In this chapter, I focus on a specific attempt to replace the national feature of the “nation state” by indigenous people’s movements in some Latin American countries in the first decade of the twenty-first century. When indigenous movements, both in the Latin American subcontinent and in the world at large, fly the flag of the refoundation of the state they target the feature of the modern state form that made them invisible and caused so much destruction and unjust suffering for so long, namely the supposedly national character of the nation state derived from the capitalist, colonialist state. Their experience is painful evidence of the difficult task of refounding the state. Due to its long history, the modern state form is much more than an institutional conglomerate. It is a cultural artefact. Rather than a political struggle in the strict sense, the struggle for the refoundation of the state is a social, economic, and cultural struggle, a struggle for symbols, mentalities, habitus, and subjectivities. In this chapter, I describe the political processes in Bolivia and Ecuador, the two countries in which efforts to refound the state were most credible in the first decade of the millennium highlighting the main features of the projected refounded state as laid out in the new constitutions.

I start from a conventional conception of anthropology and sociology of law - legal pluralism - to construct a new legal landscape capable of encompassing different scales of law, be they local, national, or global. I have been calling for an epistemological turn for a long time. And I have found it in my conception of the epistemologies of the South that refuses the abstract universalism of modern law and propose the recognition of legal plurality and the transformation of vertical differences into horizontal ones. The nation-state has been the most central time-space of law for the last two hundred years, particularly in the core countries of the world system. However, its centrality only became possible because the other two time-spaces, the local and the global, were formally declared non-existent by the hegemonic liberal political theory. My purpose is, first, to show that the legal field in contemporary societies and in the world system as a whole is a more complex and richer landscape than has been assumed by liberal political theory. Second, I set out to show that such a legal field is a constellation of different legalities (and illegalities) operating in local, national and global time-spaces, displaying a variety of configurations, making it increasingly hard to identify their limits. The way law’s potential evolves, whether towards regulation or emancipation, has nothing to do with the autonomy or self-reflexivity of the law, but rather with the political mobilization of competing social forces.