6/29/2020 Commodity Frontiers: Capitalism and Contestation in the Countryside — Contested TERRITORIES https://www.contested-territories.net/commodity-frontiers-capitalism-and-contestation-in-the-countryside/ 1/3   ARTÍCULOS Commodity Frontiers: Capitalism and Contestation in the Countryside Hanne Cottyn [ hanne.cottyn@york.ac.uk ] University of York commodityfrontiers.org encuentro.website This brief paper explores the potential and limits of the concept of ‘commodity frontiers’ to further develop the notion of ‘contested territories’ theoretically and methodologically. I start from empirical research on ‘contested territories’ in the Bolivian and Peruvian Highlands to introduce the concept of commodity frontiers, drawing on the approach of the cross-sectoral network ‘Commodity Frontiers Initiative’. Contested territories in the Andean Highlands: Communal resistance to commodiｦed land rights. My own research deals with contested territories in the Andean highlands in the context of liberal land reform. Focussing on rural societies of the Peruvian and Bolivian altiplano, I am essentially looking at communal territories in which community control over land has formed the spine of social and economic relations. In the late nineteenth-century, the breakthrough of wool and mining commodity booms gave viability to liberal ideas that fundamentally challenged communal land systems. Similar to other Latin American countries, new land legislations were designed seeking to standardize the relation to land, inspired by the ｦction of “perfect” property rights. Rather than a smooth transition to mobile land markets, the altiplano witnessed the expansion and consolidation of a semi-feudal hacienda system, albeit without eliminating communal socio-territorial logics. The profound restructuring of power and property relations in Andean communal territories sparked a cycle of indigenous uprising. Through archival research and ｦeldwork, my research traces the historical trajectories of highland areas where lands remained in hands of the community. I argue that far from constituting passive territories overlooked due to private and state disinterest in these semi-desert pastoral lands, I am looking at negotiated territories. These territories did not just “survive,” but are the outcome of a long history of renegotiating and reinventing territorial autonomy. Episodes of contestation provide a productive lens on such processes of (re)negotiation and (re)invention. Commodity Frontiers: What, why, how? My research triggered me to rethink the relation of (territorial) change and contestation in peripheral places to processes of globalization. In an apparently homogenising world in which land is increasingly