Leslie Johns 0:00

I'm Leslie Johns. I'm here today in my capacity as Associate Director of the Burkle Center, which is sort of the facilitator of the event. You know, if it takes a crowded community to have planetary democracy, it takes four units to organize a talk at UCLA. So we have many people to thank. First of all, we have Tejas Parasher, who's representing the Department of Political Scientists, Political Science. And as chair Davide Panagia, who are the main facilitators of today's talk, as well as the main funders. So thank you so much to both of them. John Agnew from the Department of Geography, who's actually the brainchild who came up with the idea of inviting Paulina. So who knew that a geographer loved political theory. So thank you so much for coming up with the idea of this interdisciplinary event. We also want to think Ted Parsons from the law school, who's director of the Emmet Institute on Climate Change and Environment, quite a long title indeed. So our speaker Paulina Ochoa Espejo, like many brilliant people spent significant time at Johns Hopkins where she obtained her PhD, and is currently a professor of Political Science at Haverford College. She has held many prestigious positions and fellowships at Yale, Princeton, Sita, and the Institute for Advanced Study, many impressive articles and books, but probably came to the attention of most of us. And certainly, I think John and me through her recent 2020 book On Borders: Territories, Legitimacy and the Rights of Place, which puts forth a watershed model of borders, which I think has become very influential in many different disciplines, including political science, geography, law, as well. And she's here today to talk about her new book project, which is grounded in Spanish colonial wall from Latin America. All I know is what I read on her website, but it certainly sounds very promising, indeed, seems grounded and interdisciplinary work. I look forward to hearing about it. Paulina has asked that we refrain from interrupting too much, that she's welcome to take to taking clarifying questions. But that in terms of more substantive questions that we hold back from interrupting too much, and Tejas will be managing Q&A afterwards. Should people indicate if they want to get into a queue? How would you like to manage that?

Tejas Parasher 2:58

Yeah, I mean

Leslie Johns 2:59

Any directions?

You know, obviously, it's a very interdisciplinary audience. We all come from different traditions. So we'll all just sort of do our best to get along and manage our differences. And thank you to the political theorists for letting us all crash your Friday afternoons. So thank you very much.

