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Indigenous Civil Society in Latin America: Collective Action in the Digital Age was published by the University of North Carolina Press this month.<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cIn the 1990s and early 2000s, Indigenous civil society in these countries really managed to have a significant impact on policy and legislation, even some constitutional reform,\u201d says Lupien. \u201cIn the years after that, there was a lot still going on, but instead of visible, disruptive types of protest movements, the organizations and leaders were involved in the policy process and putting pressure on the government by building on the experience and the concessions gained in the previous period.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lupien, who looked at participatory democracy in some of the same communities for his 2018 book, Citizens\u2019 Power in Latin America: Theory and Practice,<\/em> became curious about how the digital age was coming into play through the 2010s.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause so much of the attention to Indigenous social movements in Latin America focused on that late 20th-century and very early 21st-century period, we didn\u2019t know a whole lot about the impact of digital technologies and particularly social media,\u201d he says. \u201cBut a lot of the literature tells us that protest and collective action is increasingly moving online.\u201d<\/p>\n However, the notion that social media could be an ideal site for resistance did not necessarily line up with what Lupien and his team observed in the communities they were engaged with.<\/p>\n As the broad general optimism around the potential of social media for marginalized groups began to fade, the researchers were already finding that governments and corporations could limit the effectiveness of what some had believed might be a field-levelling technology.<\/p>\n \u201cWe found that social media is not particularly helpful for Indigenous organizations, and that it can and is often used against them,\u201d Lupien says. \u201cMost of the Indigenous organizations don\u2019t have the resources to hire the kinds of specialists that extractive industry companies or the government can, or spend a lot of money to circulate misinformation all day.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, as Lupien outlines in the book, the reliance of Indigenous civil societies on the complex and robust mechanisms already in place in their communities \u2014 rather than on an ever-shifting landscape of digital technologies \u2014 is likely beneficial.<\/p>\n \u201cIndigenous civil society has so many complex, structured and very deliberate elements \u2014 social movement organizations that engage in protests, co-ops that sell products in order to raise revenue to fund engagement in politics, service-providing organizations offering services that the state fails to provide and other Indigenous participatory democracy governance mechanisms,\u201d says Lupien. \u201cIn the book, I argue that the fact that Indigenous civil society doesn\u2019t really have to rely on social media or new technologies is actually a strength. They can and do use it, but their success in advancing their goals doesn\u2019t rely on it.\u201d<\/p>\n