blomley, 2017),
and terrain, a political-strategic relation rooted
in the military and geology alongside historical
associations with fear and violence (Elden,
2009), are essential components of territory in
the form of the modern state (Elden, 2013). Yet
territory is much more than political-economic
and political-strategic relations tied to the
sovereignty of the modern state.
1. Terrain
Struggles over territory do not only involve stra-
tegic/military relations aiming to violently con-
trol terrain, they also involve bottom-up
struggles seeking autonomy to self-govern
based on less hierarchical power relations – a
key element to Latin American understandings
of territory (see Souza, 1995). For example,
since the 16th century fugitive African slaves
in Brazil have appropriated rural land, known
as quilombos, in the pursuit of autonomy to live
as free people, hidden from the colonial state,
and subsequently reproduce their black identi-
ties and ways of life in and through territory
(Lira and Neto, 2016; Malcher, 1999). Over
time, quilombos overlapped with agrarian
practices and organisations and eventually
(long after the abolition of slavery) turned to
strategies of greater visibility and cultural rec-
ognition of black communities’ right to territory
(Kilinger and Alonso, 2004). Recently, the
modern concept of territory has been adopted
by afro-descendent movements in Brazil to
provide legal recognition of quilombo commu-
nities, solidified in the historic convention on
‘indigenous and tribal peoples’ of 1989. More-
over, across Latin America territorial autonomy
has become a central goal of indigenous and
afro-descendent movements struggling for
self-determination based on longstanding his-
torical claims to the land (Bryan, 2012; Escár-
zaga et al., 2014; González, 2015). Following
Porto-Gonçalves (2016), these territorial strug-
gles are seeking autonomy both with and from
the state, leading to dilemmas.
On the one hand, territorial autonomy has
been constructed alongside and with(in) the
state’s sovereign claims over space, via legal
recognition of indigenous and afro-descendent
rights to self-determination, particularly via
land tilting and constitutional reforms (Bryan,
2012; González, 2015; Offen, 2003), producing
‘overlapping territorialities’ (Agnew and Oslen-
der, 2013). While this has created new opportu-
nities for non-state territorial claims, it has come
across limits. The reliance on legal (constitu-
tional rights) and cartographic (mapping land
titles) territorial practices led to an entangle-
ment with modern/colonial ideas of territory
(Wainwright and Bryan, 2009), despite drawing
on alternative knowledges (e.g. collective gov-
ernance and communal land rights). Moreover,
claims to territorial autonomy have drawn on
opportunities presented by neoliberal restruc-
turing in the 1990s. In much of Central America,
for example, World Bank lobbying led to land
reform (selling off to transnational, private
interests) in parallel with a multi-cultural turn
to indigenous and afro-descendent rights (Lar-
son et al., 2016), both justified under a modern
territorial logic of parcelisation and privatisa-
tion. This led territorial autonomy in many Cen-
tral American states (and elsewhere) to become
entangled with the ‘very structures of domi-
nance that these communities intend to resist’
(Hale, 2011: 7). This ‘territorial turn’ in indi-
genous and afro-descendent claims to auton-
omy, based on self-governance and collective
rights, has thus been sandwiched between the
hegemonic political technologies of the state
and neoliberal reform based on private property
(Bryan, 2012). Moreover, as Ulloa (2011, 2012)
highlights with Colombian indigenous
Halvorsen
movements, building territorial autonomy often
requires negotiating other overlapping terri-
tories, including drug traffickers, paramilitaries,
guerrilla organisations and international NGOs,
requiring certain internalisation of competing
understandings of territory (see Ballvé, 2012;
Courtheyn, 2017).