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 3:21

Thank you so much. So okay, let me get going. And this is, Leslie mentioned that political theories usually circulate the paper in advance, but this one is not circulated in advance. It's like three different pieces of writing. So I hope that it all comes together. So what I'm presenting is introductory ideas of this new book on territorial rights and democracy, specifically, it's a form of democracy that I call planetary. I'm not the only one. You might have heard it in other places. And it's a work in progress. So I'm really looking forward to hearing your, your opinion and your questions. And I will elaborate, of course, but just to anticipate, planetary democracy sustains a plural place base form of democracy, that apply to equal social systems rather to define populations in sovereign territorial states, or even in international communities. So today, democracy it obviously faces this dual challenge, the collective pressures of climate change and human mobility. And as we know, climate change will create mass migration. And that will change the shape of everything. So obviously, democracies will have to change their economies fundamentally, while they try to redefine who are the people. So my project is to turn to contemporary local movements in Latin America and to the history of Spanish American Political Thought, which have been interested all my life, to study how pueblos claim a right to control their natural resources. And the idea here is to learn something that will allow us to respond to some of the impasses in democratic theory in the planetary scale. Pueblos, by the way, are grounded and I choose to call them grounded communities. They are I'll say more about them that they're very important in Mexico and other parts of Spanish America. So I will spend a few minutes. So in the talk is divided in four parts. And first, I'm going to present the question and how it's related to democracy and why it matters in terms of planetary crisis. And the second part, I describe the alternative mainstream theories of territorial rights, I promise not to bore you too much. They're mostly like Lockean and Kantian views. In the third part, I talk about the contemporary movement of pueblos' defence of water and territory. And I tried to understand their views on territorial rights, both from a historical perspective, and also from a normative perspective. And then, I explained how pueblos when they assert their grounded communities rights, they do so in terms of place, and they can help us to think of a way to deal with solutions that distort democracy. And also that way respond to the pressures of mobility and climate change. Not all of them, of course, but you know, likes to be elaborate. Pueblos allows us to imagine distinct places as connected across with each other in terms of sustainability, specifically in terms of water. And this, I hope, can pave the way towards what I will call a planetary democracy. Okay, so let's start with the nature of the problem. And I'll do so with an example. So let me take you to a place close to where I grew up in Mexico City. It's a town. And it's a mountain village that has been engulfed by urban growth in Mexico City in the last 30 years. That's a very bad picture because I took it. But it sort of looks like that. And so the town is now an urban neighborhood. It's in the Southwest of the city about 15 miles from the center. If you have been to Mexico City, that's San Bartolo. And it's like about that close to Mexico City, La Condesa. You may know about that, and it's about 15 miles. If you've ever been, you know, anyway, you may imagine how it looks. It's like the peripheries of the city, sort of grow on the side. But in May 2014, either went too fast that there was a violent confrontation between the neighbors or a group of residents in San Bartolo and Mexico City Police. So the police were protecting city workers and the city workers were digging trenches for a new hydraulic system. And the system was intended to pump water from an aquifer that is in this part of the town. And the aquifer had traditionally been managed by traditional local authorities. Traditional meaning like I'll say more about it but not like the legal authorities. The city government asserted their city's right to the water, which the official claims was intended for neighborhoods that don't have access to the water drain. The locals however, and this was picked up in the press, said that the aquifer would be contaminated by the connection to the grid. They didn't say exactly how or why it would be contaminated, but also that the water was really intended and not intended for the other neighborhoods. But it was intended for the new development condominiums and high rises in the new the development of Santa Fe, which is very close to San Bartolo. So the present emphasized the economic differences between San Bartolo and Santa Fe, San Bartolo of course is a poor town, Santa Fe it's rich neighbor. And so the issue of water, of course, in Mexico City is complex. It's fascinating. You know, like Mexico City is one of the biggest urban areas in the world. It has 21 million people. And it's located in a landlocked water basin. So the basin used to contain a lagoon, but now it's mostly dry. And in the last few years, the city has a couple of times come very close to day zero. So that's the moment when the city runs out of water. So Mexico City's authorities have been trying to drain the basin since before the time of colonization. And the city goes through periodic cycles of flooding, and drought. So this is like a reconstruction of the lagoon over the centuries. Of course, they're not pictures because nobody was taking pictures in 1350. But I mean, it does. This could be a picture, right? So like, it used to be a lagoon. Not all the water was like sweet water, most of it like part of it could not be drunk. Anyway, as fascinating as it is, and it has been fascinating for a long time. This is the the rigorous mural in the national policy in Mexico City that depicts the descriptions of the city before the Spanish colonization in the 16th century. Anyway, as fascinating as it is, and many people think so, the research that I'm trying to do is not strictly about the history of water in Mexico City, or even about the particular conflict that I started with. What I'm concerned is with the theoretical questions that come up, when you think about this, so it's not about the concrete characteristics or the particular political problems, but about the theoretical problems that the conflict brings up. So, many individuals in San Bartolo call themselves a community. And they organize to resist the state's use of natural resources in that area. So they believe that they have a right to the water. And they have a right to exclude Mexico city authorities from their territory. Now on what grounds? So clearly, the government of Mexico City disagrees, and so doesn't Mexican federal government, because legally the inhabitants of San Bartolo do not have the right over the water. So this is not a legal question. It's a political question and ethical question. And, as you saw before, that press emphasize economic differences. And I think that that's how international like most international observers would like to frame the conflict, in economic terms. But as, I'll explain this was actually not the town's main claim. So who should have right to territory? Who's the subject who shouldn't have those rights? That's what I'm trying to figure out. So in the last decade in political importance, like in political philosophy, mostly, there has been a heated debate over the question of territorial rights in and I tried to join this debate in On Borders in the book that Leslie mentioned before. But this may also seem surprising, because I think that is central to democracy and democratic theory. And that's why I chose to frame it in terms of the struggle between populism and liberal democratic theory that I think actually hinges on the question of territorial rights. So this is not obvious. But let me try to explain why. Up to first year, the picture just told you the story. So since 2016, we have been hearing about the crisis of democracy, which is obviously connected to the rise of populism across the world. And for decades now, many popular demands have not been met by liberal institutions. So in Mexico, there was a financial crisis in 1994. They have financial crises all the time, but the one that matters, is in 94', and the state bailed out the banks and the companies and not the workers. Right. So this generated much resentment, and brought two decades of political change. And something similar, as you know, happened in United States in 2008. So many associate the discourse that justifies liberal institutions with economic liberalism and economic inequality. The result is estrangement from liberal institutions and their promise of self government seems impossible to fulfill and eventually, legitimatly suffers. So this goes hand in hand with the rise of populism, which makes it a renewal of the people at central goal. Of course, there are many explanations of the rise of populism, I dealt with that a lot as well. And so you I know that you may disagree with this particular account. But all the explanations, or all the accounts of populism, have an aspect that cannot be overlooked, which is that populism has at its center, the question of exclusion, and who is excluded and who ought to be excluded from the people in our democracy that's central to all forms of populism. Who count as the people who govern themselves, or bring legitimacy? Who are the Americans that will make America great again? Who are the Britons whose dignity had to be rested from European bureaucrats? That kind of thing? So I think that a core of these questions about the crisis of democracy, there are group boundaries. Some of these are the boundaries of identity. And this is how political scientists think about. But there are also physical borders, of course. Right? So there are territories, and there are territories with rights associated with this. Who decides? That's, that's a big question here, who decides who's an American who's of region, you, of course can appeal to nationality, you can appeal to legal citizenship, this is the way that people have doing it, you can appeal to nationality you can appeal to race. But in societies where there are many residents, who are neither citizens nor part of uniform ethnic groups, many turn to the physical border of the state to establish the boundaries of the people and to determine who's eligible for citizenship. Right? So the territory tells you who are the people that ought to be part of the opposite. And, of course, territorial rights are not only about jurisdiction, they're not only about natural resources, what is important control are also central to territorial rights. So territorial rights include the right to exclude people. There are just two people from the territory and to decide then who's part of the teams, who's part of the people. This relative to return rights to populist discourse is obvious if you think what happens. And the main challenges that populism poses to liberal institution is that demand to control immigration. So this is how I think that territorial rights are the elephant in the room of the politics of populism. And to see this consider how populists tried to redefine the identities and restructure the demos on exactly on these grounds, right. So now populism, don't seek and look at these people as a totality of the citizens or the residents. So instead, what they do is that they define the people as us. So it like it can be anything. It's just us, the good people. And then then the corrupt elites, or their means, you know, it can be foreigners, migrants, ethnic others, whatever. So what populism is doing is constructing the people by excluding around their preferred identity. And these can be race, ethnicity, or religion, or basically, sometimes it's just simply the desire of the leader. But they can use these boundaries to redefine the scope of politics. But they're keenly aware that the territory the border signals, the need of exclusion. And the most important part, I think, is that they know that their main, their main adversaries, the liberals, really need territory to use it as the ground of exclusion. So populism, fans the flames of the Identitarian belonging like that, but crucially pueblos use the border to point out that liberal institutions also rely on territory to justify exclusion. So that's, that's the, you know, that they don't do it, right. So even the most liberal political institutions will have those boundaries. So when when liberal institutions, try to reply to the Populists, for example, they would say, in the US, for example, you will say like, no, no, like the people is not the White nation. That's not what we say, when we talk about the people. The people is all of us, we all count, no matter a race or ethnicity or social class, that would be the liberal response, right? But then what you would say, okay, so what do you mean by all of us? I mean, it can be all of us in the universe, of course. It cannot be like an Argentinian who's now in Kenya, that doesn't count. So it has to be all of us what? All of us here, right? The people in the country is never all of us. It's all of us here. But this is the key, if they exclude on the basis of us here, and they don't want to exclude without any good reason. We're talking about the Liberals now. They must have a right to the territory that they hold and from which they explore. Because otherwise, like, what is the good reason that you're doing it should be that you have a right to this territory that you're killing people. So clearly, liberals institution also exclude but why the populace have xenophobic or racist discourse that is tailored for that exclusion? Liberals don't have the arguments for this question besides those that rely on territory. So that's why I think that territorial rights is so important, particularly for liberal institutions. Now, these will become much of a problem because climate change makes it obvious that the territorial limits of states are not impermeable. And so this is flooding in Pakistan. And it hasn't been a year I think events like this one show that, like we can't really trace the borders. Like according to jurisdictions that way we have done for many years. It shows that humans are codependent that economic activities influence on others that the water and air and climate cannot be separated into blocks. And territory does not separate interests or concerns or obligations as much as liberal states would suggests, right? So, on the one hand, the populist have responded to the challenge of climate change by doubling down on nationalism, and channeling all concerns into the fear of the climate refugees. But you know, the story, I'm not gonna repeat it exactly how they like the ones that do want to engage climate change would go about it, but it's like, based on on exclusion. And on the other hand, many liberal Democrats undermined the liberal state institutions legitimacy further, because they use state borders to uphold what seems to very many like unjustified exclusions, right? Or what grounds up, keep people out so many things that there are explicit arrangements to benefit corporations, etc, etc. You have also heard that other side of the story. Now, my concern is mostly how both populism and liberalism are seen as unable to deal with the challenges of immigration and climate change. And that both positions can be seen as a way of undermining democracy. Now, I think that the fact that they share the problem, and this is what I want to go shows that they're not really these two ideological forces that are dominant. The fact that they share this problem shows that there's actually a third, I mean, there might be met very many, but there's at least another position that sees them as having the same traits. And this other position is the one that I wanted to bring up today. So the challenge of climate change shows that there are at least three global mainstream positions which produce three different kinds of claims about democracy. So there's first populism, then liberal democracy, including institutions such as party systems, economic liberalism, sometimes, well depends on who's talking about it. But yes, those two and beyond those two, there's a series of groups and demands that are first appear independent and unarticulated. But in fact, search shared several trends. And I think that they may be an incipient translational movement. So I think that they might point to some planetary democracy claims. Now, these are the things that I see that ideological elements that they might have in common, which are the master self determination, and non domination of community that are not sub national, but rather organized independently of the nation state.

