Few places condense the contradictions of our planetary condition as sharply as the Amazon.

The Amazon is at once central to planetary survival, and constantly exposed to processes that threaten it (here and here). It regulates climate, sustains biodiversity, and holds together forms of life that exceed any single ecological or political description. At the same time, it is incessantly reworked through extraction, infrastructure, and international, domestic and transnational governance projects that seek to render it legible, manageable, productive.

To approach the Amazon today is to stand at the intersection of survival and planetary collapse.

Yet the Amazon is not only an ecological concern. It is also a juridical one. The forest and its rivers and, above all, the enormous socio-ecological biomass that Eurocentric modernity shorthand as the Amazon are not merely sites where law is applied. They are sites where law is made, practice, contested, and imagined otherwise. 

Amazonian Law

Across the Amazons, different ways of understanding obligation, authority, and coexistence unfold in relation to a world that is never reducible to human actors alone. In this sense, the Amazon is not simply an object of governance. It governs. It produces normativity. It operates under what legal anthropologist Jenny García Ruales has termed, in the context of the Ecuadorian Amazons, a form of  Living Forest Constitutionalism, or what Ecuadorians still refer to, somehow enigmatically and despicably, as “el Oriente” (“the East”).

For a long time, however, the Amazon has been apprehended through external lenses.

Colonial chronicles, missionary accounts, extractive maps, development plans, and now satellite imagery and climate dashboards have all contributed to making the forest visible in particular ways. These forms of representation organise “the Amazons”. They configure it as a particular, often state-centric, fragmented space of intervention, a frontier of resources, a carbon sink, or a zone of risk. They establish what can be known and, by extension, what and who can govern it.

From within the Amazonian forest and along its rivers, a different set of relations nonetheless persists.

For many Amazonian Indigenous Peoples, the Amazon is a living, relational field. Rivers, animals, and other more-than-human beings may appear as ancestors, interlocutors, and participants in decisions concerning territory and conduct. Obligations emerge through encounters among humans and a wider community of beings. Crucially, these relations are not reducible to symbolic beliefs or moral allegories – as if the depletion of fish merely signalled human misconduct such as overfishing. They instead form normative arrangements that organise life, conflict, and continuity within cosmological polities that are ontologically rich and agentically diverse, as scholarship on Amerindian perspectivism has argued over the past decades. 

Law, in these contexts, extends to nature. A clear example is the recent Rights of Nature turn in Latin America and beyond which, although articulated through state institutions, emerged from Indigenous mobilisations to protect their relationships with more-than-human entities and to secure recognition of their legal standing. Yet, for many Amazonian Indigenous Peoples, law also begins from a world already saturated with cross-species relations that carry juridical weight, challenging received Eurocentric assumptions about law’s ontology and operation.

Visiting the Ecuadorian Amazon in November 2024, a member of the Kichwa People of Yanayaku put it simply to one of us as we travelled along the El Tigre River: “we benefit from [the forest’s] generosity but we should also attend to the rules of reciprocity”. 

This phrase captures something that Western legal language often struggles to hold. In the Amazon, obligation does not follow from entitlement, but from relation – from forms of relation that cut across beings often treated as though they did not belong to the same juridical world.

Amazon of Rights

The project, which unfolded between 2023 and 2026, set out to explore how eco-centric normativity – forms of ordering grounded in the value, agency, and reciprocal claims of human and more-than-human life – operates across the Amazon basin, or better still, across what might be understood as the Amazonian socio-ecological biomass.

Rather than treating the Amazon as a mere object of environmental regulation, the Amazon of Rights project approached it as a juridical ecosystem in its own right. The aim was not only to document new legal developments, particularly the emergence and mobilisation of Rights of Nature discourse across the region, but also to attend to the multiple ways in which law is enacted, visualised, and experienced in the forest and along its rivers. In more theoretical terms, the project sought to critically assess dominant regimes of legal representation while exploring, foregrounding, and placing at the centre of debate alternative eco-centric normativities that persist across the Amazon.

Working across Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, and bringing together a group of more than forty scholars, artists, filmmakers, and community collaborators, the project combined comparative legal analysis with ethnographic and audiovisual methods.

Supported by Volkswagen Foundation, an independent foundation established in postwar Germany with proceeds linked to the privatisation of Volkswagen AG, whose own history remains marked by entanglements with authoritarian rule, extractive development, and labour exploitation, the project asked how eco-centric norms are articulated in constitutions and court decisions, as well as performed in Indigenous Peoples’ assemblies, expressed in paintings, embedded in rituals, and negotiated in everyday practices. It examined how the Amazon forest and river can appear as both subject and object, and how these formulations intersect with Indigenous political ontologies and local struggles.

This work generated a series of outputs that reflect the project’s methodological interdisciplinary commitments. A feature-length documentary, to be released later this year, traces juridical encounters through collaborative filming practices that follow the rhythms and instructions of communities. An edited volume, Amazon of Rights: Global Eco-Jurisprudence in Times of Urgency, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, brings together interdisciplinary reflections on law, ecology, and representation. Performances, visual interventions and sustained ethnographic fieldwork and mingas jurídicas (legal mingas) with community groups, scholars and artists explored how legality can be enacted beyond text. Community-based initiatives also supported ongoing efforts toward the revitalisation and recognition of Indigenous jurisprudences.

At the centre of this constellation sit the five Amazongraphies produced by the project.

