Indigenous Geopolitics: Creating Indigenous Spaces of Community Self-Protection and Peace Amid Violent Conflict

This article examines the social and spatial dimensions of civilian agency amid violent conflicts, specifically focusing on the daily work required from indigenous community members in the upkeep of a peace zone as a space of peace and self-protection amid insurgency and counterinsurgency. Using the concept of indigenous geopolitics as an analytical framework, it argues that indigenous spaces of self-protection require the simultaneous processes of collective refusal of state or non-state violence toward indigenous peoples and the re-inscription of indigenous sovereignty within the nation-state. Through case study vignettes, it illustrates the agentive capacities and power of indigenous peoples as geopolitical actors. Rather than viewing indigenous communities as ‘passive victims’ of violent conflicts or excluded from state-centric geopolitical discourses and processes, this article reveals that indigenous agency transforms spaces of conflict and violence and generates and creates new or alternative spaces of unarmed civilian protection and peace outside of the purview of state and non-state armed actors. At stake is a re-thinking or destabilizing of dominant state-centric geopolitical processes that govern contemporary understanding of civilian protection, war, conflict, and peace.