Thinking De-coloniality

: Challenges and questions from Bolivia

Abstract

Thinking De-coloniality: Challenges and Questions from Bolivia takes the recent Indigenous protest in Bolivia as a starting point to think about the challenges and difficulties inherent to the process of de-coloniality. Asking why in Bolivia – regardless of the recent constitutional, political and economical reforms – Indigenous organisations continue to protest against the violation of their ancestral territories and the violation of their rights by the state. Analysing the recently published work of Alvaro García Linera this dissertation explores how the underlying assumptions made in his work are related and influence his and the governments position against the Indigenous protests. This dissertation argues that that Linera’s analysis, and political opinions are based on a number of underlying assumptions that are making him reproduce those very colonial boundaries, and logics of domination and marginalisation, he says to be trying to overcome. The second part of this text, follows the question of how and why coloniality reproduces and perpetuates itself so easily in our thinking, our practices, as well as in our politics. Through the analysis of concepts developed by the literature associated with the decolonial turn, this text discusses how modernity and coloniality are related, and the implication this has when we thinking about de-coloniality. By embracing with the challenges of the Indigenous peoples, and the discussion on the coloniality of modernity, this dissertation explores in the third chapter possible ways of thinking and becoming that emerges out of the experience of coloniality. Ways of a thinking and becoming de-colonial, without reproducing the boundaries and practices of coloniality

Date of Award	2011
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Aberystwyth University
Supervisor	Lucy Taylor (Supervisor) & Carl Death (Supervisor)