State institutions remain central webs through which this pushing and pulling of the strings that
arrange competing notions of authority, legitimacy and order occurs. This is especially pertinent,
as my case material reveals, to states and societies enmeshed in 1) rapid processes of capital
expansion/foreign direct investment (or “neo-liberal” economic processes); and 2) either
democratic transition, or the implementation stages of democratic reforms. Because of the way
in which transitional periods create conditions both for new opportunities and constraint, states
and societies simultaneously facing these two dynamics, which are both linked to dialectic
globalizing processes, provide an edge from which to analyze changing structures in global
governance.
Reformulating and Expanding International Relations Regime Theory
In sum, I conceptualize certain conflicts -- in this case conflicts arising through
indigenous resistance to resource extraction and export, particularly the case of oil -- as
occurring within a framework of interaction and collision not only between indigenous peoples,
oil companies and states, but between two “trans-spatial regime networks.” These are described
as 1) an identity-based, counter-hegemonic/challenger regime network, grounded in indigenous
and environmental rights regimes; and 2) a hegemonic regime network grounded in an
economic model centered on resource (oil) extraction and export, within a neo-liberal market
integration context. The latter corresponds to previous regime scholars’ frameworks
emphasizing power/interest based priorities.
I posit that significant sectors of Latin American indigenous peoples and their allies, as
well as significant sectors promoting oil-led development build, link and use respective issue-
based regimes, creating trans-spatial regime networks which traverse units of analysis through
the local, national and multi-spatial arenas.
Both the oil extraction regime network within a
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I build on Alison Brysk’s (2000) thorough tracing of the indigenous rights regime in Latin America. I simultaneously
share strong analytical resonance with Arenas (2000).
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Stephen Krasner is often credited with having condensed sustaining definitions of regimes to qualify an
“international regime” as a pattern of “norms, rules and principles around which actors expectations converge.” (1982,
p.2) Oran Young (1999) more recently characterized international regimes as “sets of rules, decision-making
procedures, and/or programs that give rise to social practices, assign roles to the participants in these practices and
govern their interactions.”
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Convention