Amazongraphies: Mapping Law Otherwise

The Amazongraphies are more than policy reports. They are attempts to map law otherwise. Each Amazongraphy brings together legal analysis, visual materials, and ethnographic attention to trace how eco-centric normativity takes shape in specific contexts. They follow the movements of law across institutions and practices, across texts and images, across human and more-than-human relations.

The country-based Amazongraphies for Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru offer situated national accounts of how eco-juridical practices emerge within distinct historical and political trajectories. Conceived as visually informed normative cartographies, they provide historical overviews of the formation of nation-states and their legal orders in relation to the Amazon, while tracing the changing presence of the forest within domestic legal systems and their correlated regimes of representation.

The Brazil Amazongraphy by André Nunes Chaib explores a dense and paradoxical legal landscape shaped by constitutional environmentalism, Indigenous jurisprudences, and persistent extractive pressures that has unfolded in the Amazons since the beginning of the Brazilian state project. The Colombia Amazongraphy by Iván Darío Vargas Roncancio, Sonia Mutumbajoy Hurtado and Benjamín Jacanamijoy Tisoy develops a normative cartography of overlapping legal worlds in the Colombian Amazon, from Derecho Propio (Own Law) to Derecho Ajeno (Foregin Law), foregrounding plants, territories and so-called invisible beings as legal actors.

The Ecuador Amazongraphy by Jenny García Ruales, Andrés Martínez Moscoso and Holger Cisneros offers a visually grounded and conceptually rich account of eco-centric normativity in Ecuador: a jurisdiction that has constitutionalised the Rights of Nature while remaining marked by extractive tensions. 

The Peru Amazongraphy by Roger Merino and María Eugenia Yllia shows how eco-centric perspectives in the country are articulated in legal activism, social mobilisation, and artistic expression, including the recognition of the Marañón River as a subject of rights and the designation of Indigenous communities as its guardians.

Across these studies, a recurring insight emerges. Eco-centric normativity is both diverse and dynamic. It is expressed in courts, in municipal ordinances, in community practices, and in visual/sensory worlds. Importantly, these expressions sometimes reinforce each other, sometimes constrain each other, and often they reveal the limits of translating complex relational ontologies into the bounded language of law and rights.

Alongside these country studies, the project also produced an Amazongraphy of 10 Canonical Texts on Eco-Centric Normativity by Carlos Andrés Baquero-Díaz. This report traces the intellectual trajectories that have shaped contemporary debates on eco-normativity, from early arguments about the legal standing of natural entities to Indigenous declarations that articulate relational understandings of life and territory. It shows that eco-centric thinking develops through law, philosophy, political theory, and Indigenous knowledge systems, drawing together multiple traditions of thought and practice (here). 

Importantly, the use of the term “canonical” in this Amazongraphy is itself reworked. The aim was to identify texts that are actively shaping how scholars and practitioners think about the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world, and to show how a canon is continuously formed, expanded, and contested through those engagements.

Reading Across Amazongraphies

Reading across these Amazongraphies allows for a set of broader reflections.

First, irreducibility is a characteristic of law in the Amazon. State law, Indigenous law, community norms, and more-than-human agencies coexist and interact constantly in the Amazonian forest (here). This plurality is not a problem to be solved. It is the condition through which legality is produced. Attempts to impose coherence often obscure the very relations that sustain life in the Amazonian world. This is particularly significant given how a single legal system, with individual property at its heart, continues to play a crucial role in this incredibly heterogenous territory. Property is thus a central fault line. Property regimes continue to structure extractive practices and legal conflicts across the Amazon. They organise relations between humans and the more-than-human world in ways that prioritise control and exploitation. Eco-centric approaches challenge these arrangements (here), but they do so unevenly and within constraints that are not easily displaced.

Second, eco-centric normativity exceeds the language of rights. The recognition of the Rights of Nature has been a significant development, opening new avenues for legal imagination and practice. Yet, as the Amazongraphies show, many Indigenous ontologies do not begin from rights. They begin from relations. Rivers, forests, and animals are not only subjects to be protected. They are participants in worlds of obligation, reciprocity, cosmopolitics and even legal hearings. When these relations are translated into rights, they gain visibility and enforceability. At the same time, they risk being simplified and bounded (here).

Third, representation is not external to law. It is one of its conditions. The Amazongraphies show how images and visual narratives are integral to the way law is enacted, practice and can be reimagined. Paintings, diagrams, and audiovisual materials illustrate legal developments, and enable the ongoing administration of the Amazon. They provide, at the same time, a vehicle through which the Amazon can be thought otherwise. They render visible relations that might otherwise remain outside institutional perception. They allow different worlds to appear.

An Invitation from Amazon

Taken together, these reflections suggest that the Amazon is a site of jurisprudential possibility. They reveal that alternative ways of understanding law are living practices already being enacted, negotiated, and transformed across everyday life.

To engage with the Amazon as a juridical ecosystem is to shift perspective. It requires moving away from viewing the Amazonian biomass as an object of law and toward recognising it as a space where law is continuously produced through relations that exceed the human. It requires attending to ontological and epistemic plurality, to visuality, to the limits of translation, and to the persistence of structures such as individual property rights that shape what is possible.

In the current planetary moment, the question is not whether law must change. It is how and from where that change will be articulated. The Amazon offers one such vantage point. Not as a model to be replicated, but as a site that makes visible the transformations that law must undergo if it is to remain responsive to the worlds it inhabits.

The Amazon of Rights project and its Amazongraphies are an invitation to take that vantage point seriously.