About

The Amazon of Rights project explores how eco-centric normativity interacts with social realities in the Amazon River system, a critical ecosystem of global importance. Using comparative law and visual ethnographic methods, particularly documentary film, as socio-legal research tools, the project examines the legal status of the Amazon River as a subject and object of rights across different jurisdictions. It investigates how eco-centric norms shape and are shaped by the social practices and legal imaginations of local communities, Indigenous Peoples, activists, and legal practitioners.

While Rights of Nature have been celebrated as a new eco-centric legal paradigm rooted in Indigenous cosmologies, local variations in normative understandings and practices remain underexplored. The project aims to capture this plurality of eco-centric normative orders, both within state-recognized frameworks like constitutions and case law, and in non-state, community-based practices that involve more-than-human entities.


The Amazon of Rights project pursues one overarching research question and five research sub-questions:

Overarching research question:

  • What types of eco-centric normative orders (state, community, non-human) are in operation in the Amazons?

Sub-questions:

  • To what extent, and how, is some form of eco-centric normativity recognized by/in official state law in the four jurisdictions traversed by the Amazon river?

  • What other, non-state (community/non-human) forms of eco-centric normativity are invoked by actors as part of their social legal struggles on the ground?

  • What distinctive social and legal practices are associated with the operation (invocation/mobilization/advocacy/litigation) of eco-centric normativity, and to what extent/how are these practices (legally, socially, visually) different from standard anthropocentric normativity?

  • How are social conflicts and legal struggles and their outcomes (in terms of resource distribution, power relations, etc.) transformed by the official recognition of eco-centric normativity, including rights of nature? Where there is no official recognition, are there social or legal struggles for such recognition, and do these struggles transform social conflicts and their outcomes?

  • What regimes of visuality (state, community and non-human) are associated with the eco-centric normative orders that operate in the Amazons?

The project will establish an international, transdisciplinary network of legal scholars, political scientists, legal anthropologists, ethnographic filmmakers, and local stakeholders from the Amazon region. Together, they will address these research questions through a combination of desktop legal research, joint workshops, ethnographic fieldwork, documentary filmmaking, and semi-structured interviews with activists, indigenous leaders, and academics in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. An Edited Volume, four Amazongraphies, two state of the art Amazongraphies on Rights of Nature developments and law and visuality, as well as a documentary feature film are the outcomes of the Amazon of Rights project.