My name is Riccarda Flemmer and I am a political scientist with a PhD from the University of Hamburg. My expertise is in grassroots’ activism, international indigenous peoples’ rights, conflict transformation, and citizen participation in Latin America. In my previous research, I have worked with civil society activists, especially indigenous peoples, to understand their perspective on the multiple (inter)national political, social, and legal struggles over resource extraction in the Amazon.

As Assistant Professor of “Political Struggles in the Global South”, my focus is on the Rights of Nature (RoN) and indigenous peoples’ ontologies. The research I want to carry out takes an innovative perspective on socio-environmental conflicts by (re)conceptualising them within the framework of ‘ontological politics’. Scaling-up insights on indigenous peoples’ understandings of nature and how these are mobilised in resistance to projects of resource extraction, development or conservation imposed on their territories, I want to explore the political potential of RoN in the Global South as well as in global climate activism.

I believe that RoN can be understood as a multitude of global encounters between indigenous and Western epistemologies and ontologies which may open possibilities to tackle one of the most pressing issues we are facing today: the emancipatory transformation of destructive and deeply unjust human–nature relations.