And they describe the affected communities not just in terms of their ethnic or political identity, but in terms of places. And they don't frame this places as property of a national group, but rather in terms of sustainability, such that they define the object of concern as a relation, or as a network of relations within a self sustaining system that includes people, animals, geological features, and eco social unit. And sometimes they portray themselves as anti extractivist. And they are seeking to stop exploitation of natural resources. And they make connections with other such groups with similar demands in other places. So you may have seen a lot of these kinds of headlines all over the place. Some of it is grassroots, some of it is put forward by the media, but there's multiple. Now, I want to see if there's something in here that is worth squeezing. I see the conflict is said about so long as mapping into this kind of discourse. And sometimes this is presented in the media. And I think that the trend deserves more empirical research. And there's a lot of people doing empirical research on that. It's a very interesting, but I also think that it deserves theoretical engagement. And that's what I want to do. So. Let's see. Remember, I think that the reason why I want to see is that I see something here that could be the basis of planetary democracy. I don't claim that they have it, are they putting it forward? I think that they might give me ideas or they might give other people who are interested in these things, ideas on how to build it. So so let's see what are the alternative theories of territory? What are the ones that are out there? So like, the question is, who has territorial rights? And what is the right relationship between the subjects? Then who's the land and the resources? That's the janitorial part and the legitimacy of rules. So the right, so my specific question, what I'm mostly interested in, it's in the hope. So a typical theory of territory and territorial rights will offer you an explanation. And the normative account of how the people, the place and the set of institutions are connected to each other, right. So a good theory will often a plausible account of why there are rights over land, who is the rights holder, and why the particular subject has a connection to this particular land. And that last bit is the one that is the most complicated. So today, there's like two mainstream theories. And I will call them the Lockean and the Kantian. You can see where I'm going. They are different, but they share what they think they think of territorial rights using individual private property. As a model, there are historical reasons why they think this way. But this is like basically, that's, that's the view. And that model roughly says that there's a subject, a person or a group that owns a thing. And by owning, I mean that the owner has a complete set or a bundle of rights, as the lawyer say, they have rights, privileges and powers over this thing, including the power to sell. So that's when that model of individual private property is applied to territorial rights, the thing is the land. And just like the plot of land that is surrounded by the white picket fence, and it is distinctive and clear defined area over the surface of the earth. So the big difference between the theories is how they define the owner. So the individualist, the Lockean model is individualist here. And in this account, individuals have a natural right over their property. And what they do is that they eventually will build a state aggregating their lands by concept. So you know, like, think of the Western, the American homesteader and the individual that takes the land and build Senate, and then they create a country. And it's an individual. Then there's the status account, and that's the Kantian model. So here is the public or a civic people that owns a territory. So territory is legitimate if government is. So the corresponding image is that of, of government that justifies territory because you uphold political and legal. Now, it may seem that the difficulty is, and this is, this is what, what I wanted to get out, you may see that in here, the difficulties arise because there's like the public and the private. And when they say that the media and the press all over, try to frame it in terms of individual like the rich, private, and the public in their conflict in Mexico City. And in many other places, they tried to frame it in terms of individual in the public eye, but in here, in fact, they share the same problem. The problem that this book, both these models of territorial rise up is that they cannot really account for a meaningful connection between the subject, individual and collective, and the object, the land. So the Lockean accounts relies on private property to establish the connection. But okay, it gets a little complicated, and it might get a little boring, but the idea is that individuals will get together and create a state. But to do that, they need to have a title. So they need the state to be there. Alright. So that creates a problem. If you start with the state, then you have a similar problem, because the state justifies itself, because it allows individuals to deal with conflicts of private property. But that means as well that there would already be private property and the state is helping individuals to so in a way, this state and the institutions here, both our principles and their results of having private so I can come back to the is to explain why there is a problem. But then main problem here is that there's not really a meaningful connection between the subject. And there is when you're saying that there's private property, but then you you lack the legal element. Because the state is not there already. And you don't know why this is yours rather than somebody else's. So the problem with the contents, it can be seen when you see colonialism, because you may have a very well run state with an excellent government. But the fact that there's not a meaningful connection between the colonial government and the man makes it illegitimate. And most people would accept that our government imposed on our place or population is legitimate, because there's not a meaningful connection between the very good government and the actual and the land itself. So so this is the problem that you keep on finding the theories of territorial rights that are out there. And in, and this is where I think that pueblos can offer an alternative. So let me make a new side to say what pueblos do. If you're an American, like most of you are, if you hear Pueblo, you probably hear indigenous people in the southwest, such as the Hopi, who are inheritors of the Anasazi cultures, and their name is Pueblo, but they get their Pueblo from the Spanish term for time. So it's actually the it's because of those like beautiful adobe houses and that are like Pueblos. So in most people in the world that speak Spanish, Pueblo is not an identity is it's a place where it's a word that can be used to describe any village. But the Latin name for Pueblo also refers to the populace. So it also means a people. So in Spanish, a Pueblo can be both a town or and the people and this ambiguity is crucial to what I want to say. So in the conflict inside matola. The slogan was el agua de el pueblo no se vende. So this can be translated as the people's water is not for sale. And a whole bunch of people saw it and read it that way.

