Bolivia

Since Morales’s election, rural movements have become the new protagonists of Bolivian politics. Previous analyses have emphasised their active role in shaping national politics, often focusing on those organisations as a compact block. However, their relationship is marked by both cooperation and fragmentation. This article provides a narrative of Bolivian socio-political history over the last 60 years, establishing four main phases of identitarian articulations/disarticulations. It demonstrates the high degree of interdependence and fluidity of ethnic and class identities, as well as their interconnections with the broader socio-political context and the national legal and institutional changes.

""Agrarian reforms do not constitute linear processes: rather, they are based on the interconnection between the crystallization of land governance in formal tenure rules and the way societies organize around a set of identities and power mechanisms. This paper focuses on how the misinterpretation of this two-way relationship, in setting up
a new normative framework, can generate unintended consequences in terms of conflict. The recent wave of land conflicts in Bolivia shows how changes in the allocation of strategic resources inspired by the so-called ‘politics of recognition’ triggered processes of political ethnicization and organizational fragmentation, eventually contributing to fuelling new tensions between indigenous groups and
peasant unions.""