A Postcolonial Marxist Critique of the River-as-Subject: Situating the Atrato River in Its Development Aporias

Abstract

In 2016, Colombia's Constitutional Court declared the Atrato River a subject with rights and named the river's environmental stewards. This article traces how various actors co-produced the ruling and critically engages scholarly calls to theorise a river-as-subject ontology. Centring postcolonial Marxist perspectives, the piece illuminates how power operates through the Rights of Nature discourse and theorises that the river-as-subject builds on and creates racialised development aporias: non-passages beyond the hegemony of the state, capital, and development discourse and double-binds for environmental justice struggles. Unpacking how the plaintiffs built the case and the river stewards navigated the ruling's first five years, I show that mining-induced river degradation unfolds through (i) the fraught promise of justice in the Colombian Constitution, (ii) the naturalisation of collective legal personhood as “bio-cultural rights”, and (iii) the inclusionary exclusion of river stewards from policy discussions about large-scale mining enclosures and alluvial gold exploitation.