Aastha Nayak, Shashwat Shankar and Tanvi Gupta
In this episode, we speak with Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca, Deputy Director of the Justiciary and Professor at Javeriana University, about rethinking international law through indigenous cosmologies. The conversation explores his concept of indigenizing international law for multi-species justice, examining how indigenous knowledge systems challenge Western legal frameworks and offer new ways to address climate change, ecological harm, and questions of justice beyond the human.
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Aastha Nayak: Hello and welcome to the Law School Policy Review podcast. Our topic for today is Indigenizing International Law for Multi-Species Justice. Our guest for today is Paulo Ilich Baca, and we are really honoured to have you, Sir, for this conversation today. I know this has been a long time coming since we initiated this concept note, but we are grateful to be here today to talk on indigenizing international law for multi-species justice. Do you have any questions for us before we begin, or should we just dive into the podcast?
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: Thank you for having me. It is a pleasure and I think we can start.
Aastha Nayak: It is our honour to have you on the podcast. For our listeners, here is a brief introduction of Doctor Baca.
Tanvi Gupta: Doctor Baca currently serves as Deputy Director of the Justiciary and Professor at Javeriana University. His academic background spans law and ethnography. He holds a law degree from the National University of Colombia and a PhD in Ethnography from the University of Kent. He has also been a Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown and a postdoctoral researcher funded by the European Research Council.
Aastha Nayak: Sir, just a slight note: none of us can really speak Spanish, so please excuse our pronunciations. We will try our best.
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: That is fine. English is not my language either, so I apologize for that as well.
Aastha Nayak: I think that really ties in with our podcast. We are talking about indigenizing law, and we are all speaking in a language that was given to us by the colonizers. It is none of our native or mother language, and I think that is also interesting. The reason we are having this conversation right now is in the context of the July 2025 International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on Climate Change. The July 2025 advisory opinion on climate change has been called a vindication for vulnerable states. However, the opinion reproduces the same structural asymmetries that have defined international environmental law since Stockholm 1972. It grants formal equality in theory while overlooking the vulnerabilities of small island developing states. In practice, these nations face the most devastating effects of climate change, despite contributing only a fraction of historic emissions. We have been delighted to learn about your work, which deals precisely with this problem. You draw on Colombian indigenous movements, Amazonian and Andean cosmologies, and that is what you call indigenizing international law for multi-species justice. We know that you have spent multiple years asking the harder question, and you do not merely ask how the Global South can better use international law. Instead, you ask whether international law, as currently constituted, is fit for purpose at all, and what it would take for international law to change.
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: Thank you very much. Indeed, my research question and what I have been trying to answer is why we as Western scholars cannot translate our own language through the language of indigenous cosmologies. In my own perspective and my own personal experience, I learned English very late in my life when I was twenty-eight, and it was a hard process because at the beginning, my grammar worked quite well, but I was not an idiomatic speaker because I was thinking in Spanish. Sometimes it sounds strange for native speakers, although the grammar works. Being able to immerse myself in Anglo-Saxon environments suddenly changed my mind, and at some point I was able to dream in English. It is a practical example of how a culture can change you. I am very different when I am talking in my own language; even my behaviour changes. The exercise is quite the same as when I used to work with indigenous peoples. I am fascinated by their words and cosmologies, and they told me to change the very concepts of international law through indigenous cosmologies. It happened when I started to work within the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia, because they asked me to analyse the concept of genocide in terms of criminal international law. It was a field that at that moment was unfamiliar to me. I was not an expert on criminal law. I was very much involved in human rights and indigenous peoples’ rights from the perspective of international standards, and I immersed myself in criminal international law. But suddenly the indigenous leaders explained their own interpretation of criminal law standards through their cosmologies, and that marked a core moment in my intellectual history, because they pushed me within their boundaries, and in a way asked me to interpret international law and criminal international law through the history of indigenous movements here in Colombia. Then, working in the field in the Amazon and in the Andean region, I started to understand how indigenous peoples have been able to use international law to their own struggles in order to keep their own cosmologies. So the exercise that was born at that moment, almost twenty years ago, was to try to understand international law and constitutional law through indigenous cosmologies. In a way, it is a kind of inverse translation. When I am talking in English, you as a native speaker might think that in my translation, the English is losing something from its very soul. But I can see it the other way around: through my Spanish, the English language is gaining something that it does not have. That, mainly, is the exercise.
Shashwat Shankar: That really helps set the context, Professor. You gave an example of how indigenous communities had their own interpretation of what genocide meant under the Rome Statute or under the International Criminal Court. But we know that all of these statutes, all of these textual provisions, are drafted in ivory towers at the very best, by people who are not privy to the problems or the hardships of indigenous communities. So it is a Western construct, and developing countries or indigenous communities are not part of the decision-making process to that effect. How do we see that changing, and what efforts can we take? What is the scholarly discourse in this context? If you could just elaborate on that?
