UC Berkeley

This dissertation uses the campaign of Colombia's Uwa indigenous people against oil extraction in their land as a case study to understand the impact of the state, the law and the market over the tactics and scale of social movements. It studies how the campaign shifted away from litigation, expanded its scale transnationally and started using the tools available in the global market economy to prevent oil exploration in the Uwa land. The dissertation suggests the need to understand social movement tactics as a complex, multidimensional phenomenon in order to capture the relation between activism and multiple institutions. Finally, it also provides a framework to understand the relation between different tactics and institutions that helps to explain the roles of economic, political, and legal factors in providing the resources and opportunities for tactical innovation and transnational activism.