FROM THE STRUGGLES FOR LAND TO THE STRUGGLES FOR TERRITORY: STEPS TOWARD A GRAMMAR OF ECOLOGICAL CONFLICTS

The thesis begins with an actual ecological fact: the current ecological crisis goes hand in hand with the proliferation of ecological conflicts. This fact is attested by the vast literature in the social sciences. This led to the search for a grammar of conflict appropriate to these struggles. To do so, an environmental history of the grammars of conflict inherited from modern political philosophy is undertaken. Three general grammars are reviewed: the grammar of Having, which includes wars of land appropriation (Hobbes), struggles for distribution and collective appropriation (Babeuf); the grammar of Being, which includes the struggle for recognition (Hegel); and the grammar of Action, which includes land use conflicts (Fichte). Although these grammars were elaborated in close connection with the question of land, the argument put forward is that they remain inadequate to account for those struggles that are bearers of an ecology of territorial attachments. More especially, three pitfalls are encountered: they did not overcome the alternative between detachment and rootedness; they defined relations with land exclusively in terms of appropriation; and their internal structure remains inadequate to a grammar of attachment. However, hope in philosophical discourse is not lost. In particular, the political philosophy of territorialities elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari lays the foundation of a grammar of attachment. Mille Plateaux is revisited in which an philosophical concept of territory is articulated with a theory of territorial conflicts between social formations. Finally, we test this model through the empirical data provided by the ethnography of ecological conflicts in the low lands of Ecuador.