But if you pay attention, and you speak Spanish, and you pay attention to these the el pueblo, it's not the water of the people but of the town, that el part. So this would be more accurately translated as the town's water is not for sale. So in pueblo here, it does not mean the people it means the town. And that's precisely what the people in San Bartolo wants it to say. And there's a huge difference between the two. Because if it's the right of the people, then it could be depending on how you frame it. It could be all the folk, or it could be all the poor people. Or it could be all the members on an indigenous group, or perhaps all the Mexicans, they have a right to the water. But here the assumption is that the conflict was between Mexico City or the Mexican federal government, against a pueblo against the town of San Bartolo Ameyalco. So whereas the people that populism creates and relies on it's a vague collection of individuals that are opposed to the elites, or the foreigners, or what have you, and none of these elements are present here, el pueblo as the town, it's a collective subject that is not really listed among the options of territorial rights holders that in Anglo American political theory and basically, standard political theory, come up. So this is interesting, because now we are not talking about the public and the individuals. So the pueblo is geographic is designed as a collective subjects. It's a grounded community, it communally governance resources, but it also contains private property, it's complicated. So el pueblo is not an individual subject that can own private property. But it's also not a public, it's not a people, it's not a state. So in San Bartolo Ameyalco actually the conflict was between a Pueblo, the town, and individual property owners in the high rises. And the people, the Mexican Emery was against the Mexican people. And he was against the Mexican state. So it's important against this other subject. So am I again, as I was saying, there are people in the town have private ownership, and they some of them actually have private ownership of the water but they all of them as a as a community want to keep it from the public distribution of the network of the city controls. So again, there's not private responsibly, though between, on the one hand, the criminal authorities, and on the other hand on all the others, right. So the main concern is not deciding between private individuals, but the public, but rather, and this is where I think it gets exciting is the scope of the public. Who represents that common when we talk about the common good? Like, who are they? And where we also open up the difficulty and conventional theories of territorial rights and put forward a third possible subject besides individuals and states. Now, people are Mexican and Spanish America, agree or disagree with the idea that if whoever owns the water, in fact, a lot of people think that there should be private property that pueblo streams are atavistic. Many people think that pueblos are backward and the state should be dealing with this. But even if they disagree, both from the perspective of the state or from the perspective of the individuals, they understand that the purpose or making a claim, so they understand that they have something going on, so they recognize them as a subject of territorial rights. So my, I actually, I have a recent paper in. Okay, that's what I wanted to say before. I had a recent paper there where in perspectives what what I tried to argue is that, yes, pueblos historically have territorial rights. So let me tell you a little bit about the historical plan. Because you can see how it gets to the, to the, to the normative. So the purpose both a town and the people, and that's why I call it grounded community, because if both town people, I, if you can think of a better term one that is like, you know, I'm still at the moment in which I get changed. So ideas are, were accepted. And they're usually a village, and many of them are indigenous. And there's a historical reason for this. Indigenous people either gathered after the epidemics, or were forced into pueblos across the Americas in the 16th century. And the pueblo was one of the main forms of political organization with the Spanish colonial order. So in in Mexico, specifically, in the parts where there was the Aztec empire, the cities were very powerful even before the arrival of Spaniards. So this is a glyph in our writing, that depicts the sea. So this is the glyph, which means the water mountain. So now was, which are the people that you may know, perhaps as the Aztecs, that's the name that became more common in these were city states that were in tributary kingdoms to that to the Triple Alliance of the Aztecs. And they, because their name is water mountain, we can assume that they were, like fundamentally related to land and water. And they claim something akin to what we would call territorial jurisdiction. So I may Dalco, is now designated as a pueblo de Janerio center, and which means that it descends from pre colonial capital. So now, I've just a little bit that this is the glyph for a modality, where the water flows. And this is the glyph for a medal for I couldn't find one that it was drawn. This is like another one because it has like a chair pulling on it. But this is the glyph for me. And this like the towns is still keep their toponymic lifts. And there have been periodic revivals of them, but they still recognize themselves as having their traditional name. So during colonial times as the payment preserved their existence by making legal claims within the colonial order, which recognize them as well. And they litigated their rights, through the ambiguities of Spanish colonial law, and then later through the law of independent Mexico, and they have been periodic revivals of indica nyssma, or state based reimagining of indigenous claims. And some of these were very important during the Mexican Revolution in the 20th century. So even pre Hispanic times communities that were defined collectively to pursue from personal obligations to the king. But as as dependent we became pueblos during colonial era in this political relations where, and this is interesting were redefined in terms of space, not in terms of identity. So you can see this in some early colonial documents. Here's one of the most interesting the memorial, and here the inhabitants write to the Spanish king petition to lower the taxes and denounce the abuses of the people who were charged off evangelizing, and secure the income and data show collecting taxes, they were not having fun. But in the document, this is what I wanted to get out. They also described the territorial claims as claims made by abuela. So in the map depicts the turn of the last talk in relation to the other that have their own glyphs to tell you what their their names are. So they were understood to be independent, and to have territorial rights. And so if we can come back to more details about this, if you're curious, and how they're called, et cetera. But what I find interesting is that through these kinds of legal documents, and other forms of litigation, the native splendid, the legal and ethical idea of the city, because in the Spanish law, and specifically what is called the Spanish legislation that said emerged around the costumes in the colonies. So the idea of the city was understood as a stronghold of mutual support. And so Spanish legislation in the 18th century, created a new legal definition of pueblos, which were not ethnic, but reinforce obligations to places rather than the traditional kin groups. So they were redefined as territorial entities and justify for the good of their political community that was defined locally. What sustain a town was not the ethnic community, or the ethnic continuity of inhabitants, are the relations to their leaders for the mutual relations that were mediated by place, and the good of the community, which was also the good of the place. That is its economic activities, which would have been closely connected, of course, with land at the time, because these were agricultural communities. And in the same happen, many communities were different. We can get into that later. But the agricultural communities for sure. Pueblo that was defined by mutual obligations, that arise in a given place in specific circumstance. So this, I have called somewhere else play specific duties. And what I think distinguishes place specific duty from other such duties is let me put it in contrast, because it's easier to understand. When you have obligations, and and we tend to think of obligation, political obligations, by similarity with obligations to kids and family. So you have an obligation to your children, or to your mom, because of who you are, right? So it doesn't matter of where you are in the universe, you have obligations to the people who are close to you. Like, as soon as I finish, my mom is gonna call me and she's gonna ask me how I would want to be nice. And that happens wherever I am giving a talk anyway, is however, and actually, this was very useful to me to explain, there are other of obligations that you have to people depending on where you are, the physical location to them. So that's why I was saying that the whole mask makes it very easy for me to explain. You don't have an obligation to wear a mask, unless you're actually physically close to somebody, obviously, you know, because their relation that might be of danger, or continuing whatever obligation you have is determined by your physical, the physical nearness, so you have an obligation to wear a mask if you're close. And if you're not, you don't have it, right. So there are these obligations that are defined by place. And there are special obligations, as philosophers say, in the sense that they are not universal. You have a universal duty to every human being certain circumstances, but not here. And they also only depend on physical nearness. So in pointless, and you traditionally have and still have the type of obligations that create community not in terms of identity, but in terms of closeness, their obligations to neighbors, and you have obligations to the people that live next to you. So for example, if you live on a hillside, you have an obligation to not let like things roll down and kill people down the hill, right and downstream obligations upstream and downstream are these typical kinds of obligations. So these political relations that's mediated by place seems to have been a standing practice throughout the Spanish Indies and even in the cities. So for example, it during the colonial era, a person was taxed in a place where he was domiciled, and considered neighbor. And it was residence and domicile that decided who acquired the benefits and burdens and not identity or ethnicity. So not only pueblos, but also cities, this is, for example, Mexico City celebration for the arrival of the viceroy, and they were often of mixed ethnicities, but they were organized by this horizontal place-based connections. So pueblos' territorial rights, then have this fascinating history. And they're also interesting from what I think is the normative political theory perspective, because they can give you these ideas about how to solve some of these problems that I described in the dominant contemporary theories of territorial rights, and eventually might lead us to some ideas for democracy. So as I was saying, before, you know, in the part where people usually get bored to death, the Lockean and Kantean theories cannot satisfactorily explain why a particular community has a right to this particular territory. But pueblos can relatively, and so can neighborhoods. Because unlike individuals or city centers, pueblos are always already spatial entities. So it's not only because they're located in a specific place, but also because they are defined by particular kinds of activities. So you can see this as commercial activities in cities of the market, but in pueblos, this were communal activities that were sustained agricultural, in a particular ecological niche. So this, this is, this is quite nice in particularly in Mexico City and area. But because it was a place that flooded, there were all these hydraulic works, and so every community had to cooperate in how they farmed the land in order to keep the place from flooding. So this is called a chinampas, which is a particular kind of structure in which people farm. And they actually, I mean, they're not gone, they actually were around in the 19th century, but they're still around today. This is how it looks today. I mean, they're pretty much gone, but there's still some of them in the free side. These activities historically determined the spatial limits of towns and explain how people relate to the place through these obligations that I mentioned before. So you have these relations of mutual aid that are coordinated by political authorities but they're not defined differently than collective circuits in a nation or ethnic communities. They emerge because you have this web of mutual obligation that only arise in specific places. These webs connect individual individuals with all the others without necessarily going through the center. Right. So I have more examples of the early days later on, but I want to get through to the grounded communities of planetary democracy. So in pueblos, the foundation that makes individual and collective action possible, so they take rounded communities, they are the natural standpoint from which both individual action and state organization derive. So in pueblos a wet of this relation of mutual obligation underpins how the pueblo works. And this relation depends on productive activities that form the land and the social and symbolic order around them. I think that, I don't know if they're superior to states or nations or individuals as the subject of territorial rights, although it's quite obvious that I sympathize, right, but and I think that what I want to get to is that pueblos may be able to deal differently with the problems that arise when you try to create people by ethnic or identitarian links, specifically the problems of related to migration and climate crisis. So I think that they can give substance to what some other theorists have been called, like this include people like James Tolley or David Held and David Owen for Bona Thermon, they cal it planetary democracy. So of course, the pueblo is characteristically Mexican, but pueblos can share characteristic with other territorial claims throughout the hemisphere and pehaps across the world. So what what they claim is that they want to be plural, rather than universal. They don't want a single solution, they weren't individual solutions, that may be linked, but they have to be plural. So these are the separatistas. But it's a good slogan [Spanish phrase], "we want a world where many worlds are possible." So they're also playing space, rather than an identity base. Of course, many people will think that you cannot have politics without identity-place relations. But many of these places are actually place-space, like the ones that I described juts now. And they're not few, I mean, there's a lot of things going on. And, finally, the place where they occur are not jurisdictions defined by states, and they're not jurisdictions defined by individual private property. They are jurisdictions defined by eco-social systems, they're the places where you have the kind of economic activities that protect the land. So it's not states or international institutions or global communities. And I just want to close by saying that I think that water is particularly promising as as a way of thinking about what could link the plural communities across or beyond time and space, you know. Not as states because what gives legitimacy to states is the continuity of an identity, but I think that one thing that could gives continuity is the idea of water sustainability, because in protecting water, or making water available is something that connects everybody everywhere on Earth. But it's also deeply local, because you have to have infrastructure, because you have to have the kind of ecosystem that reproduces water. And because you have a deep meaning, that is local to the place. So I think that from, from a theoretical perspective, but also mostly from a symbolic perspective, water is one of the very important ways in which you can make the connection across the plural without immediately sliding into the universal. And I'll just leave it at that, and if there are many other details we can figure them out. Thank you. Thank you.

Tejas Parasher 52:48

Excellent. So we now have the floor open to any questions.

