Intercultural Disagreement: Implementing the Right to Prior Consultation in Peru

Context Matters

The passage of Law 29785 formalized a well-established legal right of indigenous peoples acquired 17 years before, when the Peruvian state ratified the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169. At the time the right to prior consultation had existed only on paper, since the state had not so far established a process of consultation. The law was conceived as an instrument for preventing deadlocks and violent struggles between the state and indigenous groups about the implementation of extractive projects in a highly conflictive context. According to the Ombudsman’s Office, in the five years before the passage of the law, social conflicts had tripled in number and frequency, extended to all 24 regions of the country, and significantly increased in intensity (Defensoría del Pueblo, 2012: 37). In the month the law was pro-mulgated, 41 percent of conflicts were environmental ones related to extractive projects (mining, petroleum, timber, or gas) that required the removal of indigenous peoples from their Andean and Amazonian territories (Defensoría del Pueblo, 2012: 38).

This contentious context was situated against the background of entrenched inequality and exclusion of indigenous groups rooted in the country’s colonial past. Peruvian society is pluricultural and highly stratified. Poverty, discriminatory social systems, and a monocultural state ruled by oligarchic groups have been characteristic of republican history, institutionalizing in practice a system of unequal socioeconomic and cultural relations among different social segments. Despite economic growth in the nineteenth century based on the production and export of primary materials and the physical modernization (railroads, highways, and international commerce) of the country in the twentieth century, social relations have perpetuated social distinction based on discrimination (Flores Galindo, 2005).

In the early twentieth century, modernization closely associated with the teleology of mestizaje (racial mixure) was a central project of the Peruvian state. As Marisol de la Cadena (2007: 115, my translation) has pointed out, “mestizaje was a demographic policy, a tool for the creation of populations, that promised to improve the quality of life of the indigenous through the eradication of their backwardness.” Indigenous groups were seen by the ruling elites as the antithesis of modernization and their identities as an obstacle to progress that needed to be removed or transformed. This racialized understanding of society informed the country’s economic and political projects and helped build an exclusionary state (Drinot, 2010; 2011) that reinforced a well-established association among terms such as “Indian,” “Andean,” “Amazonian,” “rural,” “poor,” and “primitive” constructed during colonial times (Méndez, 2011; Montoya, 2009; Pajuelo, 2006). A racist discourse that is part of a multidimensional discriminatory system including gender, regional origin, ethnicity, and socioeconomic stratum has endured despite modernization. The rules of discrimination are complex, ambivalent, and unstable because they move with society and adapt to social changes such as urbanization and modernity. This means that while discrimination persists in developing a particular language and forms of expression, the subaltern do not feel resigned to it and have no intention of “staying in their place” (Santos, 2002). The violence of racism played an important part in the history of political violence at the end of the twentieth century. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission indicated in its final report, war victims were 70 percent Quechua-speaking, rural, and poor and were targeted both by the terrorist organization Shining Path and by the state, in both cases with sustained and extreme cruelty (Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, 2003). Racism facilitated the dehumanization of a “certain type” of Peruvian who could not be seen as part of the national society or even the revolutionary project (Ilizarbe, 2015).

Preceded by the teleology of mestizaje and racism, in a postwar era of hegemonic neoliberalism the twenty-first century opened with a wave of social unrest that delineated the contours of a counterhegemonic public sphere. The crisis of the system of representation—particularly the crisis of the party system—has been met with the politicization of social groups exercising their right to dissent from the margins of institutional politics, trying to influence decision making in matters that affect them directly. The demands, strategies, and forms of association and articulation of political identities are extremely diverse, but together they constitute an alternative way of doing politics, an exercise of collective self-representation through direct participation from noninstitutional spaces (Ilizarbe, 2017).