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: Indigenous movements and grassroots organizations have been doing that kind of exercise since colonial times, when the very discourse of international law started at the beginning of the 15th and 16th century, during the process of the colonization of the Americas. The debates were, for example, whether or not the lands of indigenous peoples here in Latin America had an owner or not, or whether or not they had a soul. Those were the first debates in terms of international law. So international law played a role in the colonization of the Americas, and indigenous peoples not only criticized the framework of international law, but they understood that they could use this framework to claim their rights. It is a very interesting paradox, grounded in practices of resistance: when the colonizer appropriates the language of the colonized, he thinks that he is imposing his language. But the colonized are able to transform and reappropriate the language of the colonizer. That is why the colonizers first learned the language of indigenous peoples to impose Spanish, and it happens the same in the United States, where colonizers learned indigenous languages in order to impose English. In that sense, the process of appropriation and reappropriation is very complex. Indigenous peoples have been able to go to the United Nations and claim, for example, self-determination. They were able to drive the first treaties on indigenous rights and then the 2007 Declaration on Indigenous Rights, in the language of international law. But on the field, they use that language to keep their own language, their own jurisprudences, their own cosmologies. They have been doing that exercise for centuries. What I have been trying to do with the proposal of indigenizing international law for multi-species justice is to reappropriate the very concepts of indigenous cosmologies to think about international law. For example, if for indigenous peoples, mountains and rivers are sources of law, how can we approach international law using this kind of language? How can we translate the rules that indigenous peoples take from their relationship with mountains and rivers, in order to transform the very framework of international environmental law? That is the kind of exercise I have been trying to drive, but it is an exercise that indigenous peoples have been doing for centuries. In a way, I conceive myself as a diplomat and a translator of the world that I have been able to journey through, trying to transform the field in which I have been working in the last years.
Aastha Nayak: Your work pushes back against a long tradition where indigenous norms are treated as custom, tradition, or culture, but not exactly law. Where would this structural resistance to recognizing indigenous law come from? And what do you think has to change in legal education, or even in the courts, for that recognition to become real and tangible?
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: I think it is very important to start changing our own sources of knowledge. In that sense, Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak in India has been doing so for many years. We think that the only way to express ourselves in academia is through writing: books, articles, and in terms of law, constitutions and rulings. But in other cultural traditions that many times belong to our own nation states, there are different sources of knowledge. For example, dreaming could be a source of law in the desert of La Guajira in the north part of Colombia, where indigenous peoples use dreaming as a way to make interpretations about law and to produce biocultural indicators to fight against climate change. That kind of intercultural dialogue is key to transforming legal education. Indigenous peoples have been doing that with our laws. They have been attending law schools, and they have become magistrates and judges of the courts here in Colombia, and in other contexts as well. They have been very generous in the sense that they have been very open-minded about the concepts of the Western tradition, using them for their own struggle, even while acknowledging that Western law has many remarkable concepts and contributions. For example, feminist theory is a Western background that can invigorate indigenous peoples’ traditions, and indigenous women have been working with that Western tradition in order to strengthen their rights. Why can we not do the same? Why can we not take indigenous cosmologies to think about the rights of nature, for example, and expand the concept of environmental law to a multi-species justice, in which the relationship between humans, non-humans, and spirits can bring possibilities to expand in a creative manner the very framework of international law?
Aastha Nayak: That is a very fair point about cultural blending within legal education, which surely helps. You also talk about how what is happening to indigenous people in Colombia and elsewhere constitutes genocide by ecological means. Can you please shed some light on how that would happen and explain the connection between, say, the destruction of a river or forest and genocide?
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: The Colombian indigenous organization has been working on indigenous genocide not only to think about indigenous extinction, but also to catalyse important doctrinal reflections on genocide by ecological means and indigenous ontological self-determination. In the first scenario, as Rob Nixon has argued, impoverished communities today are increasingly subjected to forms of displacement without movement. This has been exemplified here in Colombia in the case of the Embera Catillo nation. In this expanded understanding of displacement, rather than being limited to physical relocation of people from their homelands, displacement refers to the degradation and loss of land and resources that sustain living communities, effectively stranding them in environments that no longer support life as they once did. In that sense, displacement operates not only through physical expulsion, but through the gradual erosion of the ecological conditions that sustain life, culture, and territorial belonging. In the second instance, as Colombian ethnographer Daniel Luis has shown, indigenous organizations have forcefully demonstrated that territory cannot be reduced to a physical enclosure or bounded spatial category. Rather, it encompasses multiple interdependent ontological realities. Indigenous territories are thus better understood as complex relational networks that include both human and non-human beings, which together co-produce the conditions of life and knowledge. This relational ontology challenges the epistemic hierarchies embedded in Western legal and political thought, which tend to separate nature from culture, subject from object, and law from life itself. By affirming the territoriality of these relational worlds, indigenous organizations advance a conception of multi-species justice that recognizes the agency and rights of non-human entities, while also enacting epistemic justice through the recognition of indigenous modes of knowing, governing, and inhabiting their biocultural landscape. Territory is not merely a space to be owned or administered, but a living, sentient field of reciprocal obligations and shared existence. To give a practical example, the idea of rivers as veins of water becomes especially powerful. These narratives are not only about nature; they express the rules that make life possible. Over time, I came to understand that the relationship with water can also be read as a form of law, as a source of law. For many indigenous peoples, rivers are living beings embedded in dense webs of relations, where water listens and speaks. To defend a river is to defend an entire world.
