Counterhegemonic Forms of Justice: The Potential of Permanent Peoples Tribunal in the Context of Resource - based Conflicts and Human Rights Violations in Guatemala

This thesis is about the confrontation between two forms of justice. One institutionalized as law, and the other, depending on situational embodied forms of doing justice. Further, it is about the confrontation between sources of law. One source relates to sovereign nation states as top down mechanism, and the other, to indigenous peoples as bottom-up process. The analysis applies a bottom-up approach, as suggested by decolonial critical thought, that questions elemental assumptions about dominant neoliberal institutional frameworks. This thesis cannot solve these tensions. It tries to investigate their dynamics on the basis of a specific case, which is, the ethical tribunal, established by Maya Mam indigenous peoples in 2012, that accuses the Canadian mining company Goldcorp for committing human rights violations through its extractive activities in the area of San Marcus Ixtahuacán, Guatemala. Instead of coming up with a solution, the thesis wants to question dominant legal...Show moreThis thesis is about the confrontation between two forms of justice. One institutionalized as law, and the other, depending on situational embodied forms of doing justice. Further, it is about the confrontation between sources of law. One source relates to sovereign nation states as top down mechanism, and the other, to indigenous peoples as bottom-up process. The analysis applies a bottom-up approach, as suggested by decolonial critical thought, that questions elemental assumptions about dominant neoliberal institutional frameworks. This thesis cannot solve these tensions. It tries to investigate their dynamics on the basis of a specific case, which is, the ethical tribunal, established by Maya Mam indigenous peoples in 2012, that accuses the Canadian mining company Goldcorp for committing human rights violations through its extractive activities in the area of San Marcus Ixtahuacán, Guatemala. Instead of coming up with a solution, the thesis wants to question dominant legal frameworks that permit human rights violations and reveal the capacity of informal legal compositions to install grounds of justice. It was identified that the ethical tribunal contributed to unfold the seemingly uncontested nature of neoliberal extractive activities through its potential to challenge impunity and establish access to cognitive, and epistemic forms of justice.Show less

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Counterhegemonic Forms of Justice: The Potential of Permanent Peoples Tribunal in the Context of Resource - based Conflicts and Human Rights Violations in Guatemala