In this highly conflictive environment, social movements with histories and well-defined identities such as the feminist movement, the human rights movement, and the environmental movement have brought forward agendas and repertoires that do not necessarily share discourses, strategies, or goals but do coincide in demanding the right to participate in decision making (Bebbington, Scurrah, and Bielich, 2011: 147). The indigenous movement epitomizes a confrontational dispute with the state over citizenship and enfranchisement. Its agenda not only includes socioeconomic demands and political rights but also requires a transformation of the state and democracy from within. Indigenous movements can therefore be seen as challengers demanding a reorientation of state policies (Eaton, 2012: 646–647) but also as transformative movements that demand a redefinition of citizenship, democracy, and the state itself (Yashar, 1999; 2005).

In sum, context is dense, and it matters for the analysis of the process of consultation; power relations and historical grievances have to be taken into account. Even more important, these elements are present in the events that led to the passage and implementation of Law 29785. Peru signed Convention 169 in 1993 and ratified it in 1994, thus giving it the status of constitutional law and recognizing the right of indigenous and aboriginal peoples to self-determination (the right to maintain and enhance their cultural difference) and autonomy (the right to participate in decisions that affect them directly) via the right to prior consultation. Yet, in violation of the rights of indigenous peoples, the Peruvian state failed to organize a single process in 17 years. The first consultation came only after the passage of Law 29785 and an extremely violent confrontation between the state and indigenous peoples.

In 2007 President Alan García launched what came to be known as “the politics of the dog in the manger” in reference to three opinion articles published in Peru’s most prestigious newspaper (García, 2007a; 2007b; 2008) in which he used the metaphor to refer to the Amazonian indigenous peoples, who, in his view, were an obstacle to progress and national development: “This is a case that can be seen everywhere in Peru: idle lands that belong to owners without education or economic resources whose ownership is a pretense. That land, sold in big lots, would bring technology that would benefit the peasants too, but the nineteenth-century ideological spiderweb persists as an obstacle. [It is] the dog in the manger” (García, 2007a, my translation). The argument highlighted the need to take control of indigenous communities’ land, an action that could not be legally taken without prior consultation.

In 2008 the executive obtained permission from Congress to issue more than 100 decrees facilitating the signing of a free-trade agreement with the United States. Among them were several articles that unconstitutionally secured control over indigenous lands to facilitate the extractive projects of international corporations (Montoya, 2009; Ruiz, 2011). In response to these decrees, the most important indigenous organization in Peru—the Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana (Interethnic Development Association of the Peruvian Jungle—AIDESEP)—denounced the violation of its right to consultation as established in Convention 169 and the property rights recognized in the 1993 Constitution. When its demands went unheard, it launched a two-year-long campaign involving street protests, lobbying of Congress, and appeals to national and international public opinion (Montoya, 2009). The government finally responded with extreme repression, generating a violent confrontation that resulted in the death of 34 people (police and indigenous people) in the conflict known as the Baguazo (Brandenburg and Orzel, 2016; Vílchez, 2014; Wiesse, 2009). The government’s position in the conflict is exemplified by President García’s infamous words (Servindi, 2011):

Societies always demand order from states, and it is enough already. These people don’t have a crown; these people are not first-class citizens that can say—400,000 natives to 28 million Peruvians—“You have no right to come here,” in no way whatsoever. This is a severe mistake, and anyone who thinks this way wants to return us all to the irrationality and primitivism of the past.

The president ascribed second-class-citizenship status to indigenous peoples, whom he saw as savages. He rejected their acquired rights to self-determination and autonomy and even excluded them from the national community. His speech, which amounted to disenfranchisement, generated deep indignation among indigenous people that was eventually echoed by national and international public opinion. Only then did Congress countermand the decrees.

