Collaborative Resistance: How Civil Society Replaced the State in Brazil’s Land Conflicts

When state institutions abandon constitutional mandates, civil society can sustain democratic practices by assuming counter-mediating roles—a process that this article terms collaborative resistance. The article applies this argument to the Indigenous mobilization in Brazil during the Bolsonaro administration (2019–2022). It shows how the capture of state agencies produced institutional substitution: the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) displaced the weakened National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) as the mediator between Indigenous communities and institutional arenas. Using network analysis of the litigation about the temporal framework for land demarcation (Marco Temporal), the study traces how APIB mobilized legal, transnational, and domestic alliances to defend land rights and reactivate channels of negotiation with hostile state actors. The findings demonstrate that democratic resilience largely depends on civil society’s capacity to reconstruct collaborative governance when the state abandons its constitutional role. These dynamics contribute to understanding minority rights, protection and democratic renewal in Latin America and beyond.