Reconfiguring the political landscape after the multicultural turn: Law, politics and the spatialization of difference in Colombia

This dissertation is conceived as a journey across rights. It analyzes the manner in which the "political landscape" is constituted and reoriented within the context and mobilization of a liberal multicultural regime in Colombia. That is, how the relationship between place(s) and politics is actually being shaped within multiculturalism. The notion of a journey relates to the principle of studying legal codes and legal practices jointly and also results from the specific methodological and theoretical approaches employed. I thus address and explore "the political" as it unfolds in various different scenarios and places, incorporating a multiplicity of agents including state and non-state institutions.; As such, this dissertation centers on a number of different problems related to place making practices in the context of the mobilization of multicultural rights in Colombia. Some of these problems are located within "commonly analyzed" legal scenarios such as the Colombian Constitutional Assembly of 1991 and the jurisprudence of the National Constitutional Court. Archival research focused on one legal place-making practice: the construction and association of an ethnic typology (characterization of ethnic groups as grantees of minority rights) to an ethnic topology (the spatialization and delimitation of an ethnic territory). Ethnographic research also served to further problematize the relationship between an ethnic group and a territory, and also to analyze how diverse place-making discourses and practices intertwine, expand or eventually come to clash with the development of multicultural policies. The analysis included studying conflicts over land tenure and land use between indigenous peoples and peasants, following a dispute between indigenous evangelical Christians and indigenous authorities, and the manner in which urban ethnic groups contest what they perceive to be multicultural segregation by actively imagining and participating in the creation of a "plural city".