In 2010, after months working with indigenous representatives, Congress unanimously adopted the right to prior consultation, but President García did not promulgate it. The newly elected President Ollanta Humala, acknowledging the struggle of the indigenous communities that he had supported as a candidate, did that in Bagua in 2011. He hailed the law as an unprecedented step forward in the democratization of state-society relations and the consolidation of a culturally inclusive republic. Although he did not use the term “intercultural,” he referred to a problem that required an intercultural perspective—that the Peruvian state did not represent the nation’s cultural plurality (Valdez, 2011):

Today we are taking a step forward, but this is not all that needs to be done. Signing a law does not solve the problem, although it is a beginning to fix it. And what is the problem we face today? The construction of a great republic that respects all its nationalities: Aguarunas, Huambisas, Quechuas, Aymaras, and others, Awajún, and many more living in the national territory. And that the state that must represent all cultures and nationalities in practice represents only one culture, and it is not the Awajún, it is not the Aguaruna. . . . This is a step forward by this government, but it will mean a more important step by the nationalities, the communities, so that they can express their free and sovereign will and not be dominated by economic power or failed leadership, because this is a law that implies solving a problem of development, of local development, regional development, in all of the national territory. And that is the consultation that we want to make, so that when we have different themes at the regional level, there is an instance that allows participation without conflict, that helps talking and sitting down and establishing a dialogue and in this way reaches a peaceful solution that benefits all our population but also benefits our nature, our natural habitat, our water, our sky, our ways and traditions.

President Humala recognized indigenous peoples as fully entitled citizens with their own nationalities and acknowledged their historical exclusion from the political community. But he also emphasized that the most important achievement of the process of consultation would be preventing conflicts among parties with different understandings of development through their commitment to a dialogue that would secure the peaceful resolution of disagreements. He was not only sanctioning the restitution of rights but also instituting a new space for the reconciliation of differences concerning state-sponsored extractive projects.

After the violent confrontation between the state and the indigenous communities, the law seemed to emerge from consensus around the need to rebuild the social and political pact. Yet consensus soon proved to be only apparent. The establishment of procedures and conditions under which consultation would take place was designed as an actual first experience, closely following what the law required, but it failed to achieve consensus or even majority agreement on those procedures. What went wrong?

Interculturality, Dialogue, and Disagreement

The Peruvian constitution acknowledges several important rights for indigenous individuals and communities (Congreso Constituyente Democrático, 1993). At the individual level are the right to ethnic and cultural identity and the right to communicate with state authorities in non-Spanish languages via interpreters (Art. 2-19). At the community level the state is required to recognize, in addition to Spanish, native languages as official where they are predominant (Art. 48), to foster intercultural bilingual education to preserve cultural difference (Art. 17), and to recognize native and peasant communities as legal persons, granting them inalienable rights over their land (Art. 89). There have been important advances to secure these constitutional rights in recent years, among them the acceptance of indigenous forms of judicial administration at the local level (Ardito, 2012), the creation in 2010 of a Vice Ministry of Interculturality with the mission of formulating policies with an intercultural approach, and the establishment in 2016 of the National Program of Bilingual Education.

Nonetheless, these initiatives are not part of an integrated project intended to transform the state itself in such a way that it acknowledges cultural difference as its distinguishing feature. A political project of institutionalized intercultural state-society relations that includes indigenous representatives as decision makers has never been fully thought out (Ilizarbe, 2002). The Peruvian state has made progress toward accommodating the rights of those considered “different,” but it has never developed plans to become an intercultural state. In practice, the state representatives designing and implementing policies for indigenous groups rarely have an indigenous background and tend not to include indigenous representatives in the design, implementation, and evaluation of public policy.

Of course, intercultural relations are not new in Peru. As Heise, Tubino, and Ardito (1994) have pointed out, interculturality has three dimensions: the factual (the historical forms of relationship among culturally diverse groups), the normative (the design and implementation of laws and institutions that aim to establish fair intercultural relations), and the political (demands and strategies for the transformation of intercultural relations). These three dimensions are in tension in Peru: while the normative discourse of interculturality is expanding, ethnic discrimination and exclusion persist, and disarticulated state actions do not contribute to a transformative political project. In addition, interculturality cannot be assumed to be univocal when racism and inequality have historically informed state-society relations at the factual level. Although the importance of establishing democratic intercultural relations is widely acknowledged, the orientations of this new social contract are not necessarily consensual. Thus, the political project of interculturality must take into account power relations and inequality and acknowledge that intercultural relations do not occur in a vacuum and demand action to alter the ways in which unfair economic, social, and political structures are reproduced.