On the other hand, territorial autonomy has
been constructed in direct resistance to the mod-
ern idea of territory. The most prominent exam-
ple is the Zapatistas who, following failed
attempts at reaching a government agreement
in the San Andrés accords, rejected the sover-
eignty of the Mexican state altogether (Reyes
and Kaufman, 2011). The Zapatistas’ territorial
autonomy can be understood as a negation of
strategies of ‘taking power’ (Holloway, 2002)
and an attempt to build non-hierarchal, horizon-
tal power relations based on potencia (or
power-to) (Clare et al., 2017; Dinerstein,
2015; Holloway and Peláez, 1998), rooted in
everyday, embodied practices such as food pro-
duction (Naylor, 2017). Despite the resistance
of many Zapatistas to any form of sovereignty,
the state is present within rebel territories, most
clearly in the form of military checkpoints, but
also through everyday practices such as school
funding or legal representation, leading to
tensions within the diverse communities of
Chiapas (Barmeyer, 2008; Mora, 2015). Most
recently, it is notable that they have put forward
a candidate, Marı́a de Jesús Patricia, for
presidential elections in 2018. The autonomous
territories of non-state actors provide a counter-
point to the state’s sovereign power but must be
understood through their relational strategies in
the context of ongoing hegemony of modern,
colonial understandings of territory. Contempo-
rary urban struggles provide further insights.
The Latin American city has become a cen-
tral terrain of struggle for diverse movements
and communities seeking the freedom to appro-
priate space in the context of informal state
presence combined with neo-colonial practices
of urban ‘accumulation by dispossession’
9
(Harvey, 2012; Lees et al., 2015; Souza,
2015a). Greater Buenos Aires exemplifies the
‘territorial inscription’ (Merklen, 2005) of pop-
ular classes who appropriated urban space as a
means of survival and political organisation. In
the wake of post-1970s deindustrialisation,
which saw the decline of factories and trade
unions and the parallel weakening of political
parties during the military dictatorship
(Levitsky, 2003), working class barrios (neigh-
bourhoods), which in some cases grew from
asentamientos (land occupations), became key
sites for constructing political identity and orga-
nisation (Grimson et al., 2009; Merklen, 2005;
Svampa and Pereyra, 2003; Tobı́o, 2012).
During the 1990s unemployed workers
re-positioned the piquete (picket) tactic away
from the factory towards the blocking of roads
as a form of strike, while simultaneously appro-
priating urban space through ‘trabajo territor-
ial’ (territorial work) (Delamata, 2004, 2005;
Manzano, 2007; Mazzeo, 2014; Menazzi,
2008; Svampa and Pereyra, 2003; Torres,
2011). Trabajo territorial provided a means of
re-defining the value of post-industrial labour
away from the factory and towards the social
value of the barrio, the ‘new factory’ (Stratta
and Barrera, 2009), and a means of living dig-
nified and productive lives (Dinerstein, 2014:
128). Moreover, trabajo territorial allowed the
production of ‘autonomous and horizontal’
poder popular (popular power) (MTD Almir-
ante Brown, 2002; Mazzeo et al., 2007) through
everyday practices such as popular kitchens,
health centres, art activities and solidarity
economies (Chatterton, 2005; North and Huber,
2004; Sitrin, 2012). These examples demon-
strate attempts to redefine territory around
non-hierarchal, anti-statist and anti-capitalist
ways of living (Dinerstein, 2015). Nevertheless,
as I explore below, many of these autonomous
urban territories became entangled with state-
based strategies to control terrain through
clientelist practices and Argentina’s populist
Kirchner governments.
10
Territory involves more than political-
strategic relations of domination: it is produced
through strategies for constructing autonomy
with and from modern territory, often striving
towards horizontal power relations and collec-
tive forms of governance. Struggles over the
terrain of territory, for the political freedom to
appropriate space, cannot be separated from
struggles over the right to occupy and produce
land, a key focus of Latin American social
movements.
2 Land
Land has been central to Latin American strug-
gles, taking on particular weight within rural,
campesino movements in the second half of the
20th century that mobilised both through agrar-
ian reforms and, frustrated with institutional
attempts to redistribute land ownership, through
direct action land occupations (Fernandes and
Pereira, 2016; Rosset, 2013; Veltmeyer, 2005).
