Research

Thanks to my Master’s degree in political science, major in international relations, I started developing multidisciplinary studies and links with Chile. My Master’s thesis thus focused on the internationalisation of the Mapuche and tried to show how their international mobilisation produced a diversity of feelings of belonging. I created a Zotero shared library on Mapuche studies.

This first research project led me to carry out two stays in Chile: the first was a professional internship at the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the second was a research stay in Temuco, with the aim of interviewing various Mapuche actors or those linked to them. My doctoral research began in 2018 with the continuation of the study of the Mapuche, although I broadened the perspective by integrating the case of Bolivia and the Aymaras into the analysis. I retained in my doctoral thesis the historical approach that I started in my dissertation. However, instead of pursuing the relationship between identity construction and internationalisation, I focused on the right to self-determination in order to explore the political novelty that indigenous peoples introduce to this principle once it is appropriated. In this way, I delved into the relationship with the state and established a comparative framework of the most different cases between Bolivia and Chile.

I also insisted on the importance of the international arena and the transformation of law that indigenous peoples achieved through their mobilisation. To conduct this analysis, I undertook a four-month internship, from September to December 2019, at the Indigenous Peoples and Minorities Section (IPMS) of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). There I was able to observe the participation of indigenous peoples in the UN and contribute to the training given to them to deal with the international legal arena. Trips to Bolivia and Chile complemented this first field trip. From January to April 2020, I was able to conduct more than 80 interviews in both countries and consult press archives in order to gather historical material.

I am currently developing a research project on the contestative value of the right of self-determination and the way in which it challenges the international hierarchy. To do this, I propose to develop two case studies. First, I explore dependency theories and how they helped Latin American countries develop their foreign policy in the 1970s. Second, I analyse the right to self-determination of indigenous peoples as a principle of political autonomy and how it contests state sovereignty.

As a founding member and a co-organiser of the Seminar on Postcolonial Approaches at the CERI of Sciences Po, I have developed the capacity to gather scholars around a topic where no academic space to discuss of its progress was previously available. This Seminar was thus a pioneer in that field in France and is now thriving. A Zotero shared library was built to access the references discussed during the seminar and previous session can be listened in podcast on the Seminar’s webpage.