The political project of interculturality in Peru should also be conceived as a key factor in democratization and as a collective work-in-progress of redefining the political community as intercultural. As Butler (2000: 11) points out, democratic polities are constituted through exclusions that “haunt” them and engender demands for inclusion that force them to question the limits of their identities. “That haunting becomes politically effective precisely in so far as the return of the excluded forces an expansion and re-articulation of the basic premises of democracy itself.” Thus democratic practice requires the capacity to question the boundaries of the political community in order to acknowledge and remedy exclusion and marginalization. This is precisely the situation of indigenous peoples in Peru; they have historically been marginalized, and democracy has not yet fulfilled its promise of universal enfranchisement and equality for them. Granting them recognition and full membership will alter the terms in which national identity and citizenship are defined.

Recognition becomes the first step of a transformative endeavor that demands overcoming established hierarchical relations. An intercultural project that aims to democratize state-society relations must not anticipate the meaning of interculturality but view it as a product of the politics of cultural translation by which new forms of intercultural relations are instituted (Butler, 1996: 48). Cultural translation is the process by which different notions of a concept defined as universal (interculturality) and different ethical and political projects interact in dialogue, through agreement and disagreement, gradually producing a more inclusive version of the universal. Democracy requires openness toward the revision of the criteria for membership in the political community, which implies exposing its limits and inherent dynamics of exclusion. The revelation of these limits emerges with the claims of those who have been marginalized and dismissed as valid interlocutors and whose exclusion proves the community’s failure to be all-inclusive. This is precisely the case of indigenous peoples in Peru, who demand recognition as legitimate members of the state and the national project but are seen by the ruling elites as second-class citizens and a threat to progress. Thus interculturality is a potentially democratizing project, propelled by the excluded, that calls for redefinition of the most basic organizing notions of the political community. Such a transformative project necessarily involves conflicting views and discrepancies. How should disagreement be understood and dealt with?

Jacques Rancière (1999: x) approaches the dynamics of dialogue from the perspective of disagreement. He sees it as an intellectual encounter in which a conflict occurs: interlocutors conceive the object of their dispute differently, referring to the same object but attributing different meanings to it:

We should take disagreement to mean a determined kind of speech situation: one in which one of the interlocutors at once understands and does not understand what the other is saying. Disagreement is not the conflict between one who says white and another who says black. It is the conflict between one who says white and another who also says white but does not understand the same thing by it or does not understand that the other is saying the same thing in the name of whiteness.

Because particularity and diversity (difference) are inherent to human beings, disagreement has to be considered a necessary component of any dialogue. People need to expect not only differences of opinion but also different understandings of what counts as “real” or “true.” As Rancière puts it, disagreement is not a problem of misconstruction (by an incompetent interlocutor) or misunderstanding (because of a poor choice of words) but a problem of conceiving and naming the same things differently. It is an intellectual mix-up that reveals the plural ways in which people apprehend reality, develop a particular rationality and morale, and establish what counts as true, logical, and valid.

Disagreement can also emerge from ontological antagonism between interlocutors who have not developed forms of recognition or even representation of each other because their different cultural backgrounds, languages, and understandings of the real make them unintelligible to each other (de la Cadena, 2010; 2015). Here dialogue is not to be taken for granted, because translation alone does not guarantee mutual understanding; the ontological antagonism that underlies dialogue has to be dealt with before setting the rules that will organize the interaction. As de la Cadena emphasizes, the state has its own language and cultural background; it is not impartial or neutral in establishing those rules.

