Associate Professor of Law Pablo Rueda-Saiz discusses his paper, “Targets, Fields, and Tactics: Multi-Institutional Legal Mobilization in the Campaign of the U’wa People in Colombia” on Miami Law’s podcast, The Explainer. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the U’wa became the poster child for the anti-globalization and anti-corporate movement in Seattle and Genoa. There were protests in support of the U’wa all around the globe, from Bogota to Tokyo, and from Canada to Argentina, and especially in the U.S. Their fame came in part because this group threatened with committing collective suicide if the oil companies went forward with their project to extract oil from their land.
In the end, the campaign successfully prevented the foreign oil companies from exploring the area they had licensed for their operation, and they gave back their license to the Colombian state-owned oil company. Listen more here.
Professor Rueda-Saiz’s primary interests include international and comparative constitutional law, law and society, social movements, armed conflict, and globalization. He has taught law at the University of Wisconsin, at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, and at the Universities of El Rosario and Los Andes in Colombia.
