(2020) 1 TWAIL Review 93-120
ISSN 2563-6693
Published under a Creative Commons licence. 

This article analyses the complexities of the double bind between colonial domination and Indigenous resistance in conversation with anarchist sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. The functioning of the double bind appears in the article at three levels: first, by exploring the encounter between Western and Indigenous jurisdictions in the context of colonial meetings and across imperial networks; second, by analyzing the way in which Rivera develops an epistemological program based on daily life practices; and, third, by showing one example in which Rivera develops a double bind epistemological framework in order to read the colonial encounter between Western and Indigenous jurisdictions in the Americas in the sixteenth century. The interaction with Rivera allowed me to better understand the complexities of an Andean world that operates through the double bind of being Indigenous and non-Indigenous at the same time; while on the other, it enabled me to test out the academic tradition that depicts history, in particular the history of the international legal order, in a linear and progressive trajectory. With this approximation at hand, I analyze the relationship between past, present, and future within the social life of Andean Indigenous communities.