The Brazilian Movimento Dos Trabalhadores
Rurais Sem Terra (Movement of Rural Landless
Workers/MST) is a key example of the latter.
Beginning as a strategy of survival for landless
families, the MST used land occupation as a
means of generating, on the one hand, alterna-
tive socio-economic relations, developed
through grassroots practices of ‘political socia-
lization’ (Fernandes, 2000), pedagogy (Meek,
2015) and economic co-production (Pahnke,
2017) and, on the other hand, strategies of nego-
tiation and institution building, which devel-
oped most substantially under the PT
(Workers’ Party) government (Fernandes,
2006; Wolford, 2004, 2010). Land occupations
materialise critiques of the political-economic
relations associated with modern private prop-
erty (cf. Blomley, 2017; Elden, 2013), e.g. the
latifundio system, and represent alternative
ways of relating to the land, based on collective
ownership and governance (Giarracca et al.,
2006; Routledge, 2015). While land struggles
have achieved collective land rights for
Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
indigenous and afro-descendent communities,
they have been entangled with modern/colonial
territorial logics, most noticeably through the
dependence on legal-technical practices of mea-
suring and controlling land that have reinforced
the presence of the state (as a legal entity) and
capital, by parcelling-up and selling-off land
(Bryan, 2012; Wainwright and Bryan, 2009).
Moreover, gender has provided a key barrier
to accessing land rights (Deere and León,
2001; Sesia and Sarmiento, 2008). In indigen-
ous land struggles in Ecuador, for example,
Radcliffe (2014: 866) notes a ‘racialised gender
bias’ with women, particularly of certain ethnic
communities, marginalised in the process of
land-titling, presenting barriers to territorial
struggles.
Nevertheless, land struggles challenge mod-
ern/Eurocentric epistemologies of territory
based on private property and concentrated land
rights and also their Cartesian rationality that
separates social and natural processes, reducing
land to its quantifiable and objective dimen-
sions. Many indigenous communities under-
stand and produce territory through diverse
‘socio-natural’ relations that draw together mul-
tiple ‘earth-beings’ (e.g. a mountain) with their
own agency (De la Cadena, 2015). At stake here
is making visible and allowing for the co-
existence of multiple worlds, a ‘pluriverse’
(De la Cadena, 2010), sometimes referred to
as the ‘political ontology’ of territory (Blaser,
2014; Escobar, 2016). The territory of black
communities along the Colombian Pacific, for
example, is shaped by multiple human and non-
human (e.g. mangrove) lives within a dynamic
‘aquatic space’ (Oslender, 2002, 2016) whose
tidal rhythms are deeply inter-twined with
social interactions and identity building (Satizá-
bal and Batterbury, 2018). The production of
territory in such contexts not only challenges
the fixity of Eurocentric assumptions of terri-
tory by emphasising fluidity/mobility (see
Steinberg, 2009) but seeks to mobilise territory
through the relations between different ways of
Halvorsen
knowing and being that acknowledge the inher-
ent limits to any particular understanding of ter-
ritory (Escobar, 2008, 2016; Porto Gonçalves,
2002; Ulloa, 2011). The shift in discourse from
land to territory in indigenous and other social
movements (see Porto Gonçalves, 2012) sug-
gests a strategy to mobilise territory’s ‘multi-
dimensionality’ (Fernandes, 2008) against
monolithic, modern understandings (Giarracca
and Teubal, 2013; Rosset, 2013). Yet opening
territory to multiple ways of living in/with land
is not inherently decolonial and requires careful
attention to the power relations between com-
peting and overlapping knowledges, as can be
seen in contemporary urban examples.
