Indigenous Peoples and Land Claiming in Latin America

Inequalities in ownership, distribution, and access to land generate social injustice in many contexts, yet land rights litigation has not been central to the literature on socioeconomic rights, courts, and social transformation. What is specific about land litigation? Is there any feature—in processes of judicialization or their outcomes—that renders land conflicts distinct? We address these questions by analyzing Indigenous Peoples’ (IP) judicialized claims for land and territory in Latin America, arguing that existing scholarship on the prospects for social transformation through the courts does not adequately address their specificities. Putting the literature on the judicialization of socioeconomic rights in Latin America in discussion with research on judicialized IP land and territorial claims in the region, we propose an analytical frame for assessing when court rulings of IP land rights litigation can be considered transformative.