Date/Time: Thursday 30th November 2017, 16:00-17:00

Venue: Research Beehive 2.22, Newcastle University

Dr Julie Cupples, Reader in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh will joining us in November as part of the CLACS visiting speaker series. Julie's talk is titled “We do not consent”: Indigenous rights and the Nicaraguan inter-oceanic canal project

In June 2013 in a context of growing authoritarianism, the Nicaraguan government led by the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) announced the construction of a $50 billion interoceanic canal backed by Chinese foreign investment. This highly neoliberal and colonial megaproject threatens to undermine Nicaragua’s sovereignty, displace thousands of campesinos and indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples from their lands, and produce dramatic and irreversible environmental and biodiversity destruction.

The FSLN also passed the interoceanic canal law (Law 840), which gives the government the power to expropriate any territory and displace those who reside there, without consulting with the indigenous and Afro-descendant communities who live in the path of the proposed canal and who will lose access to their forests, fishing sites and planting grounds if it goes ahead.

The application of Law 840 to the communal lands of indigenous and Afro-descended peoples would seem to contradict and nullify the rights assured to them by existing national and international legislation. Drawing on decolonial theories and in particular the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, this paper explores the ways in which this group of Nicaraguans are fighting back against the canal project and making creative use of media resources to do so.