Leslie Johns 52:52

So so I'm obviously you know, not a political theorists, I approach this more from a political economy perspective. And it didn't really come together for me until section three, which I think was really helpful. But But what occurs to me is that, you know, when I teach undergraduates and graduate students, one of the topics that we talk about in political economy, is talking about how we talked about the origins of political institutions, is how you create cooperation and political societies. And I'm thinking about sort of fundamental models of thinking about things like the law merchant paper of Milgrom, North, and Weingast as sort of a justification for the creation of political institutions. And when you were talking about the Pueblos, and I don't recall, I was taking notes, as you were talking about the exact wording that you were using, it brought to mind sort of a lot of the of the work in economics and international relations, talking about sort of reputational based models of cooperation. And so it seems to me that, that, I think that if you if you want it to go in this direction, there's there is quite a lot of work in economics and international relations that you could that you could build upon in terms of talking about sort of the the ability to sustain cooperation in communities that lack formal political institutions. And it's somewhat ironic because you're talking about democracy, but you're essentially sort of talking about essentially cooperation between individuals where they're relying upon closeness, right, where they're not relying upon necessarily authoritarian structures to tell them to cooperate with their neighbors, but as you said, like 'I don't want the rock to roll upon my neighbors because I don't want to have to face my neighbors if the rock falls on them,' right, it's not necessarily that I'm worried about getting a ticket from the building inspector. And so I wrote down a book for you that that immediately sprung to mind. But Avinash Dixit wrote this really beautiful book. It's, it's not even though he's an economist, it's not an economics book, itt's written for everyone. It's called Lawlessness in Economics, that's about cooperation amongst groups that don't necessarily operate in law-like environment, and he talks about like migrant remittances and things like that and I think it might be really helpful in terms of maybe figuring out a way to ground your intuitions, but maybe in a more diverse language, because I think a lot of the concepts you're talking about have really broad application. Yeah.

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 55:55

I mean, I could have, I think I could have given the talk, like, starting from New England towns, and you know, like, 'okay, so there's this town in Maine, where like, yeah, they share the lobsters this way and I don't fight,' you know, that the fact that you can do it in many places is part of what I want to pick up, which is that, even though it works, and it has worked in many places, part of what I'm trying to get out from the tongue is not only the fact that it works, and that it may be something that makes sense to many people, the fact that you may be able to extract some normative criteria. And so in the bottom line, what I'm trying to do is, is trying to, to create a theory that would make sense when talking to a country. Which, you know, like, why would I want that? You know, I don't know, I'm a political theorist. So that mean, but it's also a way of explaining how can something be universal and local at the same time, and not depend on the particular boundaries of that particular community. Because you can always say like that, that town in Maine will say, 'well, yeah that's how we do it over here.'

Leslie Johns 57:22

Just for me, it's not necessarily intuitive to a non-theorists that planetary democracy means not universal.

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 57:32

What I want to get at is that planetary is not international, or global. Right. So it that I'm trying to say that the planetary has their relation to, to the earth to the planet, that its just physical features as well, and it's not about global institutions, as much as connections that will span the earth.

Leslie Johns 57:59

Is that your term? Or is that an existing term?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 58:02

A few people have been using it? Some people use Gaia democracy, to talk about, like but that, that gives it a little bit more of, Gaia, like, it's, it's more like a subject, the Earth itself is a subject, so I think more people are using planetary democracy.

Leslie Johns 58:20

Oh, okay.

I mean, I'm not gonna say it's huge, but there's still like, there, there are already a few theorists that are using it.

I find it a little confusing myself. I don't necessarily see the argument as inherently environmentalist myself.

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 58:39

Well, I do think that it would be just maybe like, like a victim, like, if it not were, because they claim that they are doing it for the sake of sustainability. So it's because these these particular connections are the ones that sustain water for us and everybody else.

Audience Question 2 59:08

This was a great talk. It's exciting. I hope, you know, I hope it comes to fruition, you know, soon.

Not, not yet. Haha. But yes, soon-ish.

Haha. I'm not doing your files but. But I guess the, I guess one of the things that I wanted you to specify, and here, I'm thinking about similar issues that that, you know, we dealt with, with the interesting disputes between indigenous territories and, and, you know, Quebec sovereignty in Canada, because some of the problems were very much the same, right, because with, you know, indigenous treaties, you couldn't actually talk about borders, you had to talk about lands granted, and those overlaps, say, between the provinces of Ontario and Quebec, so that, you know, Quebec's ways of wanting to say we're gonna, you know, vote for sovereignty, ran against the grain of indigenous peoples who were like, oh, yeah, it's not your land, because there isn't a bounded territory, its a treaty, right. So I'm just I'm hearing resonance in that in that in that context as well. But I thought, you know, I thought that the sort of strength of the argument was to say that a planetary, a turn to the planetary compels us not to have to think about one's relationship to land in terms of identity. Right. And so I just wonder whether like, that shouldn't just be the the argument of the book, which is to say that claims, land-based claims on, identity based claims about land run against the problem of things like flows that are not, like water, like air, and these kinds of planetary phenomena, particles, etc, etc, that we're now having to deal with politically for the first time, although land and water we've been dealing with for a while. But breathable air, for instance, that really isn't, that the tools that we have for thinking politically about these sorts of things, from a specially agreed tradition that understands politics and relationship to identity, and relationship to governance is going to be insufficient to how we deal with them. And so and so, you know, we just need a different way of thinking about this. And so you're going to introduce this idea of Puebla that is a kind of interstitial term that isn't just about up people in terms of the Demos as the identity of the Demos, but it is about a constituent moment, in relationship to a whole series of environmental factors that are present.

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:02:07

I have a lot to say, but it's not exactly like I could just go on forever. Let me just start with a indigenous thing. So a lot of people in Canada work on this, as you can imagine. And especially because a lot of because Anglo-American academia is so dominant, a lot of the language of indigenous rights gets borrowed from Canada. And of course, there is a lot of borrowing and sharing. So there's a lot of things that are created and shared among the the different groups. And it is a strategic as well, because it goes through international law, and international organizations. So a lot of indigenous peoples rights talk is created in Canada. So one of the things that clash with Pueblos, is this very, very, very deep identity claim. And I think that part of it has to do with the shape the current shape of the Canadian legal system. So the Canadian legal system has emphasized belonging in terms of like your ID. And so it has become very, very difficult to claim any rights if you don't have an ID, and there's all these like are you pretending and etc, etc., and so authenticity and identity become crucial. A lot of the claims that get made in the Canadian context are related. They, they don't, like a lot of indigenous people don't want to make it that way, but then they get framed as property claims. And that, that is very problematic. So like a lot of the newer scholars have tried to explain how these are not property claims. They're really about networks of relations and relations of conservation to the land and respect to the land adnd they're not property claims. But the Canadian legal system sort of pushes them in that direction. It is like that in other countries in South America because of their, their historical relations, but in Mexico because of these rebellions, and because of the Mexican Revolution, there was a legal adoption of the communal thing. And of course, that also, like the legal system also distorts towns, which have their own customs and traditions. But there's a little bit more leeway for having this kind of communal organization. And the Mexican commune, also became influential for for the socialists. So this actually, through Mexico, there were all these parallels made between the mirror the Russian mirror and the Mexican community. And so there's a parallel tradition of socialist thinking about the community. I'm not saying that the indigenous Mexican communities are socialist, there's all these overlaps and difficulties in trying to translate one on the other, but the legal history is very different from the Canadian one. And I think that there's a little bit there's something to be recovered from here that you might not get if you are like if you filter all indigenous peoples claims through Canadian or Australian law. So that's, that's why I think it might be interesting to pick it up.

Audience Question 3 1:05:28

Are there any current or recent examples where the Pueblo exerted the control over resources and had a viable working relationship with the government?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:05:37

In Mexico, again, there's like this long tradition of some people, some pueblos becoming like our sister Republic, you know, they become like, completely independent. So there's now a Pueblo on in Michoacan called Chenan, where the, where the state cannot go in. I mean, they just like, they just declared independence from the Mexican government. So and so other towns over time, and to some extent, the separatistas, also on the on this basis, declare independence from the Mexican government, you know, to some degree, but Cheran is a particularly interesting community, because they have a lot of connections, international connections. Cheran is like, the separatistas too, they have all these connections with with the Kurds in Rojava. And, anyway, this is like the history of how it works. So they are some, they're not fully, nobody can be fully, I mean, it's not like they're sovereign, like fully, like, economically independent, and that would be impossible. But they just don't let the state in.

