"When the people are the territory": the politics of seeds and the production of GMO-free territories in Colombia

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Indigenous peoples in Colombia mobilize against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) by declaring and constructing GMO-Free Territories, asserting sovereignty over seeds, land, and ecological governance. Focusing on two cases—the Zenú Indigenous peoples and the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC)—it argues that conventional theories of state formation, predicated on coherent territorial control and centralized authority, fail to capture the fragmented and negotiated nature of postcolonial states. Through these case studies, the dissertation shows how Indigenous communities actively reshape the terms of governance, challenging agrarian extractivism and reconfiguring territory through land recuperation, seed and food sovereignty, and the formation of autonomous institutional structures. Seed politics serves as a key lens through which Indigenous strategies of resistance and governance are enacted and made visible. Rather than representing a break from earlier struggles, seed sovereignty emerges as a new layer within long-standing processes of territorial defense and autonomy-building. These movements are not merely reactive but are also creative and future-oriented, constructing alternative territorial orders that defy both state and corporate development models. Using a process-tracing methodology, the study identifies mechanisms such as claims-making, memory work, identity formation, boundary activation, and territorialization through which Indigenous actors contest spatial control and materialize autonomy. Theoretically, the dissertation reframes the state as an unstable and relational formation, continually reshaped by resistance from below. It argues that "when the people are the territory," territory is not simply a bounded administrative unit but a lived and political space, cultivated, remembered, and defended through embodied presence and collective action. These movements unsettle dominant models of sovereignty and open space for plural, decolonial, and ecologically grounded forms of governance rooted in the defense of seeds, land, and collective rights.