Governing through Recognition? Riverside Amis Resistance and the Politics of Recognition in Taiwan

Abstract

This study examines how the politics of recognition function simultaneously as a mode of governance and a site of resistance in the land rights struggles of three urban Amis riverside communities in New Taipei City, Taiwan. Focusing on the Sanying, Cinemnemay, and Cirakesay communities, it argues that urban space constitutes a crucial site of decolonisation in which Indigenous peoples strive for cultural continuity, sovereign presence, and land justice, rather than the urbs nullius imagined by the settler-colonial state. Through critical analysis, the study reveals how the Taiwanese government, through mechanisms of urban development policy, land commodification, and cultural governance, has continually delimited Indigenous land rights, enabling the state to regulate, monopolize, and define Indigenous claims and subjectivities. The resistance of Amis riverside communities further demonstrates that urban Indigenous housing injustice cannot be reduced to the capitalist notion of individual affordability; instead, it is deeply intertwined with the colonial past, which continues to shape contemporary legal structures and state-produced knowledge of indigeneity, and plays out in market-driven spatial governance. The research draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality to examine how the state produces governable Indigenous subjects through material and discursive forms of governance. It also engages Butler's theory of subject formation to explain how urban Indigenous peoples, once positioned as undertaking 'illegal construction' and as unauthorized occupation, mobilize resistance to challenge dominant governance practices, reassert their subjectivity, and claim legitimacy as urban Indigenous tribes with rights to the city. By analysing land struggles across social movements, discursive challenges, cultural resurgence, and policy negotiations, the study shows how urban Amis communities contest and reconfigure state-led recognition. Their resistance reveals the dynamic and ambivalent nature of recognition politics: recognition operates both as an instrument of state governance and as a means of empowerment through which Indigenous peoples reclaim land rights in Taiwan's settler-state context. The study further argues that the involvement of civic groups enables transformative forms of recognition that challenge the state's unilateral power structures and governance practices, thereby creating conditions for substantive redistribution and social change. Taken together, the findings suggest that recognising Indigenous sovereignty, epistemologies, and relational connections to land is essential to unsettling the structures that sustain colonial domination and to opening possibilities for more just futures. Show more