The occupation of land in Latin American
cities demonstrates overlapping and entangled
grassroots strategies, made particularly visible
in urban slums. The territories of Latin
American slums represent paradoxical and
hybrid sets of strategies that vary over space and
time (e.g. Clichevsky, 2003). From the perspec-
tive of urban planning, for example, cities such
as Buenos Aires demonstrate alternating cycles
of strategies of integration and expulsion with/
from ‘formal’ urban territory (Cravino, 2009; Di
Virgilio et al., 2014; Massidda, 2018). From a
grassroots perspective, the 1990s saw a shift in
many Latin American cities towards the mobi-
lisation for property titles by slum dwellers that,
paralleling the experiences of indigenous com-
munities, has tended to undermine collective
solidarity and relations in the land (Borrell,
2016; Varley, 2017). The slum thus represents
a hybrid and paradoxical territory (Varley,
2013) that presents challenges for decolonial
analysis, as the well-documented experiences
of Brazilian favelas suggest.
On the one hand, the favela reproduces and
sustains colonial territorial relations based on
socio-economic inequality (e.g. supplying
cheap labour) and political exclusion (e.g. lack
of welfare state or institutional representation)
(Barbosa and Silva, 2013; Muxica, 2011; Leite,
2008). Janice Perlman famously (1976)
11
denounced the ‘myth of marginality’ in Rio de
Janeiro’s favelas, arguing that the issue is not
lack of integration but the exploitative mode of
relating them to dominant political projects (e.g.
underpaid labour, clientelist relations, stigma-
tised cultures). At the same time the state has
violently imposed dominant territorial logics on
the favela, for example through practices of bor-
dering/walling that materially and symbolically
control the agency of favela dwellers (Burgos,
2005; Caldeira, 2017; Haesbaert, 2014), or the
militarisation of favelas in the context of ‘paci-
fying’ criminal/drug-trafficking organisations
(Leite, 2012), in turn creating territories of fear
(Souza, 2008).
On the other hand, however, favelas demon-
strate alternative ideas and practices of urban
territory. The shared, embodied experiences of
living in close proximity have provided numer-
ous opportunities for collective, grassroots proj-
ects (Barbosa and Silva, 2013). For example,
afro-descendant populations have (re)produced
the favela as a symbolic site of subaltern iden-
tity, through cultural practices such as rap, high-
lighting territorial/racial (in)justices and
affirming black political subjectivities and
non-oppressive social relations (Da Silva,
2009; Pérez-Wilke, 2014). These radical sub-
jectivities, often explicitly understood in refer-
ence to historic quilombos and ancestral lands in
Africa (Carril, 2006a, 2006b; Pérez-Wilke and
Marquez, 2013), symbolically resist and disrupt
the neo-colonial ‘whitening’ of urban space in
Brazil (Caldeira, 2006; Correa, 2017). More-
over, the formal political exclusion of favelados
has led to what Holston (2008, 2009) terms
‘insurgent citizenship’ based on innovative
forms of building institutional relations with the
state through grassroots organising. The favela
thus demonstrates potential for generating what
Souza (2015b) terms ‘dissident territories’:
insurgent experiments with alternative social,
economic and political relations. Although not
formally based in the favela, the sem teto
(homeless) movement demonstrates potential
12
in using urban occupations, particularly build-
ings, to make links between the struggles of
favelados and other urban social movements
while also experimenting with emancipatory
practices such as cooperative work relations
(Souza, 2015a, 2015b). Nevertheless, a key
demand of favelados in this and other move-
ments is greater inclusion in formal urban terri-
tory (Falcão and Falbo, 2016; Silva, 2008;
Souza, 2015a, 2015b). This raises questions
over the strategic role of the state in decolonial
strategies, something that has been central to
contemporary debates across Latin America
3 The state
Since the early 2000s there have been explicit
attempts to decolonise territory through elec-
toral victories and constitutional reform, most
prominently in Bolivia and Ecuador. Evo Mor-
ales’ election as the first indigenous president of
Bolivia in 2005 opened up a participatory pro-
cess (the ‘constituent assembly’) of re-writing
the constitution in which the ‘plurinational
state’ became a central pillar (Lizárraga, 2009;
Rivero, 2014). Bolivia, where indigenous peo-
ples are a demographic majority, had long been
ruled by a racial minority whose state gave little
recognition to the multiple territories of its orig-
inal inhabitants, producing a ‘motley’ (abigar-
rado) territorial formation (Tapia, 2002) with a
monoculture state (super)imposed on a multi-
