ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the challenges that contemporary Mexican communities are experiencing in the face of new trends and processes linked to globalisation and its attendant social conflicts and risks. In these conditions, the meanings of concepts such as sustainability and resilience require reconceptualising in ways that are not reliant on conventional Western approaches. In particular, the concept of resilience, understood to mean constructive adaptation to risk (Folk et al. 2002), is often merely an ideological concept meant to transfer responsibility for confronting serious problems generated by the effect of globalisation onto communities and individuals, despite the fact that the responsibility lies with larger macro-economic institutions and corporations (Puyana & Romero 2006; Stiglitz 2002, 2006). This chapter examines the tensions produced when global forces come into conflict with long-standing communities, natural resources, values, capacities, and the priorities of actors and institutions’ territories of the global South. The chapter focuses on conditions in the indigenous southern territories of Mexican state of Michoacán and the ways that a system of parallel governance based in traditional social cohesion developed alongside a formal legal framework for dealing with struggle and insecurity. The municipality of Cherán is in the hinterland of indigenous communities of the state of Michoacán, and here citizens decided to organise themselves around demands for justice in order to tackle a disturbing situation of struggle and social conflict. In the face of state failures to accommodate their demands, namely to reduce explosions of violence, citizens turned to self-organisation, self-defence and, ultimately, self-government. This chapter thus provides one example of how collective action (resistance) came about in a local community of Cherán, and tries to make sense of how and why this occurred.
