Governing Maya Communities and Lands in Belize Indigenous Rights, Markets, and Sovereignties

"In this careful and lucid account of the struggle for Indigenous land rights in Belize, Medina not only gets the details right, but also steps back to give the local issues a broader legal, political, economic and anthropological context. It is essential reading for all those concerned with the conflicts between states, economic development and Indigenous peoples." - Richard R. Wilk (co-author of Seafood: Ocean to the Plate) "Medina thoughtfully analyzes the claims of Maya people in southern Belize to their customary systems of land tenure and local government, based on their culture and history. These claims have conflicted with state claims of sovereignty, capitalist conceptions of private property, and the changing demands of a neoliberal economy. Her study makes an important contribution to understanding disputes about the communal rights of Indigenous people everywhere." - O. Nigel Bolland (Charles A. Dana professor of Sociology and Caribbean Studies, Emeritus, Colgate University) "Governing Maya Communities and Lands in Belize provides original insights into how Mayan peoples in Belize achieved groundbreaking legal victories recognizing their rights to land and territories. Through careful ethnographic analysis of multilevel judicialization, it shows how sociolegal mobilization can strengthen Indigenous peoples' systems of law and governance, sustaining alternatives to the extractivist logics of neoliberal markets." - Rachel Sieder (co-editor of Routledge Handbook of Law and Society in Latin America)