Forging territorial justice: Afro-Colombian legal mobilization and the prefiguration of territorial authority in northern Cauca

The expansion of extractive economies in Colombia disrupts human and ecological interactions in particular places. In response, Black communities have enacted different activist strategies, including legal mobilization around the multicultural reforms that took root throughout Latin America in the 1990s. However, these legal mechanisms in Colombia reflect a Pacific-centered bias, which ties Blackness to rigid ethnic and territorial definitions, marginalizing alternative identities and attachments to space. While recent scholarship in anthropology, critical geography, and political ecology has examined how multicultural rights shape state-ethnic group dynamics, less explored is how seemingly homogeneous groups contest exclusionary legal frames by integrating legal and contextual strategies across multiple scales. Drawing on critical geography, legal mobilization, social movements studies, and feminist political ecology, in this paper, we study the strategies and processes enacted by Black communities in the inter-Andean valley region in northern Cauca to contest illegal mining and associated developments. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, our analysis shows that laws are subject to contestation, renegotiation, and strategic appropriation. We show how subaltern groups strategically engage with legal and self-ascribed context-specific practices to prefigure political authority, allowing them to shape relations to space and nature and advance their pursuit of what we conceptualize as territorial justice. Through their dialectical engagement with the law, these communities assert territorial authority beyond strict legal definitions, shaping new political subjectivities that exceed identity boundaries imposed by legal frameworks while being institutionalized.