From this perspective, the ability to communicate with others does not determine agreement or mutual understanding. Rancière questions Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethics model, developed as a strategy for decision making and agreement through rational argumentation, which asserts that communicative action is the most important and characteristic form of human interaction and that language is the basic instrument for the constitution of individual identities and societies (Habermas, 1990). People build personal identities and a social semantic space with meanings and values that are the bases of social order; these values and meanings are institutionalized, recreated, and transmitted historically for generations through communicative action (Habermas, 1989). In this sense, the main characteristic of discourse ethics resides not in specific moral content but in procedures, and it is expected that practical discourse will secure reasonable and fair agreements through argumentative interaction.

The difference between Rancière’s perspective and the influential Habermasian model is important because the latter has informed much of the institutional engineering of contemporary democratic practice. In Peru, mesas de diálogo (dialogical roundtables) are a common practice, conceived as the appropriate remedy for conflictive relations between the state and various groups in society. These spaces for argument always assume that agreement is not just desirable but possible, locating the probability of success in the establishment of fair procedures that guarantee equal and respectful exchange within a community of individuals who, it is assumed, are intersubjectively related.

But what if an intersubjective relation among speakers and a common worldview are not presupposed? What if dialogue is regarded as situated in a context in which inequality and power relations obscure fair procedures and favor mistrust? Intersubjectivity is of course a crucial resource for dialogue, but it cannot be taken for granted; it is a sociohistorical construct that relies on common social meanings (values, symbols, connotations) and institutions (language, morality, culture) that shape people’s understanding. Intersubjectivity is key for social interaction, but it does not occur in a social vacuum in which individuals rely only on certain natural capacities to produce common action (Castoriadis, 1987).

If intersubjectivity is not assumed, a more cautious consideration of the bases for agreement ensues, and disagreement and its foundation can be seriously considered. Rancière asserts that there is a structure in disagreement: “The structures proper to disagreement are those in which discussion of an argument comes down to a dispute over the object of the discussion and over the capacity of those who are making an object of it” (Rancière, 1999: xii). Thus in a situation of disagreement we are to focus on how interlocutors understand the object of their dispute and how they conceive “the other.” This implies revealing at least two levels in play in any dialogical situation: the level of understanding of themes and discourse and a deeper level of understanding and recognition of forms of subordination. As Rancière puts it, language is not only about exchange but also about commandments that reveal hierarchies in play. From this point of view the legitimacy of some interlocutors may be questioned in situations in which a subjacent conflict and power relations emerge.

Intercultural Disagreement

The influential theory of deliberative democracy has significantly shaped the design of social policy procedures and techniques that increase the citizenry’s participation in political decision making. In Peru, the return to democracy was accompanied by the creation and implementation of mechanisms of consultation and deliberation such as dialogue roundtables, procesos de concer-tación (deliberation and consensual decision processes), mesas de desarrollo (development roundtables), and presupuestos participativos (participatory budgets) (Remy, 2005). The law of prior consultation and its implementation were part of this participatory wave in response to the increase in social conflicts and protests demanding direct participation in political decisions (Ilizarbe, 2015; 2017). The passage of the law was the result of violent confrontation between the state and indigenous communities defending their legitimate right to make decisions about their land. This struggle for the control of Amazonian territories also confronted different understandings of progress, justice, and democracy. Although the law seemed to emerge from consensus about the need to rebuild the social and political pact, its implementation turned into an area of disagreement and dispute that revealed irreconcilable differences. In this section I analyze the first official intercultural dialogue conducted to decide the procedural terms of future consultation processes, focusing on revealing the structure of disagreement. The leading questions are how interlocutors understood the object of their dispute and how they conceived “the other.”