Audience Question 3 1:06:43

So they don't go in because they're heavily armed is that the only thing preventing the state?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:06:46

In their, what happened is that the state already had lost control because of the cartels. So they self organized militias. They just kicked out the cartels, and they kicked out the police. I mean, it is a little bit complicated in Mexico for that reason nowadays. But they have always been, I mean, in many of these cases, these communities were independent, because the state did not have enough reach. So they were just doing their thing, and the state just didn't come until the late 20th-century.

Audience Question 4 1:07:22

Thank you very much. I have a comment and a question. The comment is, actually, an irresistible resonance with ancient Greece, because the same semantic richness of Pueblo, the people and the village is exactly the meaning of Demos. And so, this is, this is in essence, the trick of certain Greeks, if not all of them, to invent a way of redesigning the territory administratively, a sort of county around the polis in such a way that also the people who live outside the urban space in the demes participate in what is called the power of the people, so the practice of the Demos. So the Demos is made up precisely of the people who live in the villages. And it is done, however, in a way which is hyper-sophisticated with with a very complex connection between rotation, selection by law, the inclusion of people for brief periods of time in the administration of the polis. So, in a sense, in the comment that there is also potential questions that resonates with what has been said, how do these communities relate to each other and to an administrative, administrative entity outside the moment of the sort of political activism that is important. So the questions actually, I have two questions. One is, is there any narrativization of identity in terms of belonging precisely to that Demos for the damos? Because the Athenians have produced this story of [Greek phrase] which is all you know, which is a mythological let's say, quote on quote mythological way of them re-signifying the relationship to the place, that particular place, that gives you an identity because the democratic way of naming people then is Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, of the deme of Alopece;. So the non aristocratic way of identifying people is precisely to put the Demos into their mini dynasty, so to speak. So that's your that. But then, you know, you have all this production of discourse that says, Oh, these people came out of the land, so they are like plants. See, what they mean is, there is a thickness of cultural making sense of this grounding of the people in the peoples. So I was wondering if we can do some sort of provides for me, certainly not for you, comparative, cultural comparison here. And the other question was on water versus land, because I know very little about this, but natural resources versus land is a big issue. I mean, minerals. So I don't know in the Mexican context, what was the dominant theory?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:11:22

Okay, so the first one is like, of course, there's a connection to the Greeks, because like, it comes from the same place. I mean, after all, this is like, it comes from Spanish colonial law. So it's not like, of course, it's filtered through Latin sources, and it comes, it comes from the same place. So it's, it's obviously not independent, but it's not the same, you know, like I have, because a whole bunch of things happening. So one of the things that I think is interesting is, is the whole issue about identity, of course towns are fierce defenders of their identity. And some of them are fierce defender defenders of I mean, a lot of the times, they're organized around the church, and they were organized around the church since the 17th century, so like, the Catholic identity is huge. So some of the towns, for example, do not like nowadays, do not accept the evangelical members of the community, or the newcomers, and it is like a huge deal. And one could frame it in terms of identity. And if you frame it in terms of identity, then it's not useful for me for the kind of, of theory that I want to get out of it. And, of course, one could frame plays in terms of identity, and many people do that. They say that place is not the physical location, or it has very little to do with, with the environment, it has mostly to do with a projection of of subjectivity into into nature. I think that what's interesting here is that there's a bunch of people, and some of it is archaeological, some of it is revivals, but they have seen how a lot of these connections were actually environmental, were framed in relation to the environment, so you won't can see it that way. And if you see it that way, then you begin to see how a lot of the relations were relation of nearness. So you could see how the neighbors could be from different ethnic groups. And so like, for example, it's a lot of the people who wrote about this, about the Pueblos in the 18th century emphasize the distinction between the indigenous towns, pueblos [Spanish phrase] and then in the Spanish town [Spanish phrase]. But then if we dig a little, a little more, and you see it from the other perspective, you'd see that every of each one of these town actually had relations, important relations among the neighbors, and legislation that allowed the connections between them. So, and different ethnicities within the town, like different indigenous ethnicities within the towns. And so if you begin to dig, and so what allowed them to live together and not kill each other? There was all this emphasis on on water management, and, and things that had to do with like, agricultural cycles, and particularly economic niches that were connected to the environment, so you can only grow this kind of stuff here. And they would cultivate this kind of agricultural niches, particularly in that area that is around Mexico City. So many of the towns were determined by by elevation, because you could grow certain things at certain elevation and not at others. And so I think that that's it. A lot of this has been recovered in the last 100 years, especially when the scholars began to act. What we learn now will and not just talk about the sources. These are actually a lot of UCLA scholars that learn or work earlier in the 20th century in the 60s. And they began to dig up more of them directly into the Navaho, and they see those connections to the land that I find fascinating. And I think that those could be a source of inspiration when you're thinking why it matters that these particular neighbors deal with the resources here. So, and I think that happens in other parts of the world as well. And how those people here combined to protect resources and to make sure that they will go.

Audience Question 5 1:15:41

How do they Evo Morales or how did the Evo Moralesitas in Bolivia who formed the Pueblo movement past and present, does it give them hope? Or does it just reaffirm that they need to continue along with their semi autonomous path?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:16:04

I'm not an expert in Bolivia, however, they were framed as national groups. So because they were, like it was a fully national constitution, it's mostly about identity, rather than about resources. And the fights later on between indigenous peoples and Evo Morales came precisely because then the national state did the national state thing, that became, again extractivist and wanted to make big economic developments for the sake of the national economy. And so the communities that had the dam or the highway or the extraction, rebelled against Evo Morales' government. Do they give them hope? I mean, all the pink tide, here's the thing, they're more like state oriented, and many of these groups are not, they don't love the state. So that's why it's not about the public and the private. So a lot of the pink tide was the states. So yeah, I mean, they do, of course, I mean, it's like, its the national government, a lot of people are very happy with it. But again, I can't get into a lot of details about what Bolivia, I don't I don't know that much.

Audience Question 6 1:17:27

Just going to ask a basic question, how do you get from this particular graphical study, which as you say is is very specific, you say it can take place in Maine and I rather doubt that, I mean, the circumstances of British colonialism and the Spanish were very, very different, these local communities we're talking about here are multi ethnic while onse in Maine I take it are not. And so the kind of formation the sort of social and cultural formation has taking place very different. Legal systems, as you pointed out, very, very different in both cases. So even assuming there's some sort of connection between them, you refer to integrating this into some sort of normative claim, is this a replacement for the state? Are we going to have a world made up of Pueblos as opposed to states? And if so, how is how is that going to happen? And what what what is the what is the the normative formulation that's going to arrive from this local study, which is going to make that a possibility?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:18:34