national society: a relationship of domination
and disarticulation (Rivero, 2014). The new
constitution sought to break with the dominance
of colonial territory, making visible and giving
political agency to multiple territories within
the Bolivian state (Lizárraga and Rivero,
2014; Rivero, 2014), specifying indigenous
peoples’ rights to autonomous territorial gov-
ernance, including resource-use. A similar pro-
cess unfolded in Ecuador under President
Rafael Correa. As in Bolivia, the new (2008)
constitution not only made reference to the
‘plurinational state’ but also to notions of buen
Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
vivir/sumac kawsay (living well), which empha-
sise ‘coexistence, diversity, and harmony with
nature’ (Radcliffe, 2012; Varea and Zaragocin,
2017; Walsh, 2010).3 Although previous consti-
tutional reforms in Latin American states had
made some progress towards implementing
indigenous territorial autonomy (see González,
2015), Ecuador and Bolivia represent radical
attempts to incorporate non-state indigenous
understandings of territory within the state’s
legal-institutional framework.
Despite advances, the plurinational states of
Bolivia and Ecuador remain trapped within a
modern, colonial framework in multiple ways.
For example, both continue to exist within
colonially-imposed boundaries and are gov-
erned through modern electoral systems domi-
nated by political parties (Lizárraga, 2009).
Soon after Correa’s victory, key social move-
ments that had mobilised for his success turned
away from the government as indigenous lead-
ers struggled to have a say in local and national
governance (Radcliffe, 2012). A core critique of
these ‘post-neoliberal’ Andean governments
has been their economic model of raw material
extraction and exportation used to fund their
socially redistributive policies, part of a
regional trend towards the ‘commodity consen-
sus’ (Svampa, 2015). This has led to an ‘ecoter-
ritorial turn’ in social movements in response to
the ‘explosion of socioenvironmental conflicts’
generated in indigenous and rural communities
(Svampa, 2017: 80). A key example in Bolivia
was the TIPNIS conflict in which the govern-
ment’s proposal to construct a highway through
indigenous land was met by fierce opposition
and subsequent conflict, exposing real limits
to decolonising state-territorial governance,
resource sovereignty and, more broadly, modes
of development (Hirsch, 2017; Hope, 2014;
Laing, 2015). Anti-extractivist resistance,
which drew on understandings of territory based
on collective governance and society-nature
inter-relations, were deemed against national
interests and branded by vice-president Álvaro
Halvorsen
Garcı́a Linera as ‘colonial environmentalism’
(Svampa, 2017).
The Ecuadorian government’s decision to
exploit oil in the Yasunı́ Park also saw strong
grassroots resistance and highlighted limits to
state-decolonial strategies, including from a
gendered perspective. The Ecuadorian Colec-
tivo Miradas Crı́ticas (2014: 32) present a three-
fold feminist critique of extractivist politics in
Yasunı́. First, at a symbolic level, extractivism
‘penetrates territory through violence’ (p. 32),
ignoring the rich diversity of life in the Ecua-
dorian Amazon and relying upon military force
to control territory, violating constitutional indi-
genous territorial rights. Second, extractivism
creates a ‘patriarchalism of territory’ (p. 32) via
the employment of a predominantly male work-
force, reinforcing gendered exclusion from sal-
aried labour while masculinising space through
practices such as alcohol consumption and asso-
ciated sexual violence. Finally, extractivism
produces a ‘rupture in reproductive cycles of
life’ (p. 33), contaminating the water, land, and
air, leading to disease and illness in women-led
communities. A feminist-decolonial analysis
emphasises the embodied production and expe-
rience of territory (cf. Gieseking, 2016; Smith
et al., 2016), summarised in the notion of ‘body-
territory’ (cuerpo-territorio) (Cabnal, 2010;
Ulloa, 2016; Zaragocin, 2018). Against mascu-
linist readings of scale – that reify and separate
the global as a dominant and privileged site of
producing and governing space – feminist read-
ings emphasise the agency of ‘local’ bodies
(Freeman, 2001; Gibson-Graham, 2002;
Hyndman, 2004) that constitute territory across
multiple scales, including the state. Decolonis-
ing territory not only exposes the hierarchies
bound up with scale (see Marston et al., 2005;
Springer, 2014) but also valorises the ‘local’ as
a powerful scale of thought and practice. The
Andean experiences highlight how decolonial
strategies became entangled with modern, terri-
torial discourse and practice, presenting
13
dilemmas for the ‘plurinational state’. Urban
experiences provide further insights.
