Identifier: imarina:6312961
Authors:
Jaria Manzano, Jordi
Abstract:
Recent concern about sustainability, biodiversity, and environmental protection and the vitality of indigenous movements, in places like Latin America, has changed the vision of the value of the non-Western cultures and the preservation of their law and institutions. That has led to constitutional comparative law seeking new ways of integrating these indigenous communities into broader institutional complexes (i.e., the nation-state). These processes pose various questions of interest about the limits of this integration and the possibility of change and evolution within these chthonic communities. This presentation aims to focus on the main problems raised when a particular political system or legal tradition tries to integrate radical diversity (i.e., Western and non-Western cultures and communities). In short, these problems are how to make chthonic legal traditions compatible with the culture of human rights clearly dependent on Western assumptions, how to preserve minorities from assimilation once they have been integrated into the nation-state institutional system, how to manage radical diversity within a system, and the limits placed on democratic decision-making processes at different levels by the decisions taken in lower and higher spaces of consensus. Political evolution in places like Latin America makes these questions of clear interest in the present.
Repositori URV