So, okay. If you think about the main normative theories, that we have that structure, how we think about the state, and the international system, they were distilled or extracted from local communities, and mostly, for example, in the case of the Kantian or Lockean claims, they were extracted from the local communities that Locke and Kant knew best. So, they of course, then use that and sublimated it into an abstract and normative claim. Now, ideally, what we could do is to get some inspiration on something that is a local conflict and local claim, and get some of these ideas and try to distill up make an abstract claim. Now, the abstract claim that I want to do goes in the direction of the place specific duties to place specific obligations, and would see what can we build rather than claims of identity and property ownership, which are the the main building blocks of those normative theories. What would come up of a theory who's, that has the main building blocks in a place-oriented account? Now, I don't know if I can build that fully on my own. Especially when it's a systemic one, it took Kant some time, and it was all systemic and I don't know if the whole thing about the system helped him or not. But what I do think that can be done is to see from this kind of normative claim, is it possible to distill something that is both universal and particular at the same time, because I think that was, that was the strength of those two particular theories, the Kantian and Lockean, they were going, I mean, more the Kantian, of course, than the Lockean, because the Lockean eventually is based on natural rights. And, and if people disagree on the existence of natural rights, then you know, especially property rights, you're not going to get very far. But the Kantian is universal and particular at the same time. And he failed in the particularity because he can't connect the very abstract to the particular places. So I think that this sustained to the sustainability part, the fact that we all need water, and reproduce water in the world, is the universal aspect of it. And the local claim, is ike the fact that each community can deal with it is sort of a way of grounding the plural part of it. So each one deals with it and the universal part is that we all have to respect the fact that we all need water. So the limits have the limits of your local claim the limits of your community, the limits of your identity, are the fact that we all need water. And so that is like that's my normative, that's a normative direction, how would it look like? Well, it might be built on the basis of states, it is just that the state would not be legitimizing themselves on the basis of property claims to territory, national property claims to territory, but in terms of sustainability of resources. So growth, like GDP, or like becoming like, or keeping people out for the sake of our people, it has to be justified differently. I mean, it could be states, it could be, you know, like if local communities, they probably would have to negotiate with other local communities, and the best way to negotiate with local communities is to have an authority that is above them. Okay, well, maybe they agree that the states are the best way to do it. Great. And then the state would have to justify that in terms of the sort of the sustainability of water and local communities, rather than the sake of the people or the sake of the national community, or the sake of growth. So that's how I frame it. I mean, it's not done, and I don't think that I can do it myself. The idea is that this will inspire other people to think along those lines.

Audience Question 7 1:23:14

I actually have some questions, regarding this place origin account and, you know, and the possibility that it can be reconciled with the logic of the modern state and capitalism. I mean, like, it's sort of like, it seems, you know, modern capitalist mode of production requires sort of like, you know, of harsh and thorough control of the state, stiff control of, you know, localized resources and mobilization of local peoples. And, and this sort of, like, you know, the mobility of the human laborers, and this rich size the market and productions, so, I worry that, you know, this in other ways, like, you know, this place and localized account, harbors very rich normative aspirations, but I think, conomically this sort of stuff might, you know, hinder the development of the economy. Sort of like, you know, talking about speaking about this sustainability stuff, I think, you know, for instance, like in China, you know, the local communes and this sort of like water issues, sort of model for cooperation there has been, like in practice for more than two thousand years, it has been, it has some East Coast model issues, because like, you know, local communities are more likely to, you know, initiatives complex over complex, so they are alianced by like, strong and prestige. So wonder like, how address this?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:25:06

Okay, let me try to put it all together. Remember that capitalism does not necessarily like the state. And I mean, they do work together quite well, in many circumstances. But capitalism sometimes will say that they don't like the state. And the state will sometimes say that they don't like capitalism, at least in theory, right. So the same way, you can think that there might be some institutions that will put a damper or like a limit to capitalism, and some practices that will put a limit to the state.I often get, like when that when I talk about these things, especially when I'm talking about things that bypass the state, I'm not talking about bypassing capitalism, this is like, besides the point, it's not about economic organization, I'm not saying anything about it. But whenever I talk about bypassing the state or not fully relying on state, people say, well, that's just utopian. But I'd love to remind people that the state is, first of all, a relatively new institution, I mean, up to like, we have states or a state system as we know it just since after the Second World War, like, the most common form of political organization has not been the state throughout the history of mankind. Second, I like to remind people that states are not all powerful. Many states are not like, they have holes all over. think about Cheran, you know, like, states do not fully control their territory and they claim all the territory in the world did not control. And not only that, but they are not necessarily the most efficient way of organizing things. So it's actually being realist in recognizing that the state does not do a lot of things very well. Not only doesn't it like, should be doing that, it just doesn't do that. And there are other institutions that do that quite well. And so it is realist to recognize that states are really bad at doing what they're supposed to be doing in many circumstances. And so that's, that's sort of how I see it. I mean, this is just, remember that there exist a whole bunch of institutions that may be much more efficient and legitimate at solving some of the problems that we are facing nowadays. And that they're not incompatible, necessarily incompatible with the state or with capitalism, although there might be other forms, political forms, or forms of coming of economic organization, that might be better.

Leslie Johns 1:27:51

I kind of want to go back to what you were talking about before, when we were talking about sustainability. I mean, it seems to me like we can all agree sustainability is a good thing, but in life, there are always competing trade offs, we might disagree about what sustainability is. Does it mean no growth? Does it mean measured growth? Does it mean population control? So I guess I don't even really understand if we were to adopt the Pueblo model or this ideal of sort of a smaller community, like, what even do you mean by sustainability? You know,, I guess I'm very confused as to why you think it is that the Pueblo model is going to prioritize sustainability, whatever exactly that means, and what are the competing values that are being traded off, and why this smaller community will prioritize sustainability in a way that the other competing models are not?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:29:02

Local communities across the world are not necessarily about the enviorment. Pueblos do make a claim about the environment. And so that, that is what, the reason why I like them, because they establish that connection between the practices...

Leslie Johns 1:29:24

Are you saying that as an empirical fact?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:29:26

It is an empirical fact that they have these ideas? Not that they do, but they do have this idea. So it's a historical account.

Leslie Johns 1:29:33

In a way the states do not?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:29:35

Yes,

Leslie Johns 1:29:36

Okay

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:29:36

Yes, they do not, the states are concerned about national communities, and the well being of national communities and growth. So an example that I give in my book that might be useful here is that, for example, Mexico and the United States when negotiating the border, they exchanged the water of the Rio Grande for the water of the Colorado. So why did they do that? Because for the national community, it doesn't matter if that region does not have water, because that other region is going to have water. And then the GDP is going to grow. Right? So you can sacrifice a region in exchange for the other region, because what matters is the national territory and the national community. So what really matters in that sense is the common, when you think about the common good, you're thinking about the good of that country, of the national community and the national territory

Leslie Johns 1:30:35

Seems like local jurisdictions also care about local jobs and local growth.

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:30:39

If you have, if you have the kind of organization that allows local jurisdictions to complain to the national state, then you have a good organization within the state that works well. But the legitimacy or the ultimate justification of the whole thing is the national community, and if you go even further to that more abstract, you go to the rights of all individuals in the world, like that's the ultimate justification is human rights. Right? So the thing about human rights is that they're all about the humans, and that there is no connection of the things that are not humans. So the ultimate justification of states is human rights. And you can do anything for the sake of humans, which makes sense. But if you think of humans in connection to the places where they live, then you could introduce an element of we are doing this, but also thinking about where people live, and how those places are there to make people live. So it's not only about humans, but humans in place. So the kind of claim that I'm trying to get at is, again, a normative justification of these things. And instead of thinking like, yeah, sure, we can exchange the water of the Colorado for the water of the Rio Grande, you will have to think about all these independent communities as grounded communities, not simply as groups of people that belong to a national community, or even to humanity. You're thinking of the local communities as part of a planet rather than that human community that could exist in another planet. Like, if we we are done with this one, we all get into our spaceship and go to the next one and that would be perfectly fine, in normative terms, because we're doing the best for the human community and, and the places where they live are secondary, if you can provide for them. That's how the Kantians think about the state, its like the place it doesn't really matter as long as you can provide for the community and human rights. So the idea here is that what matters is the planet as well.