Latin American cities have seen increasing
governance by non-state and informal actors,
posing challenges for a decolonial analysis.
State decentralisation to local governance has
presented opportunities for grassroots demands
to intervene in urban institutions (Beard et al.,
2008; Campbell, 2003). For example, participa-
tory budgeting, first developed by the Brazilian
Workers Party in the late 1980 and made famous
in Porto Alegre, involved building strong rela-
tionships between local territorial organisations
(e.g. neighbourhood associations, housing
cooperatives, social movements) and state
institutions governed by political parties com-
mitted to civil society engagement (Abers,
2000; Baiocchi, 2005). This generated a con-
fluence of top-down ‘invited spaces’ and
bottom-up ‘popular spaces’ of democratic par-
ticipation (Cornwall, 2004; Cornwall and
Coelho, 2007). As Chavez and Goldfrank
(2004) demonstrate, participatory local gov-
ernance has been more successful where urban
territory is contested by grassroots organisa-
tions that, following the left-turn in many Latin
American cities, were able to re-locate their
struggles within government institutions. Yet
participatory local governance has been
accompanied – in Porto Alegre but particularly
elsewhere – by unequal participation (e.g.
class, gender), co-optation by political parties
(Abers, 2000; Rodgers, 2005; Romero, 2005)
and an intensification of neoliberal/techno-
cratic reform (Kanai, 2011; Mohan and Stokke,
2000), demonstrating an entanglement of terri-
torial practices of governance.
Much of Greater Buenos Aires (GBA) in the
1990s, for example, developed clientelist terri-
torial governance structures based around the
transfer of state resources with the expectation
of political support (not only voting, but turning
up and mobilising for marches, etc.) in return
(Auyero, 2000; Levitsky, 2003). Yet ethnogra-
phies of clientelism in GBA suggest that
14
multiple territorial projects, from autonomous
activism and protest to everyday practices of
mutual aid, became entangled and subsumed
within the label of ‘clientelism’ (Auyero,
2000; Frederic, 2004; Manzano, 2007; Quirós,
2008; Vázquez and Vommaro, 2011). More-
over, the centre-left Kirchner government
(2003–15) sought to incorporate certain auton-
omous urban social movements into territorial
governance structures (Natalucci et al., 2013;
Rossi, 2015, 2017), blurring distinctions
between state and grassroots productions of ter-
ritory and opening debates on the perils of insti-
tutionalising radical collective action (Forni and
Castronuovo, 2013; Massetti et al., 2010;
Nataulcci and Pérez, 2015; Retamozo et al.,
2013). The case of El Alto, Bolivia, is more
inspiring, where highly organised grassroots
territorial structures based on post-1950s juntas
vecinales (neighbourhood councils) played a
key role in overthrowing the Sánchez de Lozada
government (orchestrated via road-blocks) and,
following Morales victory, incorporated mar-
ginalised urban residents (particularly indigen-
ous) within the plurinational state (Deledicque
and Contartese, 2009; Espósito and Artega,
2006; Lazar, 2008). Mamani (2011) describes
this process as producing ‘new cartographies
of counter-power’ in which the state’s territory
is (re)occupied by grassroots organisations,
embedded in urban institutions such as schools,
who promote indigenous understandings and
collective ways of organising territory.
