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"The Sovereign Street analyzes how indigenous-led mass movements and protests in urban space reconfigured the politics and racial order of Bolivia from 1999 to 2011. Through protest actions that took over the streets, Bolivians realigned the political system, placing social movements, community organizations, and politically and racially excluded groups at the center of civic and political life. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork and oral history interviews in Cochabamba, Sucre, and La Paz, the book argues that mass protests succeed by demonstrating their own political legitimacy, control over space, and ability to affect daily life. By focusing on issues studied by ethnographers-social life as experienced through the human body, the meanings attached to place, and social movement practices-it explains how race and power are lived and changed through street protest. It also charts the emerging tensions between President Evo Morales' government and left grassroots movements, and demonstrates how the same processes of protest and disruption that brought him to power have become the key methods for challenging his leadership"--

AbstractRepressive state violence, intended to tamp down collective mobilisation, sometimes inspires greater participation by protesters. When popular and/or elite reactions cause the repressing party to concede, civil resistance scholars define the failure of state repression as 'backfire'. Some have proposed that movements' nonviolent discipline is essential to backfire. This article demonstrates that movements that practise 'unarmed militancy' – forceful, combative tactics less damaging than armed violence – can also succeed through backfire, achieving policy concessions and even presidential resignations, and presents a qualitative comparative analysis of the outcomes of 48 protest events with multiple deaths in Bolivia between 1982 and 2019, and a case-based analysis of how either movements or repressors prevailed. Movements that confronted deadly repression succeeded in 57–8 per cent of cases. Whether or not protesters engaged in lethal defensive violence did not affect their likelihood of success. However, state repression of guerrillas and paramilitary groups, and during polarised partisan conflicts, was consistently successful. Current understandings of backfire need to be reconsidered in light of successful unarmed militant protest in Bolivia and numerous other locations worldwide.

ABSTRACTMoments of intense physical confrontation between protesters and security forces have become iconic parts of political protest. These asymmetrical tactical encounters have been pivotal to successful Latin American revolts against neoliberalism and regime‐displacing protest movements. Based on ethnographic engagement and oral history interviews with Bolivian activists in Cochabamba and La Paz, this article characterizes an overlooked tactical stance: unarmed militancy, which I define as the use of forceful, combative tactics that are nonetheless qualitatively less damaging than those of their (usually state) adversaries. Unarmed militants complicate the binary of violence and nonviolence often used to strategize and analyze protest. Unarmed militants claim some of the moral purity of nonviolence and of those victimized by state repression. Yet, they also physically fight back to hold physical space and interrupt daily life. Neither provocateurs nor extremists, unarmed militants collaborate in achieving the tactical and strategic goals of mass mobilizations. This article examines the material processes of on‐the‐street collaboration, the subjectivity of demonstrators, the narratives surrounding protest, and the moral understandings of just and unjust uses of force as elements that can make unarmed militancy effective. [political legitimacy, tactics, protest, repression, revolution]

AbstractIn the mid-twentieth century, renewed colonization of the Llanos region of Colombia brought escalated violence to the closely related Guahibo and Cuiva peoples. This violence was made public by two dramatic episodes that became international scandals: a December 1967 massacre of sixteen Cuivas at La Rubiera Ranch, and a 1970 military crackdown on an uprising by members of a Guahibo agricultural cooperative in Planas. The scandals exposed both particular human rights abuses and the regional tradition of literally hunting indigenous people, and provoked widespread outrage. While contemporaries treated these events as aberrations, they can best be explained as the consequence of policies that organize and manage frontiers. Both events took place in a region undergoing rapid settlement by migrants, affected by cattle and oil interests, missionaries, the Colombian military, and U.S. counterinsurgency trainers. This paper draws on archival research to trace the events involved and explains their relation to globally circulating policies, practices, and ideas of frontier making. It illustrates how Colombians eager to expand their frontier in the Llanos emulated and adapted ideas of human inequality, moral geographies that make violence acceptable in frontier areas, economic policies that dispossess native peoples, and strategies of counterinsurgency warfare from distant sources. Ironically, their quest for modernity through frontier expansion licensed new deployments of "archaic" violence. The Llanos frontier was thus enmeshed in an interchange of frontier-making techniques that crisscrosses the world, but particularly unites Latin America and the United States.