Lorenza B Fontana

• PhD
• Faculty Member at University of Turin

This paper examines how participatory theatre methods can be used to foster reconciliation and conduct research in communities affected by socio-environmental conflicts. We design and pilot a distinctive drama-based approach to conflict transformation that we call Forum Theatre for Reconciliation (FTR). The method furthers embodied intersubjective...

Since the redemocratization of much of Latin America in the 1980s and a regional wave of anti-austerity protests in the 1990s, social movement studies has become an important part of sociological, political, and anthropological scholarship on the region. The subdiscipline has framed debates about formal and informal politics, spatial and relational...

This creative intervention draws on our recent work investigating the lived experiences of poor rural communities in Bolivia’s Chiquitania, a region deeply affected by wildfires in recent years. We share learning and materials from our project, Playing with Fire, situated at the interface of and combining Boal’s model of Forum Theatre and social sc...

In this essay, we report on a 2022 creative research collaboration in which we deployed Augusto Boal’s models of Theatre of the Oppressed and Forum Theatre to generate community dialogue and action on issues sparked by ecological crisis in Bolivia’s Chiquitanía. Extremely fragile to anthropogenic action, the Chiquitanía is home to one of the world’...

This pioneering work explores a new wave of widely overlooked conflicts that have emerged across the Andean region, coinciding with the implementation of internationally acclaimed indigenous rights. Why are groups that have peacefully cohabited for decades suddenly engaging in hostile and, at times, violent behaviours? What is the link between thes...

Forests have re-taken centre stage in global conversations about sustainability, climate and biodiversity. Here, we use a horizon scanning approach to identify five large-scale trends that are likely to have substantial medium- and long-term effects on forests and forest livelihoods: forest megadisturbances; changing rural demographics; the rise of...

The 189 Convention Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers is considered a key example of the ongoing process of convergence between labour rights and human rights. This article offers an empirically grounded assessment and a novel contentious politics perspective on its implementation in the Philippines. It argues that, while the convergence b...

Policy initiatives that seek to account for ethno-cultural differences in education and schooling have become increasingly popular over the past few decades. These include affirmative action measures and bilingual education models. The rationale for the implementation of these policies focuses on their potential to rectify historical discrimination...

Latin America witnessed the election of 'new Left' governments in the early twenty-first century that, in different ways, sought to open a debate about alternatives to paradigms of neoliberal development. What has this meant for how human rights are understood and for patterns of human rights compliance? Using qualitative and quantitative evidence,...

Our book began with the principal objective of exploring the scalar politics of how marginalized social groups demand justice in the Global South. We presented six empirical case studies, which demonstrate how organized and everyday forms of resistance emerge and are played out. These forms of resistance take vastly differing approaches to building...

The condition of marginalization that characterizes certain social groups is one of the main constraints for their active participation in social and political life as well as for their possibility to claim rights. Yet, across different countries and continents, marginal groups do mobilize. This book is about the politics of claiming rights and the...

This article explores the reception of human rights norms on child labour in Bolivia and Argentina, countries where governments and civil societies express support for human rights. Yet national responses after ratification of International Labor Organization's conventions diverge significantly. In Bolivia domestic interpretations of human rights h...

The politics of claiming rights and strategies of mobilisation exhibited by marginalised social groups lie at the heart of this volume. Theoretically, the authors aims to foster a holistic and multi-faceted understanding of how social and economic justice is claimed, either through formal, corporatist or organised mechanisms, or through ad hoc, inf...

Desde 2014, Bolivia es el único país que permite expresamente el trabajo infantil a partir de los diez años, lo cual viola los convenios de la Organización Internacional del Trabajo (oit). El debate que precedió la reforma del Código Niña, Niño y Adolescente muestra numerosas complejidades y matices, tanto con respecto a los actores movilizados com...

This article explores the challenges of ethnic-based participation and its potential for creating inclusive and effective forms of decision-making for marginalized social groups. Empirically, it examines a recent attempt to establish more participative forms of resource and development governance for indigenous communities in Bolivia through Free P...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) herald a new phase for international development. This article presents the results of a consultative exercise to collaboratively identify 100 research questions of critical importance for the post-2015 international development agenda. The final shortlist is grouped into nine thematic areas and was selected...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) herald a new phase for international development. This article presents the results of a consultative exercise to collaboratively identify 100 research questions of critical importance for the post-2015 international development agenda. The final shortlist is grouped into nine thematic areas and was selected...

