On December 12, 2023, Mariana Tafur Rueda presented the doctoral thesis “Risking life to live. Rural women defending environmental and territorial rights in Colombia” at the UAB. Doctoral Programme in Geography. Thesis directed by Mireia Baylina (UAB).
In recent years, the defense of land, territories and nature has put Colombian rural women in danger, since defending the rivers, the moors, the mountains and the jungle is to protect the resources that are in dispute throughout the world. And although it is important to refer to what they defend, it is also crucial to talk about them. These afro-descendant, peasant and indigenous women risk their lives every day for what they are defending. In that sense, this thesis aims to analyze the struggles and demands of rural women defenders of environmental and territorial rights in Colombia from a gender and intersectional perspective. For this, a systematic review of scientific articles in the fields of geography, feminist studies, rural studies and Latin American studies is carried out that give an account of what has been written about it, and then carry out interviews with twenty leaders from five regions of the country. From the interviews, three dimensions are revealed in which the place becomes important for the defense of rights: the body-territory, the local-community and the global. With these dimensions, a more comprehensive analysis can be made of the resistance and resilience strategies that these women adopt on a daily basis. It is important to give visibility to female leaders, as their agency parallels empowerment and beyond. The research illustrates the complexity of rural spaces on a global scale and the struggles of rural communities for survival in their territories.