New Patterns of Mobilization for and against Democracy
Olivia Arigho Stiles
Contact: o.arighostiles(at)uniandes.edu.co
Visiting Fellow, Universidad de los Andes/University of Essex (UK)
Olivia Arigho Stiles is an interdisciplinary researcher of Indigenous and peasant movements and environmental politics in Bolivia. Her UK-government funded PhD was awarded in 2022 from the University of Essex, UK. Her research traces the rise of ecological consciousness and its connections with insurgent Aymara Indigenous-campesino politics in twentieth-century highland Bolivia. She has an MA in Latin American Studies from UCL and a BA in History from the University of Oxford. She is also a Research Associate on the British Academy funded project ‘Rethinking Values of the Anthropocene’ at the University of Bristol, UK and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in Indigenous Ecologies and Environmental Crisis at University College London (UCL). As a Global Forum Fellow at Universidad de los Andes, Olivia will complete a project addressing the rise of right-wing ‘pro-democracy’ movements in Bolivia and the ways in which environmentalist discourse is deployed against left-Indigenous political projects in the twenty-first century.
Research project
Green reactionaries: right-wing environmentalism in Bolivia
Although right-wing movements globally are associated with denialist approaches to climate change, linkages between far-right politics and environmentalism are not a new phenomenon. European fascist movements in the twentieth century invoked a romanticised rural world in ways which overlapped with ethno-nationalism for example (Forchtner, 2020; Armiero, 2013). This project draws on a decolonial Marxist framework to address the rise of right-wing ‘pro-democracy’ movements in Bolivia and the ways in which environmentalist discourse is deployed against left-Indigenous political projects in the twenty-first century. My project accounts for the new convergence between environmentalist discourse in right-wing ‘pro-democracy’ mobilisations in Bolivia. The rise of an economically powerful right-wing in Bolivia’s eastern lowland territories is intimately connected with the emergence of neoliberal agrarian extractivism from the 1980s. I trace the actors and social relations of power that have historically developed under neoliberalism in the lowland region and show how this has shaped contemporary mobilisations over land, territory and democracy in Bolivia. The project’s findings enrich the literature on radical right-wing mobilisation in Latin America in the twenty-first century and a wider scholarship on reactionary elements within environmental mobilisation globally.