In his analysis of this process, Alejandro Diez (2014: 28) describes a complex scenario in which neither the state nor the indigenous organizations had a unitary position, albeit for different reasons. He highlights the indirect role played by the extractive industries and nongovernmental organizations trying to influence the process through the state and the indigenous representatives, respectively. According to Diez, this process of dialogue is better understood as a performance about unresolved problems linked to indigenous peoples’ historical demands of the state. For him there was no clear understanding of what was at stake during the consultation: the state representatives adopted a minimalist and formalist approach centered on the procedures and were reluctant to consider the demands of the indigenous peoples’ organizations. The indigenous peoples advanced programmatic historical demands that in the end questioned the legitimacy of the law. While the former thought of the consultation process as a neutral procedure that needed only to follow predesigned steps, the latter took it as an opportunity for the articulation of demands. As a result, narrative accounts of the process by state and indigenous representatives contradict each other; where the state representatives see success, the indigenous representatives denounce fraud (Diez, 2014: 11).

Stéphanie Rousseau (2012) has noted that processes of consultation continue to reproduce mechanisms of control of indigenous representation by political and intellectual elites, ignoring the specificities of the socially and politically constructed category “indigenous.” She considers this to be an expression of the teleology of modernization, which conceives of citizenship and ethnicity as mutually exclusive. Cynthia Sanborn and Álvaro Paredes (2014: 21) register a similar reading: they find the state incapable of recognizing indigenous peoples as fully enfranchised citizens and at the same time culturally different. These appreciations are consistent with President García’s statement about the second-class-citizenship status of indigenous peoples.

How did the state representatives involved in the process of consultation envisage the objective of intercultural dialogue? After the process of dialogue broke down, Iván Lanegra, vice minister of interculturality, wrote an open letter to the indigenous representatives who abandoned the dialogue. In it he alluded to a situation of preexisting consensus that, in his view, legitimized in advance the process of consultation and committed all of its interlocutors to certain basic agreements (see, e.g., Lanegra, 2012):

Widespread consensus—national and international, including at the moment your own organizations—about the necessity to dictate the Law of Prior Consultation that was finally promulgated relies on the absolute conviction we share that this norm does not violate the collective rights of indigenous peoples and is in accordance with the spirit of Convention 169. . . . What is not possible for me to admit is that someone accuses the Law of Consultation of violating the rule of law, turning its back on so many Peruvian men and women, indigenous or not, who were loyally committed to its approval. I hope that these words’ appeal to thoughtful reflection and the arguments here expressed invite you to participate in the implementation of a law you fought so hard for, honoring in this way, as you should, the commitments we have already assumed. The doors of dialogue will always be open.

In the vice minister’s view, the passage of the law had been a collective achievement (not only of indigenous peoples) and had involved a basic consensus that guaranteed in advance approval of the implementation of the law, including the approval of a reglamento, a pragmatic version of the law that lays down the procedure for its implementation. He could not conceive of any reasonable argument to question the process and thus denied reasonable competence to those who disagreed. He was shocked by the demands for revision of the law, which he considered inappropriate because of a supposed “widespread consensus, national and international.”

And how did the indigenous representatives understand the intercultural dialogue? Before starting the process of internal evaluation, the indigenous organizations agreed on a unity pact that would guarantee a common position against the state. They conceived the process of consultation as an opportunity for negotiation in which they would need to defend certain points and eventually concede others. Suspicion and distance characterized their relations with the state, which they regarded as alien and even hostile. As a consequence, the decision adopted before the dialogue was to advance some basic nonnegotiable points (Servindi, 2013):

We demand of the state, enterprises, and society as a whole respect for these minimum and nonnegotiable principles, thus fulfilling the constitutional and international obligations that the state, exercising its sovereignty, has assumed. We summon all indigenous, aboriginal and social organizations, as well as international organizations, to definitively support and respect the application of these minimum principles, which are framed in terms of the principles of the social and democratic rule of law, with cultural and legal pluralism, as recognized in the Peruvian Constitution and the framework of human rights and the rights of indigenous peoples.

