What’s at stake in the plurinational state debate? The case of Bolivia

The idea of a plurinational state is one that has gained currency in parts of Latin America in recent decades. Driven by the demands of Indigenous social movements and communities, countries such as Bolivia and Ecuador have rewritten their constitutions to acknowledge the diverse populations that make up the different ‘nations’ within their state. The notion of a plurinational state carries with it the potential to offer a set of counter-topographies and ways of being that challenge the Westphalian conception of sovereignty. Plurinationalism thus offers a means of worlding beyond the West. However, despite this promise, there remains a major debate between the more utopian horizons for plurinationalism, grounded in Indigenous self-determination, and what I term ‘actually existing plurinationalism’. The latter continues, in many ways, the colonial dominance of the nation-state in the politics of scale and furthers the practical realities of natural resource extraction, undermining the material basis for alternative sovereignties to be realised. This article therefore asks: what is at stake in the debate over plurinationalism, and what possibilities remain for its original decolonial impulse, driven by insurgent spatial praxis or counter-topographies?