The governance of Latin American cities
questions narrow readings of territorial power
as the exertion of authority from a defined cen-
tre (cf. Allen, 2009) and indicates scope for
extending relational understandings of territory
(e.g. Painter, 2010) by acknowledging the
entanglement of multiple political projects
within state urban institutions. More broadly,
decolonial analyses of territorial state govern-
ance demand critical reflection on strategies for
containing and pushing back dominant, modern/
colonial territorial practices, highlighting the
Progress in Human Geography XX(X)
opportunities and limits to institutionalising
grassroots territory.
V Conclusion
Territory is not only produced by the modern
state and dominant strategies of measuring and
controlling from above; it is resisted, (re)appro-
priated and (re)defined in the course of diverse
grassroots struggles. Decolonising territory
begins by acknowledging the limits to Anglo-
phone geographical insights – that remain pre-
dominantly rooted in modern, colonial
experiences – and opening dialogues with alter-
native ideas and practices of territory. The
experiences of Latin America are not peripheral
to the genealogy of territory outlined by Elden
(2013). Not only is colonialism central to the
modern history of state territory, as Kearns
(2017) argues, but grassroots strategies to resist
and redefine territory have long been present in
the Western state (McDonagh and Griffin,
2016) and remain so today (e.g. the 2011
Occupy movements or the assembly-based
Spanish municipal movements; see Halvorsen,
2015a, 2017; Vasudevan, 2015). Further work is
required to understand how territory came to
exist in particular historical and geographical
contexts. As a first step, this paper has used
Latin American experiences to argue that land,
terrain and the state all contain diverse political
projects that exceed that of modern sovereign
power. Doing so not only decentres the territori-
ality of the state to the everyday practices and
performances that constitute it (Jeffrey, 2013;
McConnell, 2016; Painter, 2006b, 2010) but
also opens it up to a broader set of political
values and subjectivities. Yet in opening up
territory to diverse ideas and practices there is
a risk of subsuming everything as ‘territorial’,
as Latin American scholars have warned
(Haesbaert, 2016; Souza, 2009), blurring dis-
tinctions between colonial and decolonial
approaches to territory. To what extent, then,
is it possible or necessary to demarcate a
Halvorsen
concept of territory that explicitly rejects its
dominant, Eurocentric usage?
In response to grassroots struggles Latin
American scholars have proposed concepts such
as ‘dissident territories’ (Souza, 2015b), ‘terri-
tories in resistance’ (Zibechi, 2012) and ‘insur-
gent territories’ (Wahren, 2011) that potentially
indicate a regional decolonial approach to terri-
tory.4 Doing so departs from an analysis of ter-
ritory as overlapping and entangled by
explicitly understanding territory from the posi-
tionality of struggle. Such concepts thus prior-
itise the highly charged symbolic dimension of
territory in Latin America (see Haesbaert,
2004), which includes memory (see Serrano,
2015), a dimension that has been relatively mar-
ginal in Anglophone conceptualisations (cf.
Agnew, 2014; Antonsich, 2009, 2011). My
inevitably detached positionality from the mul-
tiple struggles described in this paper (given
their immense historical and geographical
scope) is one reason for not embracing such
notions here. Moreover, and partly a reflection
of my own experiences with grassroots territor-
ial struggles in the UK and Latin America (see
Halvorsen, 2015b, 2017), I was conscious of
not generating a romanticised discourse of ter-
ritory that overshadows internal practices of
oppression and entanglements with dominant
territorial forms. Acknowledging the ecology
of knowledges that produce territory, I expli-
citly sought not to erase colonial territories
from dialogue so as not to replicate a coloni-
ality of knowing from below (Quijano, 2000;
Mignolo, 2000). While I maintain the decolo-
nial rationale of this move, its practical impli-
cations remain uncertain and require greater
political reflections.