Audience Question 8 1:33:11

Thanks so much for this, I like the talk, I like your book, it provokes in our thinking. I have some questions. Three, in particular, a metapolitical question and a normative question and theoretical context, political theory context, question. So the first is, is what? How do we understand what was historically and a little bit about them and more about the American versions of the, and I get from you're talk and a theme from your book that that, you see that they're, they're framed as being more more static and more ontologically linked to the place, then I suspect they might be, if we look at them more as as parts of historical flows, then as much products of colonization as they are of ancestral inheritance. And so, I don't know how we get from that recognition to preference and desirability for the preveland model. And there's also a political normative problem I have in the US at least, which is that when I when I scan around our country right now, I think that the people who are probably closest to embracing something like this, it is in part indigenous Americans now who are fighting back against, you know, centuries of the imposition of individualism and Lockean and Kantian understandings of the relationship between individuals and their communities, that was almost lost, but it's now being restored actively in many indigenous communities in the US right now. But, but the other groups that are doing the same thing are well, you'll probably don't watch the most popular show on American television right now, which is Yellowstone, which is about a, you know, a traditionalist white supremacist rancher, you know, family in a community whose fighting to protect themselves against the, the the overbearing liberal state, specifically Californians, and, and who the closest analogy in the real world right now are LDS church cattle ranchers in Utah and Nevada who are fighting for their control over the watersheds and the open lands there. I'm just not convinced that that's the politics that I think we can channel not appearing out of a Pueblo-centered ideal. And then finally, just in terms of political theory, I mean, this from your book as well, I wanted to ask you, the missing, I have one foot in IR and one in political theory, so I'm always slapping myself in the head with 'okay, so what are my IR colleagues say about this?' And the obvious point is that the, the missing theoretical dimension of the book, and the talk is, you mentioned the Kantian and Lockean tradtiion, but there's a Hobbesian tradition, which is, one has to admit a certain level, you're an IR realist or not, when you say that, what the state, how the state legitimates itself is through Kantian or Lockean liberal political theory, it's really through Hobbes. I mean, that's how states, states exist today, all states that exist today exists because of some prior war that, that ended in the treaty, that defined the boundary, all political countires today are the consequence of organized violence, often among the states that are still present, now if not historical states. And so what's up, it's easy to tell you you did a really good job of challenging the Lockean and Kantian dimensions of legitimacy, but that fundamental Hobbesian dimension is much harder to get at I think, the opening picture that you use of the of those brave kids throwing rocks at the federal police with their shields, and that's the Hobbesian logic there. You know, at some point, at some point, there has to be a recognition that what limits the power of public is, is armed police with shields fighting against rocks, that's why the Palestinians don't have control over their water supply right now.

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:38:02

No, no, I love it. So this the nasty of the local, yes. Okay. So there's two reasons why people don't like local. Because they have politics and all politics end up being nasty. So, okay, that doesn't get better at the level of the state. So if they say, oh, but local politics are horrible, like state politics is any better? And so like, you know, there's violence at the local level, like is the federal government so much better? So like, that really is, it is an argument to say like local politics can be horrible, but yeah, politics are tough, you know. That I don't see, I mean, are they worse than federal politics? Are the wars and national politics? Well, I don't know. You know, it's like, is it better to be resisting your neighbors, at least you know, them in unlike, or, or to be resisting the state? You know, I don't know which one is worse now, that what I do want to point out is that part of what makes local politics so nasty, is that it gets really, really bad when it's about identity groups. So, part of what I'm saying is that it allows us to cut across those boundaries. In fact, like, I began to think about this a long time ago, when I was like, in 2006, I was living in South Bend, Indiana, and this is, I put this in my book, and I saw like the marches of the like the Mexicans, that, there were like these marches in 2006 in May Day, and I just, I've never seen like the hatred, like I've never seen anything like the, the non Mexicans and the Mexicans. But the next day, I saw that like the same people not in like an activist mode, and there was like There was some fair or something, and all people were like, all together doing something. So it was like, as soon as you'd like got them, you can't do that anymore, but back then 2006, as you as soon as you got them out of activist mode, and you got them into neighbors mode, they were very willing to do so. So what I'm looking at is how you cut across those identity politics at the local level, so that you can have other forms of connection that are not determined by the nastiness of the local. And now when you go to the Hobbsian and the Webber, I wrote down Webber. What Webber does is that he adds "legitimate: to the definition. Right? He says it's like, it that control is the legitimate control of force in a given territory. Because I mean, if you really go for the control, again, I mean, I come from Mexico, I mean, I'm not gonna say that Mexico is a failed state, because all states lack total control. What you see in Mexico is it's a normal, standard state, that it's pierced through by all these groups that are not subject of the power of the state. They just aren't. There is like, there are groups in Mexico. And when you see that picture of the kids fighting with the with the police, you know, who won? The kids, the kids won. You know, it's like, how can how can they win? What, why would they win? What's the logic of having a confrontation, where you have people throwing stones, and they win over the heavily armed police? I mean, they actually I feel for the heavily armed police because they got a beating, like really bad, a couple of people died. And the ones who won the conflict and the battle, were the people without weapons. Clearly, they had something going for them, which is that they can pressure the federal state to put pressure on the city. Because they, they can mobilize that kind of thinking that put pressure puts pressure on the state. And that is what I find fascinating. What is it that they are mobilizing, that can put pressure on the federal state, and they can win? So it's not only about whether they are heavily armed.

Audience Question 9 1:39:15

Yeah, so I have a pretty basic question also, but I'm just kind of wondering if there is a limit to the size, like, is there a size limit to a Pueblo basically? And part of the reason I asked is because Los Angeles was created as a Pueblo, and I don't think it is anymore because there's 10 million people here, but also because it's like an hour drive home in an Uber. So and if there is a limit to like how big a Pueblo can be, then it feels a little bit more like just kind of standard populism, because you do eventually have to decide like, who is part of it and whose not. Right?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:43:01

Yeah. So I mean, this goes, I tried to deal with this problem in the borders book. That's what the borders book is about. So if you go to the place where like somebody has to decide, right, and that's where the state comes in, because somebody has to decide. So I'd ay like, that's, that's really what it's all about. Somebody decides, and they tell you where the boundaries are, and what are the limits of the jurisdiction and where it all starts. So that the ones that are not smitten eventually end up connecting to nature. How do they do it through natural rights, or to some other claim that this is inscribed, not in the decision of a ruler, but in a natural something, that we can all discern either through reason or, you know. So some people would say thre are natural, you know, like, there's the limits of, you know, natural law claims. Right? And that would be a way to say like, it's no, it's just simply a decision. And what I tried to do in the, in the borders book is to do a revamped version of natural claims. And that's where I talk about watersheds, because then you can connect through this idea of there might be natural boundaries of sorts. And these are eventually because natural boundaries eventually also require a decision sort of connected to natural law claims of the environmental sort. That's, that's already there in that book.

Tejas Parasher 1:44:41

Thank you. Final questions?

Audience Question 10 1:44:45

Yes. My question is, as we near a tipping point, which we're seeing at various cities in Mexico, last year, over last summer, around images in New York Times, watertrucks being swarmed by protesters. So as we see this greater burden or weight on the national capcity to distribute to manage water systems, what is preventing Mexico and maybe other Latin Americans or corporate restructuring from just completely disbanding as non state actors, like Pueblo indigenous groups, cartels establish themselves have already taken over successfully other industries? What is really keeping a check? Whether it be hard swing towards the right, that Mexico is having a military state, trying to control this by force? Whatever options are there, how can the United States government on national lines kind of together these national energy institutions?

Paulina Ochoa Espejo 1:45:52

When there's no water, things get very ugly. So if this is not only going to happen in Mexico it's going to happen, like if really there is no water, I mean, you can already see what happened, 'll go back to Mexico, I promise I'm not just skirting around the question. You have already seen what happened in the states and the Colorado rights that the federal government intervened and took away like I said, like a century old tradition of sharing water among the states in a particular way. So in the United States, the Federal government intervenes, but when there's water, when people need water at the local level, there's going to be people selling water. And whomever can control the water and sell it will. In Mexico, if it gets really nasty, the government and the cartels will eventually end up dealing water. What the town was doing here was saying, if it gets nasty, we want to have to control of out well. So it's part of the whole vision thing. People are already fighting over who gets to have control of the resources that are going to be required in very little time. So if there's enough legitimacy and state capacity, there will be institutions that deal with water more reasonably and rationally. And there will have to be other ways of accounting for the kinds of dealings that are going to happen. And I think that at that point, political theorists may want to either analyze the logics that are out there or provide others and try to get ahead of the game.

Tejas Parasher 1:47:39

Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai