Maria Lorena Leiva Salinas of political citizenship, given the absence of effective participation on behalf of social actors in the field of decision-making and the lack of attention on behalf of the state to their needs and demands. And, above all, the notion of citizenship itself, linked to the claim of the universality of rights and to their individual nature, installing a new paradigm of citizenship that comes from collective rights and from the community as the subject of law. In Bolivian history, the notion of citizenship that has predominant has tended to systematically ignore its multi-societal character37. Founded on “the negation of the other”, it has devastated, many times and in different ways, ethnic and cultural diversity and has imposed the uniform and homogenising mechanisms of the Rule of Law. In effect, the category of citizenship based on universality and homogenisation - according to which everyone is free and equal in the public sphere, and relegating to the private sphere the discussion of particularities and differences - has been overshadowed by reality itself, tensing the universal conception of rights in a country that contains diverse nations and multiple identitarian referents. The challenge posed by the new Constitution lies in the reaffirmation of difference within the framework of equality and participation, which is a difficult task to specify and resolve. The new Charter, approved by referendum on 25 January 2009 and promulgated in February, was the product of a controversial process of political polarisation and conflict in which the hegemony of the ruling party finally prevailed. The content of the text includes the demands of trade union and indigenous organisations, grouped in the so-called “unity pact” the social base of the current government - which were later negotiated with representatives of the ruling party and the political opposition. Among the most relevant aspects of the new text is the notion of a ‘Plurinational Communitarian State’, which recognises the 36 native peasant indigenous nations and peoples that cohabitated in Bolivian territory before colonialism, as well as their legal-political and cultural structures, their own norms and procedures, and their relationship to the land and the territory. In addition, it adopts an autonomic and decentralised nature in response to the centralism that governed national life since the founding of the Republic and that had been questioned several times in Bolivian history, as in the federal revolution of 1899, although without major repercussions. In summary, the native peasant indigenous paradigm is central in the new Constitution and it traverses the text, collecting its discursive and symbolic principles and values, while at the same time establishing its institutional exercise in the configuration of the new State. Moreover, the new protagonist of the Bolivian State is the native indigenous peasant, giving an important weight to the collective rights of the community. In addition, a set of rights, new and old, of various kinds - civil, political, social, environmental and intercultural, such as the right to life, to water, to food, to education, to health, to the habitat and housing, of access to basic services such as drinking water, sewage, electricity, residential gas and others, acquired constitutional rank in the new text. The rights chapter covers almost one hundred articles in the Constitution while, interestingly, duties are limited to one. For example, education is constituted as a supreme function and responsibility of the state, and is defined as unitary, public, universal, democratic, participatory, 37 Este concepto se refiere a “la coexistencia y sobreposición de diferentes sociedades o matrices de relaciones sociales de diversa cualidad y tiempos históricos”, fuertemente conectado al concepto de sociedad abigarrada de René Zavaleta Mercado, en Luis Tapia, La condición multisocietal. Multiculturlidad, pluralismo, modernidad. La Paz: Ed. CIDES-Muela del Diablo, 2002. 12 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/2 - © 2020 Author