Shashwat Shankar: Professor, when you talked about territory and how the relationship with indigenous communities transcends territory, and how we should view this from a relational ontological lens, the first phrase that came to my mind was transboundary harm. If we look at what developed countries are doing today, indigenous communities usually have some animal to which they have a deep bond, and which has now gone extinct. What these developed countries are doing is taking currently living threatened species and fossils of the extinct species, and possibly trying to revive those extinct species. We saw the dire wolf de-extinction that took place in the United States, and many other similar projects that are ongoing. But coming to indigenous communities and multi-species justice, because we do not know what these extinct species have to offer to nature in the present context, given that they have been gone for a long while, questions arise with respect to trophic cascades and transboundary harm. Considering that the ICJ advisory opinion on climate change crystallized the duty to not cause transboundary harm as customary international law, how do we see this crystallizing towards indigenous community justice and multi-species justice in a broader context?
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: It is a very hard and difficult question that poses ethical and political concerns. I think that we are experiencing a moment in history where the relationship between law, science, and technology is key. The problem is that the developments of law are sometimes very slow, while science and technology advance very quickly. I think a good place to start, because I do not have a clear answer, is to be very clear about authorship and intellectual ownership, because this example that you are raising has colonial roots as well. There are many indigenous developments that have not been recognized in terms of intellectual ownership. There are divisions grounded in colonial practices, such as the assumption that indigenous peoples do not produce science or epistemologies. We need certainly to discuss this and to carry out prior consultation with indigenous peoples, to see how we can make ethical and political commitments in this kind of field. For example, the concept of indigenizing international law is something I developed, but I did so in dialogue with indigenous cosmologies and with many scholars and thinkers whose contributions I explicitly recognize. That kind of acknowledgement matters because it situates knowledge in relationships, not as something you simply extract or repackage.
Aastha Nayak: I think that is a great answer, Professor. It is a difficult question and perhaps there is not one right answer, but it is definitely interesting to think about. While engaging with your research, we also read about the concept of the double bind, which describes having a soul divided between two impossible mandates. What would it mean to inhabit this double space between indigenous jurisprudence and international law? Do you think international law itself can learn to inhabit this contradiction rather than suppress it entirely?
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: The concept of double bind has been developed quite a lot by Spivak as well, and we are actually experiencing double bind practices in our daily life. In my case, the double bind matters because I am a non-indigenous scholar working in the field of indigenous peoples. It is a difficult situation because how can I speak for indigenous peoples without being an indigenous subject? But at the same time, we need to make translations, and the concept of double bind allows us to be creative translators, in the sense that it is not a matter of appropriation of the language of the other, but rather a matter of making improvements to our own culture through intercultural dialogue. Spivak, for example, has been doing that in her teaching practice as well. She decided to teach one semester in New York at an elite university and then one semester teaching on the field in India. That is a productive double bind. It is a cosmopolitical double bind, which situates in the same field the possibility to teach in New York while also learning from children on the field in India. That is a very productive dialogue. The same happens with Jose Maria Arguedas, the Peruvian writer who was a white intellectual that grew up with indigenous communities and, by circumstance, first learned Quechua, the language of indigenous peoples, and then, when he was around twelve, started to learn Spanish. He was a double bind subject in a way, because his soul was indigenous while his skin was white.
Tanvi Gupta: Indeed, Professor. As a non-indigenous scholar working in a field that is saturated with questions of who has the right to talk about indigenous knowledge, how has your thinking about your own positionality and research ethics evolved over time?
