Abstract
Water conflicts across the world are bringing to the fore fundamental challenges to the anthropocentric boundaries of the human rights paradigm. Engaging with the multi-layered legal ethnographic setting of the Xalalá dam project in Maya Q’eqchi’ territory in Guatemala, I will critically and empirically unpack not only the anthropocentric boundaries of the hegemonic human rights paradigm, but also the ontological differences between indigenous and Euro-Western legal conceptualizations of human-water-life. I argue that it is necessary to pave the way for urgent rethinking of the human right to water and, more broadly, human rights beyond the modern divide of nature-culture. International law and human rights scholars should therefore not be afraid of plurilegal water realities and should start engaging with these ontologically different concepts and practices. Embarking on a bottom-up co-theorizing about human and beyond-the-human water rights will be imperative to avoid recolonization of indigenous knowledges-ontologies by non-indigenous scholarships and public policy.
Highlights
“For those who do not speak our languages, we are invisible.” (Humberto Ak’abal, Maya Kakchiquel Poet, Guatemala)
Since the early 1970s, this hydropower project has hung like a sword of Damocles above almost a hundred of Guatemalan indigenous Q’eqchi’ Mayan communities living alongside the Chixoy river, the natural frontier between the departments of Alta Verapaz and El Quiché
Within the context of this hydropower extractive socio-political and economic “minefield” [28], towards the end of 2013, I was asked by the Municipality of Herent in Belgium, which had since 2000 an “international city-to-city link” (A city-to-city link is an international partnership between a Flemish municipality and a municipality from the Global South financed by the Government of Flanders (Belgium)
Summary
“Xmux’bal yuam nimla ha” or “the life of the river will be desecrated/violated”. This phrase surfaced many times during the conversations, meetings and focus groups in May 2014 with Maya Q’eqchi’ women, men and elders about the impact of the planned Xalalá hydroelectric dam on the Chixoy river, which the Guatemalan government was pushing forward. A growing number of scholars and practitioners of international environmental law have recently begun to discuss the decentering of this anthropocentric dogma, shifting towards an eco-centric and ecosystem approach [13] Even though these fields of international law, human rights and environment are increasingly engaging with historically marginalized and excluded epistemologies, such as indigenous legal concepts, I argue that they do not sufficiently engage with the ontological questions these water pluralities bring to the fore. Indigenous human-water-life relationships, such as those discussed regarding Maya Q’eqchi’, unveil competing political and legal water realities that interrogate key modern assumptions, which have organized dominant understandings of the modern world and everyday power relations affecting law, natural resources, development and territory. I end by discussing several underexplored political and scientific areas of contestation that need to be addressed in order to engage critically with plurilegal water ontologies in international law and human rights scholarship
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