On the 25 – 27 September 2015, the Post-2015 Development Agenda will be launched at a meeting of the United Nations (UN) Summit in New York. The outcome of this process will be to define the future global development framework that will succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In this crucial phase for the for the global development agenda,...

International human rights agreements promote rights-based norms as a guide for policymaking. But the appropriateness and legitimacy of these norms is sometimes questioned in local contexts, where they can generate disagreement as to their meaning and implementation. Convention 182 of the International Labour Organization (ILO) led to a global comm...

With a new development framework under way and an increasingly urgent need to address political, socioeconomic and environmental issues on a global scale, this is a critical moment for the international development agenda. Almost 15 years after the Millennium Declaration, a new phase for international development is about to begin and, with it, com...

This article explores processes of identity-building and claims-making by rural social groups in the context of recent multicultural and plurinational reforms in Bolivia, focusing on an analysis of the narrative apparatus that underpins a paradigmatic land conflict between an indigenous organization and a peasant union in the Bolivian Amazon. The i...

In the Shadow of Recognition: Identity Politics and Social Conflict in Bolivia The recent political and constitutional reforms that gave birth to a new plurinational state model in Bolivia took place in the framework of a larger international debate over the “indigenous question”. Drawing upon a multidisciplinary and diachronic perspective as well...

Over the last two decades Latin America has been a laboratory for the implementation of new models of state and citizenship. In Bolivia the (neo)liberal multicultural paradigm dominant in the 1990s has recently been replaced by a plurinational paradigm, which implies a deepening of the decentralization process and the strengthening of rights for tr...

Agrarian reforms do not constitute linear processes: rather, they are based on the interconnection between the crystallization of land governance in formal tenure rules and the way societies organize around a set of identities and power mechanisms. This paper focuses on how the misinterpretation of this two-way relationship, in setting up a new nor...

Since Morales's election, rural movements have become the new protagonists of Bolivian politics. Previous analyses have emphasised their active role in shaping national politics, often focusing on those organisations as a compact block. However, their relationship is marked by both cooperation and fragmentation. This article provides a narrative of...

Since the crisis of October 2003, better known as the "Gas War", the Bolivian political system has been shaken by two movements: the rural peasant-indigenous, movement embodied by the coca-growers leader and current president Evo Morales, and the regionalist movement led by the elites of the Eastern departments. Relying upon two researches on confl...

Bolivia is living a moment of transition that has raised expectations of a profound transformation of the state–civil-society relationship and of conflict dynamics. The Movimiento al Socialismo has promoted the direct participation of previously excluded sectors in public affairs and the integration of the traditional practices of indigenous groups...

El conflicto en torno a la construcción de una carretera que atravesaría el Territorio Indígena del Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS), desatado en agosto de 2011, ha marcado un momento de ruptura en las relaciones entre el gobierno boliviano y los movimientos sociales, y entre las propias organizaciones. En este artículo se proporcionan algun...

On 18 th December 2012, Evo Morales celebrated his seventh anniversary as president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. In 2005, this Aymara coca growers' union leader was elected for the first time, with the support of social movements and, in particular, of the peasant and indigenous sectors, inaugurating a moment of political transition that...

Over the last three decades, the theoretical debate on citizenship as well as many experiences of political change have been highly influenced by a new paradigm, which emphasizes the value and need to recognize and protect ethno-cultural diversity (Charles Taylor, Axel Honneth and Will Kymlicka are some of the most significant representatives of th...

Bolivia seems to be cyclically heading further down into the abyss and stopping right on the verge of a major freefall. Social conflict is characterized by radical forms of collective action beyond the usual means of negotiation. During Morales" era this general pattern of conflict has developed to revolve around new axis. Together with old structu...

Wars have changed in recent times in many ways, not least because of the role played in warfare by the media and communication technologies. The ‘art of war’ has inevitably felt the consequences of the information revolution that has left traces in all spheres of social life and in every part of the world. Various phrases have been invented to desc...

Wars have changed in recent times in many ways, not least because of the role played in warfare by the media and communication technologies. The 'art of war' has inevitably felt the consequences of the information revolution that has left traces in all spheres of social life and in every part of the world. Various phrases have been invented to desc...

Nel gennaio 2006, il Movimento per l’Emancipazione del Delta del Niger (MEND) si presenta al mondo con una e-mail in cui rivolge intimidazioni alle multinazionali petrolifere presenti nell’area del Delta del Niger e minaccia il governo nigeriano di ridurre a zero la capacità di esportazione di greggio. Da questo momento, si susseguono azioni di sab...