In this brief introduction, we do not go into detail summarizing our research on community politics in the Andes; rather, we aim to characterize the impetus behind it: Why should we “renew” research into local political organizing in the current conjuncture? What significance might such research on the local have for understanding pressing issues of national and international relevance? “What we need,” wrote the feminist geographer Doreen Massey (Reference Massey1994, 156), “is a global sense of the local, a global sense of place.” With this statement, Massey called on researchers to push beyond the romanticization of place and unpack the multiscalar, shifting political economic relationships that actively produce and transform places, what she referred to as “place events.” In recent years, the Andean region has once again demonstrated how such place events can send political shock waves out from the local and reshape national and international political spheres, as Ecuadorian comunas and Peruvian comunidades campesinas have mobilized to respond to economic hardships and political exclusions. In mid-2019, rural comunas throughout Ecuador drove a nationwide uprising against antipopular International Monetary Fund dictates. They marched on the capital city of Quito and forced the government of Lenín Moreno to negotiate (Lyall & Colloredo-Mansfeld Reference Lyall and Colloredo-Mansfeld2024). Their political force was the subject of widespread commentary (Vela-Almeida et al. Reference Vela-Almeida, Lyall, Lasso and Andreucci2021), and also wonder (Ospina Reference Ospina Peralto2022). Similarly, in Peru, after the fall of President Castillo in 2022, his supporters in rural communities led months of protests, raising over 140 blockades on national highways and provoking a brutal backlash by the new government that resulted in more than sixty deaths. One analyst observed that “the decentralized organization of the protests and the fact that no clear leadership could be identified favored the organization of the protests and the participation of the population from all regions” (Lust Reference Lust and Veltmeyer2024, 98). In other words, the localness of the mobilizing units was precisely the source of its national impact. The evident, resurgent power of rural comunas and peasant communities begs a host of questions regarding the legitimization of local authority in the rural Andes and its reach or impacts beyond the local, questions that are not new but that must be renewed in relation to changing economic and social dynamics.
In the 1970s and 1980s, anthropologists and sociologists examined the manifold social, cultural, economic, and political purposes of communal organizing in rural Ecuador (Chiriboga Reference Chiriboga1988; Murmis Reference Murmis1980; Sánchez-Parga Reference Sánchez-Parga1986) and in rural Peru (de la Cadena Reference De la Cadena1986; Martel and Mayer Reference Martel and Mayer1988) while agrarian livelihoods remained a dominant feature of Andean livelihoods. Yet by the late 1990s, many researchers foresaw transformations, or even the end of farming-based forms of local organization (Bretón Reference Bretón Solo de Zaldívar2001; Martínez Reference Martínez1998), as agrarian livelihoods gave way to pluriactivity and rural-urban migration. Although “community” remains shorthand in the Andes for rural residence, agrarian livelihoods, and local organization, these stereotypes conceal what needs to be explained anew—that is, the production of local organizational structures and authority. In these two articles, we document the reproduction of rural comunas and peasant communities since the 1990s, as local governing structures and authorities have shifted attention from agrarian management toward the provision of infrastructure and public services.
The pairing of Ecuadorian research here with Vincent’s longitudinal analysis of livelihoods, individual investment, and collective projects in Peru reveals an essential unity of experiences across these countries in terms of transitions of rural societies from agrarian livelihoods toward increasingly diversified, mobile economic strategies. Both the comuna and the comunidad campesina have refocused on infrastructure development that brings the amenities of potable water, electricity, and paved streets to rural villages. The emphasis on building out basic services in rural Peru coincides with the “municipalization” of local institutions in rural Ecuador. At the same time, local authorities continue to reproduce legitimacy through rituals of comuna management that members associate with the historical expansion of social rights achieved by peasant organizing and protest in the twentieth century.
The differences between the evolution of local organization in rural Ecuador and rural Peru are instructive as well. In Ecuador, services provided by the municipio continue to articulate with and inhabit the processes of the elected councils of comunas. In Peru, budgets and authority have swung away from comunidades and toward municipal authorities. Nonetheless, for peripheral communities, the enduring practices of collective mobilizations are essential tools needed to command attention and resources for authorities to move projects forward. This habitus of collective action shapes politics in the everyday, local sphere and, periodically, reaches outward into national and international spheres.
