ABSTRACT
Across the world, Indigenous peoples contend with national development models dependent on the extraction of natural resources. One of the bloodiest conflicts over resource extraction in Indigenous territories took place in Peru in 2009. This chapter argues that the ‘implementation paradox’ of prior consultation and Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) can best be understood by focusing on Indigenous peoples’ agency and studying political struggles over the contested normative meaning of Indigenous international rights. It highlights Indigenous peoples’ contestation to prior consultation and FPIC, bringing together contestation literature from critical International Relations with insights from anthropology, political ecology, and decolonial studies on law. The chapter begins with a brief conceptual overview of prior consultation and FPIC as international norms, highlighting that their interpretations are deeply entangled and highly ambiguous.
