Enabled by a Minor Field Study scholarship from SIDA, this thesis examines indigenous involvement in ecotourism in the Ecuadorian Amazons. Indigenous people are the most marginalized social group world-wide, and coincidingly often live in resource rich pristine land. The oil-rich lands of the Amazons is called a resource frontier and is now increasingly important for the tourism sector, which comes to entail conflict of interests between the State and indigenous communities living in this area. Both the global call for sustainable development and national policies of “Buen Vivir” promotes ecotourism as an ecologically, socio-economically, and culturally sustainable activity. Scholarly opinion suggest that ecotourism generates potential tools of empowerment for the involved indigenous communities. With this backdrop and with the theoretical framework of the postcolonial debate, main opportunities and challenges are examined with the correlation of tourism ventures and socio-political implications in the local reality of indigenous organizations in Tena, Napo. Complex impediments are uncovered and analysed within the social field of indigenous ecotourism. The conviction of the study holds the call for attentive cross-cultural communication in order to continue the seemingly inevitable path of globalization in a more sustainable and non-discriminatory manner.

With the reproduction of severe deprivation among the campesinado in Latin America as a starting-point,the report explores the mechanisms of impoverishment in the eastern rural region of the department of Cauca in Colombia and the forms of resistance initiated by the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC). It is postulated that the continued existence of poverty derives its root-causes not from lacking integration of the traditional sector of the national economy into the modern sector, but from the processes through which the poor indigenous staple-food producer and agricultural worker by way of his actual participation within the capitalistic system is continously deprived of his energy and capacity by the power elite as he himself lacks the means to realize his own developmental power* Sham-participation, refering to the dysfunctionality of systemic participation performed by the poor who lack access to the bases for accumulating social power, is a concept applied to understand these mechanisms. Participation per se does not necessarily correspond to influence and power. Rather, systemic political participation can give legitimacy to the very system and to those structural conditions oppressing the indigenous small-holders and workers and consequently contributes to the consolidation of the transfer-process of power and thereby the reproduction of deprivation. Thus the poor indigenous population in Cauca cannot expect to be given access to the fundaments of social power. Thus the elements of real participation and the conditions for resisting deprivation are less likely to be obtained only through the creation of new institutions and channels for popular participation# In the case of the indigenous movement in Colombia, the problem is rather to revoke the repression of the indigenous organizations which have emerged from below and instead promote their spontaneous mobilization. / digitalisering@umu

Advocates of restorative and transitional justice practice have long drawn from practices of indigenous peoples to form the basis for more sustainable, relational, participatory, community-based approaches to conflict resolution. With the resurgence in Kazakh nationalism since the Republic of Kazakhstan independence, repatriated diasporic Kazakhs, who through cultural survival in diaspora retain more of their ethno-cultural characteristics, influence a revival of Kazakh language and culture. The purpose of this study was to understand the indigenous informal restorative conflict resolution practices of the Kazakh people. The questions that drove this study were: What indigenous informal forms of dispute resolution have been in use among Kazakhs, as reflected in their folklore and proverbs; which have continued in use among diasporic semi-nomadic Kazakh populations; and, which, if any, are restorative in nature? This ethnographic multi-case study incorporates participant observation and semi-structured interviews of participants selected through snowball sampling from among diasporic Kazakhs in, or repatriated from, China. Kazakh folklore and proverb collections were examined for conflict resolution practices and values at the family and kinship levels. Key theories used to explore the topic include Post-Colonial Theory of Sub-Altern Agency, Essentialism Theory, Soviet Ethnos Theory, and Restoration of Trust Theory. This study expands the knowledge base regarding indigenous systems of conflict resolution and contributes to the ethnography of the Kazakh people. The existence of indigenous informal restorative Kazakh systems of conflict resolution can inform reassessment and reform of public policy as to alternatives to punitive criminal justice practices.