While the indigenous organizations approached the dialogue with enormous distrust of the state representatives, there were also internal debates about the proposal prepared by the Vice Ministry of Culture. These areas of argument reinforced the sense of being excluded from the state and the need to generate a strong oppositional identity. References to the struggle previous to the promulgation of the law were recurrent in the macroregional and national meetings. At the national meeting Sandra Huerta, a representative of the Organización Nacional de Mujeres Indígenas Andinas y Amazónicas del Perú–Ancash, said: “People, wake up! A reglamento is less important than a law, the law is superior and they will hurt us more at that level. This is why I am asking each of you to stand up in defense of our territories, of our life, of the dignity of those that have been hurt. Let’s please stand up together for the modification of the law. Let’s go, brothers and sisters!” (CONACAMI Perú, 2012). Her use of the self-defense metaphor revealed the intention to abandon the space for dialogue and even negotiation and prepare for confrontation. Not all of the representatives agreed with her, however. Miguel Silva, national leader of the Confederación Campesina del Perú, said: “We have always supported the construction of our organization. This is why we respect agreement by our bases, which have agreed on two issues: to go forward with the proposal of implementation and also with the proposal of modification of the law” (CONACAMI Perú, 2012). Since the majority was in favor of questioning the law, those who partially disagreed, like Silva, were harassed and identified as traitors, as is evident in the speech of Edwin Carpio, president of the Coordinadora Regional de Comunidades Afectados por la Minería–Apurimac (CONACAMI Perú, 2012):

This convention is the result of blood spilled in the world. This convention is the result of the struggles of our people in the world, and here in Peru we are not going to betray the peoples of the world. The Peruvian people have the right to defend Convention 169, whatever the cost, because Convention 169 was defended by and fought for by peoples of the world, who struggled for our rights, and we are not going to allow a few traitors to betray Convention 169.

In the end, the image of a violent world struggle returned to reinforce a collective identity that had no room for difference or disagreement. As a result, a majority position to abandon the process of consultation sealed the dispute, but it did not become consensual. Four organizations decided to leave and two decided to stay. The unity pact broke down, and the dialogue with the state ended in a new episode of confrontation between the state and the indigenous peoples, with the latter accusing the former of bad faith and mistreatment and the former approving the proposed procedure despite radical disagreement. Mistrust was reinstituted, and the possibility of intercultural dialogue faded away.

By Way of Conclusion

Processes of dialogue may be the result of extreme and violent confrontation, and this needs to be addressed and understood before agreement is set as a goal. As Rancière suggests, the structure and foundations of disagreement must be taken into account for democracy to exist. If the ultimate objective is to democratize state-society relations and this amounts to the reestablishment of the social pact and the construction of new institutions and relations, disagreement rooted in ontological antagonism and socioeconomic inequalities must be seriously considered. It is crucial to analyze processes of dialogue and their challenges in their specific contexts, attending to factors that favor—or do not—securing fair and equal conditions for all participants. Power relations and antagonistic views should not be ignored. Political subjects and political identities are not monolithic but fluid and internally diverse and can be challenged and reconstituted in these situations. From this perspective, a process of dialogue that accommodates difference and disagreement and takes inequality into account is better suited to fostering the emergence of shared meanings and new identities. Processes of dialogue that deal with cultural difference and inequality are a step forward in the construction of democratic relations.

Despite the significant challenges that intercultural dialogue poses, it is a good perspective to adopt for the construction of a new social pact and new institutions but is not to be taken for granted. Interculturality as a political project cannot assume a common language, common interests, common worldviews, or even common sociopolitical status. On the contrary, it has to depart from these difficult conditions and work creatively and collaboratively to build a shared language and common interests. Procedures are important, but since they are laden with cultural and political meanings they need to be reviewed and agreed on by all participants. It is therefore better to take a step back and consider the roots of disagreement and mistrust and work on these factors in designing and developing processes of dialogue that aim to build new forms of social and political interaction.