Advocacy beyond the courtroom: Listening to the Amazon’s more-than-human voices
Reconceiving law enforcement along environmental lines requires options beyond litigation.
In the Amazon, law enforcement often arrives too late—or not at all. Across territories dominated by illegal mining, deforestation, and organized crime, the state is both distant and, when present, violent. Its absence allows extraction to flourish, and its interventions often bring more repression than justice.
What if we built law enforcement differently—supplementing policing with collective strategies for public decision-making and decentering formal litigation? Such strategies, commonly used in Latin American advocacy, rely on dialogue, co-presence, and reciprocity to translate community knowledge into institutional accountability and to broaden the meaning of enforcement.
What if we built law enforcement differently—supplementing policing with collective strategies for public decision-making and decentering formal litigation?
Amazon Underworld and the Red de Redes Amazónicas are only two of the initiatives inspiring new mechanisms to connect territorial realities to decision-making arenas. They are forms of decolonial law enforcement: strategies that bring community voices, Indigenous leadership, and more-than-human knowledge into the institutional architecture of justice.
From courtrooms to territories
Traditional law enforcement depends on the coercive power of the state. Yet the state is rarely capable of enforcing the law across vast regions of the Amazon controlled by extractive and criminal economies. Litigation, though an important instrument for accountability, often ends where communities’ struggles begin. Court victories may be symbolic, and we must question if they bring tangible positive change once the case is closed.
Redefining enforcement as a political and participatory process broadens its meaning beyond judicial arenas and into spaces where local decisions are made, budgets are defined, and rights are translated into policy. Across the Amazon, collective initiatives participate in transformative legal actions unconnected to lawsuits: policy papers that become state commitments, strategic dialogues with ministries and prosecutors, and cross-border advocacy among Indigenous and non-Indigenous community leaders.
One example is the 2025 report In the Shadows of the State, copublished by Amazon Underworld and Amazon Watch. The report documents fieldwork in the triple-border region of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru that reveals how armed groups govern territories abandoned by the state. Its authors formally presented their findings to governmental, United Nations, and civil society representatives at a diplomatic breakfast in Bogotá ahead of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization’s Fifth Summit of Presidents. Dialogues with key authorities from Colombia’s, Brazil’s, and Peru’s ministries of environment and national public defenders’ offices and UN representatives in Brazil, Peru, and New York transformed territorial demands into actionable commitments, including regional cooperation on environmental crime, protection of Indigenous defenders, and the inclusion of territorial guards in security strategies.
When advocacy becomes enforcement
Legality in this sense is not a fixed property of the state—it is a practice enacted through movement, recognition, and encounter.
The power of policy papers for strengthening state responses to environmental crime and corruption developed by networks of Indigenous and non-Indigenous advocates in collaboration with journalists, local leaders, and researchers rests in not only the policy papers’ content but also their circulation. These documents need to work in a wide range of distinct institutional spaces, from community assemblies to ministerial roundtables, diplomatic breakfasts, and UN consultations.
Such spaces differ profoundly from courtrooms. Courts operate through codified procedures and adversarial reasoning while arenas outside the realm of litigation privilege listening, negotiation, and translation. These are the spaces before enforcement, where legality is still a work in progress. As reports and briefs travel between territories and institutions, they redefine who can speak for the law and where it can be produced. In so doing, they transform lived realities into enforceable commitments. Legality in this sense is not a fixed property of the state—it is a practice enacted through movement, recognition, and encounter.
When such recommendations reach ministries, prosecutors, or international organizations, the resulting encounters between Indigenous representatives and diplomats and policymakers lead to collective frameworks for action. Here, law enforcement emerges through voice. This is a model of enforcement grounded in conversation, empathy, and copresence that can bring the state and private sector back into dialogue with territories they have long abandoned.
Decolonizing enforcement
To decolonize enforcement is to transform not only who enforces the law but also how enforcement happens. It means introducing new forms of knowledge, relationality, and collective decision-making into those institutions that decide whose lives—and whose ecosystems—matter. This transforms enforcement from an act of domination into one of collaboration, ultimately strengthening the state.
The Amazon offers a vivid example of this transformation. There, law enforcement cannot be separated from ecology, economy, and survival. Forests, rivers, soils, and other more-than-human entities are not passive backgrounds to human life—they are political actors shaping the conditions of legality itself. To enforce the law in these territories necessitates recognizing their agency.
Outside Latin America, projects like Empatheatre in South Africa, cocreated by Neil Coppen and collaborators at the Durban University of Technology, demonstrate how storytelling, testimony, and performance can reshape how governments respond to injustice. Their method, known as theatre for empathy, brings policymakers, bureaucrats, and affected communities to the same stage, transforming spectators into participants.
In the Amazon, advocacy convenings and policy papers perform a similar function. The creation and dissemination of In the Shadows of the State blurred the boundaries between activism, research, and governance, turning conversation itself into an act of enforcement.
Toward more-than-human enforcement
Incorporating more-than-human and community-driven mechanisms into enforcement requires humility from institutions unused to sharing authority. Across the Amazon, participatory monitoring, territorial protocols, and intercultural hearings have begun to reshape the practice and perception of justice. When Indigenous environmental guards are recognized as protectors of the commons or when ministries revise policies with input from forest dwellers, legality becomes a shared endeavor rather than an act imposed from above.
Embracing more-than-human and community-based approaches also means honoring the ecosystem as a partner in coexistence, acknowledging that rivers, trees, and animals sustain their own forms of order, dialogue, and repair. These other ways of conceiving life and harmony invite institutions to slow down, to listen differently, and to learn from the plural grammars of justice already thriving in the rainforest. In doing so, enforcement shifts from control to care, from punishment to reciprocity. The judiciary does not lose authority by listening—it gains legitimacy and helps to restore dialogue across species, territories, and worlds.
