Insurgent Until Proven Innocent: Land, Power, and the Right to Defend Rights

Authors

• Kelsey Jost-Creegan, CUNY School of Law

Abstract

As the climate crisis intensifies, advocates worldwide have stood up to defend their communities, territories, and environment. In response, they have faced violent retaliation. This repression persists despite evolving international, regional, and national-level legal frameworks around the “right to defend rights” and the “right to protection.” This article begins by providing a comprehensive overview of this evolving legal landscape. Against this backdrop, the article examines the tactics and architectures of violence used to repress land and environmental defenders through the lens of counterinsurgency theory.

The article proposes a typology of counterinsurgent violence including: surveillance; stigmatization; criminalization; arbitrary detention; infiltration; cooptation; destruction of social fabric; psychological violence; and physical violence. It applies that typology to forty case studies of violence against land and environmental defenders in Latin America over the past decade. Using these case studies, I analyze where and how governments and corporate actors use strategies pulled from counterinsurgency theory and psychological operations to repress land and environmental defenders. Two or more forms of counterinsurgency violence were identified in all forty cases, with four or more forms identified in thirty-three of the cases. Ultimately, the analysis reveals a complex web of violence undertaken by a combination of state security forces and private actors.

Recommended Citation

Kelsey Jost-Creegan, Insurgent Until Proven Innocent: Land, Power, and the Right to Defend Rights, 47 Mich. J. Int'l L. 421 (2026).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil/vol47/iss3/4