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The Sovereign and its Shadow: Constituent Assembly and Indigenous Movement in Ecuador

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2003

ROBERT ANDOLINA
ROBERT ANDOLINA
Affiliation:
Political Science Faculty at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York.
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Abstract

A crucial development in current Latin American politics is the growing involvement of indigenous movements in democracies grappling with the challenges of regime consolidation. This article examines how Ecuador's indigenous movement consecrated new rights and national constitutive principles in the 1997–8 constitutional assembly. It argues that the indigenous movement defined the legitimacy and purpose of the assembly through an ideological struggle with other political actors, in turn shaping the context and content of constitutional reforms in Ecuador. The article concludes that softening the boundary between ‘cultural politics’ and ‘institutional politics’ is necessary in order to understand the impact of social movements in Latin America.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , November 2003 , pp. 721 - 750
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This article was initially presented as a paper at the Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, September 1998, Chicago. The author would like to thank Kathryn Sikkink, Donna Lee Van Cott, José Antonio Lucero, William Gorton and two anonymous JLAS reviewers for their very helpful comments on previous drafts of this article.