RIVERS’s main challenge is to produce ground-breaking knowledge, from an empirical, interdisciplinary and dialoguing
perspective, about the contentions and challenges intrinsic to reconceptualising human rights with different ways of
understanding and relating to water. Worldwide, indigenous peoples are mobilising against the neoliberalisation of nature,
demonstrating radically different ways of knowing, being and living. At the same time, in 2010 the UN acknowledged water
as a human right, while in 2017 New Zealand, India and Colombia established ground-breaking legal precedents by
granting rivers human rights. RIVERS’s overarching research question is: To what extent can international human rights
law come to grips with plurilegal water realities? This project engages with one of the most pressing questions of this
century: the relationship between humans and nature. RIVERS tackles two intertwined core objectives: 1) analysing
different ways of knowing and relating to water and life among indigenous peoples and their understanding of its (potential)
violation by extractive projects; 2) discussing the contributions, challenges and pitfalls of interlegal translation of differing
water natures in plurilegal encounters at domestic and international levels. RIVERS will develop a multi-sited analysis and
empirical case-studies in three contexts: Colombia, Nepal and the UN human rights protection system. Through the lens of
legal pluralism, this will foreground competing political and legal water realities that interrogate dominant understandings of
the modern world. RIVERS will address two interrelated research challenges: 1) indigenous visions/practices: beyond water
as a natural resource and human right; 2) the UN human rights system: towards counter-hegemonic water knowledge
production. This project will pioneer new ways of thinking about water beyond the modern divides of nature/culture,
providing clues about future paths towards reconceptualising human rights.