In the Brazilian Amazon different legal and ‘lived’ concepts of landoccupation and land-rights are conflicting and coexisting since the beginning of the 17th century. Due to various internal and external factors those controversies transformed into violent conflicts concerning access and use of land resources, since the mid-sixties. Recently, a further aggravating factor can be cited: the complexity and intransparency of national and international initiatives of conflict resolution and the growing number of conflicting norms of global regulation intensify (local) confusion. The debate on discrepancies and correspondence of forms of land-occupation of the Amazon region of Brazil with international norms and “global values” is being illustrated refering to the national and globalland-right-concepts for indigenous and black populations. This procedure leads to the following thesis: 1. Processes of “defronterization” (Brock & Albert, 1995) and of delimitation can provoke comparable phenomenons of social transformation; 2. In order to compare those processes, a change of perspective from the “first” to the “third” world is necessary; 3. Apparently equal instruments representing global confessions on human and minority rights might result in quite different outcomes depending on the respective historical, political, institutional and cultural circumstances of each place.
Author Biography
Regine Schönenberg, Universidade Livre de Berlim
Doutora em Ciências Políticas, Freie Universitat Berlin, 1993. Pesquisadora associada do Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, pós-doutoranda na Universidade Goethe de Frankfurt, professora visitante da Universidade Livre de Berlim e consultora permanente da cooperação técnica alemã (GTZ) pela Amazônia brasileira.
