New indigenous politics in the Peruvian Amazon: From land to territory, from federations to nations

Amazonian Indigenous peoples in Peru are the original inhabitants of the Amazon region since pre-Hispanic times, maintaining shared social, cultural, and linguistic ties that identify them as autonomous peoples. Although traditionally referred to as ethno-linguistic groups or “ethnic groups”, they represent around 30% of the Amazonian population (Coomes 2024) and currently the state recognizes 51 Amazonian Indigenous peoples in the Ministry of Culture's Indigenous Peoples Database (MINCU 2025). Despite this formal recognition, national legislation strongly restricts rights’ effectiveness. Indigenous Peoples are formalized as dispersed communities that can title their communal lands, but they cannot own natural resources, including sub-soil resources, rivers, mountains, and forest. Moreover, as constitutional and legal norms since the Native Community Law of 1978 and the Political Constitution of 1993 formalized peasant and indigenous communities instead of Indigenous Peoples, indigenous lands are reduced to colonial and post-colonial communities’ boundaries, instead of ancestral Indigenous territories. This territorial fragmentation also resembles political fragmentation. Indigenous communities are small portions of larger Indigenous nations, but they are represented by different local federations, not by an Indigenous government. Nonetheless, in the last decade, Amazonian Indigenous Peoples have started to organize themselves as Indigenous governments, claiming the respect of their ancestral territories beyond land titling programs. This project aims to investigate the process of the creation of Indigenous governments and the challenges and prospects in advancing a new territorial governance in the Amazon.