Decolonising territory demands more than
acknowledging the coloniality of Anglophone
knowledges and its systemic silencing of other
epistemologies and requires urgent ethico-
political responses. On the one hand, it involves
a radical reorientation of scholarly practices,
including who and what we cite (Banski and
15
Mariola, 2013), where we theorise from and
with (Hart, 2016; Robinson, 2016), how we
work with colleagues from the Global South
(Jazeel, 2016; Jazeel and McFarlane, 2009) and
how we respond to colonial hierarchies within
our institutions (Noxolo, 2017a). On the other
hand, it demands recognition that the ecology of
knowledges far exceeds the narrow confines of
academic debate (Santos, 2014) and requires
explicit discussions of the ‘social use values’
(Gidwani, 2008: 236) of research, a challenge
I am taking up beyond the confines of this paper.
Decolonial dialogues require a delicate balance
between speaking with and learning from mul-
tiple others (see Robinson, 2016) and develop-
ing long-term commitments and ‘speaking to’
particular sites of subaltern knowledge produc-
tion (Jazeel, 2016). Mobilising decolonial
notions of territory requires a strong grounded-
ness in historical and geographical context.
Decolonising territory only takes on full mean-
ing in the active process of dismantling and
reversing the colonial hierarchies that are both
reproduced through Anglophone scholarship
and sustained through dominant imaginations
and practices of territory. The task is immense,
but it is my hope that creating and expanding
spaces of epistemological dialogue is a step in
the right direction.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to a number of individuals and groups
for their comments on previous drafts: Alex Jeffrey,
Virginia Manzano, Sarah Radcliffe, Paul Routledge,
Omar Tobı́o, the ‘postcolonial governance and deco-
lonial agendas’ reading group at the University of
Cambridge, and the ‘grupo de estudios rurales-
grupo de estudios de los movimientos sociales de
Ame´rica Latina’ at the Gino Germani Research Insti-
tute, University of Buenos Aires. I am also grateful
for the feedback received on presentations of parts of
this paper at the following institutions: Department
of Geography, University of Buenos Aires; Urban
Studies Research Group, Gino Germani Research
Institute, University of Buenos Aires; Departments
of Geography and Sociology, National University of
16
La Plata; Department of Geography, Federal Flumi-
nense University. Finally, thank you for the
extremely helpful comments of four anonymous
reviewers, alongside Nina Laurie, who helped shape
the final version of this paper.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of inter-
est with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following
financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This work was sup-
ported by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research
Fellowship (ECF-2016-301).
ORCID iD
Sam Halvorsen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8215-
6946
Notes
1. For literature reviews see: Abrão (2010); Capel (2006);
Da Silva et al. (2016); Llanos Hernández (2007);
Mardones Barrera (2016); Santos et al. (2011); Saquet
and Sposito (2009); Sosa Velásquez (2012); Tobı́o
(2012). Zibechi (2012) provides an overview of
territorial struggles in practice.
2. Major genealogies of specific territorial struggles in
Latin America have yet to be undertaken, although ini-
tial attempts exist, e.g. Zuñiga Navarro (1998); Costa
Lima (2017).
3. See constitution: http://www.asambleanacional.gov.ec/
documentos/constitucion_de_bolsillo.pdf
4. Thank you to Juan Wahren for making this point to me.
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Author biography
Sam Halvorsen is Lecturer in Human Geography at
Queen Mary University of London and (until
October 2019) Leverhulme Early Career Research
Fellow. He is interested in the relationship between
grassroots urban politics and territory, having
published widely on Occupy London. Since 2015
he has been researching political parties and local
governance in Buenos Aires. He recently founded
the Latin American Geographies in the UK Research
Network.