Social Movements, State and Indigenous Autonomy Demands in Bolivia

Understanding how social movements relate to states is central to the study of collective action. The political events of the last decade in Bolivia provides an important opportunity to analyze how those relationships change once a government, that comes from social movements, is elected. We are able to follow the evolution of these relationships by focusing on the demands for indigenous autonomy elaborated by some Bolivian social movements’ organizations. In addition, the presentation aims to analyze how certain representatives of the social movements prepare the indigenous autonomy’s projects in a context where the government’s rhetoric stresses the "rebuilding” of the Bolivian state. The literature reports that the elaboration of these demands is related to the inability of the Bolivian state in meeting the needs of its population and the indigenous people’s exclusion of the political power sphere. Hence, this research also seeks to understand why this autonomy project, which has a profound questioning of state power, is reinforced among indigenous organizations, at the same time one of the projects of the national government is the inclusion of the indigenous people in the Bolivian politics and the “decolonization” of the country.