Land Rights for Change? On the Impasses of Cultural Politics for Economic Change

Property relations have long been at the centre of social justice considerations and efforts for socio-economic change. Since the 1990s ethnic minorities who often happen to live in particularly biodiverse regions of the planet have started to challenge these often exploitative relations by claiming formal property rights based on territorially defined cultural identities. Originally celebrated by various critical schools of thought as a turning point in global neoliberal hegemony and a promising manifestation of grassroots resistance against extractivist capitalism, the “territorial turn” appears today far less revolutionary. In a context where culturally orientated poststructuralist approaches for change are increasingly reassessed by political economy perspectives, such as the concept of Racial Capitalism, this paper aims at contributing an empirically grounded outlook on the interconnection of cultural and material conditions by revisiting the cultural politics of land titling through two ethnographic case studies in the Colombian Pacific region.