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Redressing Injustice, Reframing Resilience: Mayan Women’s Persistence and Protagonism as Resistance

Resilience, Adaptive Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice - Book Cover

This chapter (in Clark JN, Ungar M, eds. Resilience, Adaptive Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice: How Societies Recover after Collective Violence), discusses the limits of the transitional justice paradigm in post-genocide Guatemala. The authors critically and reflexively analyse their experiences accompanying diverse groups of Mayan women protagonists who testified in truth-telling processes and trials and organised in defence of their rights. Protagonists have reframed their engagement in these processes to centre their lives, cosmovision and knowledges, defining resilience as ‘resistance, persistence, permanence, strength and determination’. The chapter takes up Eve Tuck’s challenge of a desire-based versus a damage-centred framework and Karen Barad’s theorisation of agential realism and ethico-onto-epistem-ology, wherein ethics, knowing and being are intertwined. It also draws on the work of Mayan women authors and activists who emphasise the gendered integrality of land and body in resisting violence. The chapter documents some of the multi-systems and relational approaches to Mayan resilience that are rooted in an integral, collective relationship of land-body-territory, a pluriverse that disrupts Western dualisms of nature and culture, human and non-human, knowing and being, that are the result of ongoing colonial violence and dispossession. The chapter argues for a conception of historical justice that supports Indigenous people’s self-determination on their lands and through their livelihoods grounded in their own cosmovision.

Cambridge University Press; 210-233.

Year of Publication: 2021
Publisher website
Author: Alison Crosby