We would call on researchers to renew ethnographic agendas that explore the material interests, social ties, or cultural identities that articulate rural peoples to particular local organizations. In the following section, we lay out our reasons and approach for doing so in the current moment.
Toward a Local Sense of the Global
Following the 2019 uprising, rural comunas of Ecuador once again rose up against International Monetary Fund reforms in 2022 under President Guillermo Lasso and in 2025 under President Daniel Noboa. During each uprising, anti-Indigenous tropes circulated in national media to characterize rural populations as blind followers of a manipulative Indigenous movement. In 2025, government representatives disingenuously characterized protesters as having been funded by international drug trafficking. By contrast, leaders of the Indigenous movement generally suggest that they obey “the base,” a spontaneous consensus that unifies all rural communities. Yet during the latest uprising, most of the mobilization was concentrated in the northern Andes, as the national Indigenous movement proved unable either to mobilize comunas nationally or to bring all the northern comunas to the negotiating table with the government. The northern comunas were neither manipulated nor homogeneous, which begs questions about why and how these local institutions generate and wield authority, process divisions, and channel political energies.
In the wake of the 2022 uprising, one of our authors, who teaches international relations in Quito, asked a classroom of mostly middle-class, urban students if they knew what a comuna was. There was silence. In urban Ecuador, little is understood about daily comuna organization or periodic political mobilization, despite the evident power of rural comunas to shape national politics and resist global institutions like the International Monetary Fund. Subsequently, we formed the research collective Comunas at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) to explore the comuna as a socioeconomic and political institution. Annually, around six to eight students from rural comunas, along with professors at USFQ and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, research the diverse roles that comunas play in rural lives to understand how those roles in turn shape national and international political issues, ranging from access to public services to sovereign debt negotiations. This edition of Latin American Research Review features our first article, which addresses the basic question of why the comuna has persisted as the organizational form of choice across rural Ecuador for the better part of a century, despite political, economic, and social changes that might have otherwise “eroded its appeal” (Colloredo-Mansfeld et al. Reference Colloredo-Mansfeld, Lyall, Salas, Moran, González, Guaillas, Noroña and Valdivia2025, 2). Our research continues, as we trace political organizing from the local toward national and international spheres of conflict and contestation.
Feminist scholarship has long explored the bottom-up constructions of political relations from the personal or local toward the national and international. The local is not just a product of global relations, as Massey suggested; local experiences also shape what are often considered the abstract spheres of national and global politics. “International politics is not only conducted in ministries and boardrooms,” argues Cynthia Enloe (Reference Enloe2013, 2). “It is produced in homes, workplaces, and communities.” In a series of articles in the 2000s, feminist geographer Sallie Marston and collaborators critically examined the active social and political production of scale. Marston (Reference Marston2000) argued that there is nothing given, natural, or neutral about “the local”; rather, it is an outcome of social and political representations that would diminish particular sites of conflict and negotiation and elevate others. In a widely read chapter, “Human Geography Without Scale,” Marston et al. (Reference Marston, Jones and Woodward2005, 421) conclude that “scale is not the best ontological framework for understanding social relations”; rather, politics can only ever be located within sites, practices, and particular relations. Such critiques of scale have reshaped sensibilities across political geography. Echoing Marston’s proposition, Joe Painter (Reference Painter2006, 758) writes, “Rather than seeing power as moving vertically from the global to the local, it is more useful to think of it as produced through networks and practices that cut across scales.” In our work, we draw inspiration from such critical geographic sensibilities, as we reframe older anthropological research agendas on communal organizing in a new economic moment and in relation to national and international problems.
Finally, if the ongoing protagonism of Andean communities in national and international politics is evident, then we must ask why the Andean community continues to be widely conceived as a quintessentially “local” place, isolated from political economies and inconsequential in national and international politics? To what ends do these tropes serve if not to marginalize the institutions and demands of rural peoples from those spheres of decision-making labeled “national or “international”? Through renewed attention to community politics in the Andes, we hope to make visible the diverse motivations, demands, and decision-making processes of Andean communities as key actors in contemporary global politics.
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