CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2026
| Author | Valík, Barbora |
|---|---|
| Title | Indigenous Movements in Latin America and the Choice between Violent and Nonviolent Mobilisation |
| Summary | Since the 1970s, Indigenous movements have emerged all across Latin America, mobilising to represent the marginalised Indigenous communities, voice their demands, and seek remedies for their grievances. These movements pursued their goals by various means, mainly nonviolent—using civil resistance, electoral channels, or legal recourse—but at times, they also resorted to violence. While the existing literature in Indigenous studies comprehensively explains the emergence of Indigenous movements and their success, the choice between violent and nonviolent mobilisation remains understudied in the field. Moreover, in peace and conflict studies, investigations of Indigenous conflicts remain scarce. Research on armed Indigenous resistance has been largely limited to single case studies, which tend to focus on the idiosyncratic circumstances that led to the emergence of a particular group. The dissertation seeks to remedy these research gaps. I ask under what conditions do Indigenous movements in Latin America resort to violence, as opposed to using nonviolent means. In answering the research question, I am also interested in explaining the varying intensity and patterns of violence that ensue. The dissertation thus offers a novel model of Indigenous resistance, which identifies the pathways leading to the different types of Indigenous mobilisation. The model captures the interactions of three core factors of interest—group socialisation, regime type, and political leverage—framing their effects in terms of necessity and sufficiency for the given outcome. The model is based on a set-theoretic view of causation and accounts for multiple aspects of causal complexity often overlooked in mainstream research, namely equifinality, configurational causation, and causal asymmetry. I argue that violent socialisation of the Indigenous movement is necessary, but not sufficient for armed Indigenous resistance. Only together with particular regime type (democratic, authoritarian, or democratising) and political leverage (high or low) are these factors jointly sufficient for violent (and nonviolent) outcomes. Mobilisation tends to be limited to electoral means and civil resistance where no violent socialisation occurred, or where the movement has high political leverage and operates in a democratic regime (even if it was violently socialised). The combination of violent socialisation with low political leverage breeds small-scale armed conflict regardless of regime type (however, regime type shapes the causal mechanism). Finally, the combination of violent socialisation and high political leverage leads to large-scale conflict in the context of an authoritarian regime, but adheres to a pattern of on-and-off negotiations and small-scale conflict when combined with a democratising regime. To examine how the causal model operates in the real world, I investigate four country-cases of Indigenous mobilisation: Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, and Chile. I rely on data collected from elite and grassroots interviews, participant observations, investigation of miscellaneous documents, newspaper articles, and existing academic literature. |
| Supervisor | Erin K. Jenne |
| Department | International Relations PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2026/valik_barbora.pdf |
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