Ontological Conflicts in the Plurinational State: The Case of Indigenous Resistance against the Mirador Mega-Mining Project in Ecuador

Abstract

This article focuses on ontological conflicts over territoriality in Ecuador’s plurinational state. Departing from an ontological perspective, we examine how the Ecuadorian government and Indigenous communities battle over different ways of relating to and existing through territories, and thus over ways of practicing or undermining plurinationality. We offer a historical analysis of plurinationality, a proposal that is constituted by concrete territorial practices of Indigenous self-determination and that challenges the homogenized idea of the nation. We show how this proposal, though adopted in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution, was undermined by the government’s subsequent expansion of extractive projects. To illustrate how this ontological conflict played out in concrete terms, we focus on Indigenous resistance to the mega-mining project Mirador in Ecuador’s southern Amazon. While the state’s capacity to territorially assert itself has led to the displacement of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities continue to claim and invoke this territory as their own.