Resisting ‘Nice Development’ in Latin America

Abstract

Abstract This special issue focuses on forms of resistance to dominant development discourses and practices in Latin America. The attention is on the processes and practices through which grassroot groups challenge the capacity of official legal orders to recognise and address their concerns and demands. These groups have different names in the literature: ‘social movements’, ‘frontier communities’, ‘the oppressed’, ‘political society’, ‘uncivil civil society’, and others. The aim of this special issue is to move beyond certain common approaches in critical literature, which either unwillingly ignores these groups’ agency and portrays them as mere victims, thus infantilising their experience and diminishing their agency, or bestows upon them heroic features as ‘social movements’, thus creating a high threshold of political and theoretical relevance that only few movements with global visibility can meet.