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: It has been very, very challenging. I have learned a lot from indigenous grassroots and intellectuals. Over time I understood that the best way to talk about indigenous laws and cosmologies was through co-authorship. At the beginning I was integrating the voices of indigenous peoples through fieldwork in my writing. But in the last five years I have also been promoting co-authorship with indigenous leaders, and it has been amazing because it is a practical way to bring together the double bind and to see how we can make resemblances and resonances in our own research. It has been fascinating because, for example, I wrote a book with two indigenous intellectuals from the desert of La Guajira, and I was expecting an exercise in which I would contribute in terms of human rights and international law, and expecting a collaboration from them through indigenous cosmologies. It happened the other way around. It was amazing because Diana Palmar, my co-author, is a journalist and a lawyer, and because she grew up in a city, she had forgotten a lot of her own cosmology. So she was contributing a great deal in terms of human rights. And because I had been doing fieldwork there and reading about Wayuu cosmology, I started to introduce concepts that she began to remember again. She asked me why I knew about this, and at the end, amazingly, we wove a double bind, because she, as an indigenous scholar, put a lot of effort into Western international law, and I, as a Western scholar, put a lot of effort into indigenous cosmologies. So the trajectory has been quite rich and complex, moving from legal pluralism and ethnography to co-authorship with indigenous leaders and multi-species justice. That, mainly, is the trajectory.
Aastha Nayak: Professor, you have described the current ecological crisis as inseparable from five centuries of colonial epistemicide. But now we see that decolonization has become a fashionable word in international law circles. How do we distinguish genuine engagement with indigenous epistemologies from what is, say, a new form of appropriation dressed in decolonial language?
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: That is a really important and honestly a tricky question. I would like to return to the matter of authorship and intellectual ownership to answer that question, because I think that is where the problem lies. Extractivism does not only happen in territories; it also happens in our field, in academia. We have seen hundreds of cases where, for example, PhD supervisors appropriate their students’ ideas or research without giving proper credit. That is a form of intellectual dispossession. Similarly, there is still an underlying assumption that academic literature in English is somehow superior, even to work produced in other languages, including colonial languages like Spanish. That hierarchy erases a great deal of knowledge and reproduces the very dynamics that the decolonial approach is supposed to challenge. For me, the difference between genuine engagement and appropriation comes down to a few things. Are you giving proper credit? Are you accountable to the communities and traditions you are engaging with? Are you treating indigenous epistemologies as living systems of thought, or just as concepts you can borrow to sound more critical or innovative? If those conditions are not there, then what we are seeing is not decolonization. It is just a new form of extraction, dressed up in decolonial language.
Tanvi Gupta: That is a very fair point, Professor. We see that organizations like the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia are combining human rights law, non-anthropocentric jurisprudence, and social mobilization into a sophisticated multi-register strategy. As the project of indigenizing international law for multi-species justice moves forward, what specific milestones or changes in lived reality will tell you that this strategy is actually working?
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: There is a huge gap between the law on the books and the law on the field, to put it in legal sociology terms. What has been happening in Colombia and in Latin America is that we have been experiencing many improvements in constitutional recognition and jurisprudence, but a great deal of trouble and problems in terms of implementation. I think that is a big challenge for us as scholars and as activists. It is a very strange thing, working in the field of human rights, because sometimes we put a great deal of effort going to the courts and spending years before the Constitutional Court or the Inter-American Commission dealing with a case, and after, for example, ten years, we win the case, and then we experience a very frustrating situation because the implementation of the rulings is a failure. That shows us that law and legal activism are important, but we need something else. I think that is why interdisciplinarity is very important at this moment. We need to make productive dialogues outside the legal field in order to think about, for example, the best way to implement a ruling. It happens all the time, and it is very frustrating. In a way, my intellectual history has been marked by that double bind as well. I cannot be only in academia, because I need action, but at the same time, when I am doing only action, these kinds of frustrations make me aware of the importance of promoting critical thinking. So I think that the double bind between academia and activism is key to going beyond the improvements we can make through law.
Aastha Nayak: Thank you so much for this conversation, Doctor Baca. Right now, with everything that is going on geopolitically and in terms of the climate crisis, we are living in a moment of multiple compounding crises. Conversations like the one we have had today are very important as we think about how international law should move forward. I would also encourage everyone who is listening today to go to the Law School Policy Review blog, where Professor Baca wrote about the University of the Pastos and Kilasingas peoples. It is about indigenizing legal education from the Global South, which is also a very interesting piece. Professor, thank you so much for engaging with us today and for being on our podcast.
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: Thank you for having me. It has been a pleasure. Thank you.
Shashwat Shankar: Thank you so much, Professor. It was a pleasure interacting with you, and it really helps our readers to engage with new perspectives on indigeneity and multi-species justice that are not mainstream in the literature today. Talking with you today and hearing your perspectives on how your research has evolved, and on how this scholarly discourse is moving forward, has been really enriching. We also aim to contribute some scholarly literature as we engage further with this domain, and we truly hope that one day we will be able to see the implementation gap, which you were talking about a few moments ago.
Dr. Paulo Ilich Bacca: Thank you.