Book review, Extractivism: A Review Essay

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Extractivism: A Review Essay
by Bret Gustafson


Natural Resources: Neither Curse Nor Destiny
Daniel Lederman & William F. Malone (eds.) Natural Resources: Neither Curse Nor Destiny. Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007.

New Political Spaces in Latin American Resource Governance
Håvard Haarstad (ed.) New Political Spaces in Latin American Resource Governance. New York: Palgrave, 2012.

Unearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru
Fabiana Li Unearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile’s Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War
Jody Pavilack Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile’s Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.

Book review, Subsoil Politics: Extraction, Nationalism, and Protest in Bolivia and Peru

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Subsoil Politics: Extraction, Nationalism, and Protest in Bolivia and Peru
by Andrea Marston


Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia.
Kevin A. Young Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia.Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.

Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru
Moisés Arce Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014

Abstract, Interrupting Green Capital on the Frontiers of Wind Power in Southern Mexico

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Interrupting Green Capital on the Frontiers of Wind Power in Southern Mexico
by Scott A. Sellwood and Gabriela Valdivia 


Harnessing the power of wind is commonly understood as a “green”—cleaner and more sustainable—alternative to conventional extractive practices. An examination of the unfolding of wind energy projects and their contestation in southern Mexico shows that, despite the seeming immateriality of wind farming, wind energy requires epistemological and material enclosures to capture its value. The unreflexive push for these energy frontiers ignores this requirement and, in doing so, sidesteps the processes of dispossession that follow the widening and deepening of capitalist relations, green or otherwise.

Abstract, Environmentalism and the Globalization of the Oil Industry in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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Environmentalism and the Globalization of the Oil Industry in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
by Maria Guadalupe Moog Rodrigues


The state of Rio de Janeiro has become a hub for oil and gas production and infrastructure since Brazil entered the global oil market in the 2000s. Observers have anticipated increasing tensions between environmental activists and oil companies. These predictions have not been fulfilled, despite increasing evidence of environmental degradation caused by oil production. What could be hindering environmental mobilization in defense of the environment and affected populations and against the unrestrained expansion of oil infrastructure in the state? A longitudinal case study of environmental activism in defense of the Guanabara Bay ecosystem suggests that answers must consider the combined effects of democratization, political and regulatory decentralization, and neoliberal reforms on socioenvironmental activism—specifically, its weakening as civil society organizations confront increasing burdens of participation in policy making, deeply fragmented institutional and regulatory frameworks for environmental governance, and the expansion of opportunities to engage in collaborative arrangements with corporations.

Abstract, Neoextractivism and Indigenous Water Ritual in Salar de Atacama, Chile

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Neoextractivism and Indigenous Water Ritual in Salar de Atacama, Chile
by Sally Babidge and Paola Bolados


Latin American governments are neoextractivist: they promote exploitation of natural resources as central to economic development while acting to mitigate some of the excesses of extractive activity. In the space left open by the neoliberal state in the Salar de Atacama in northern Chile, the mining industry creates its own regulatory mechanisms and provides infrastructure and “improvement” projects to indigenous communities. While these projects gain a degree of consent to water extraction and the value of water for development, indigenous people also resist the neoextractivist project. The contradictions of extractivism-as-development are evident in everyday life and articulated in ritual and cultural practice. We take the example of a ritual and work event, the limpia de canales (canal cleaning), to narrate something of local responses to neoextractivist conditions.

Abstract, Tracing the Political Life of Kimsacocha: Conflicts over Water and Mining in Ecuador’s Southern Andes

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Tracing the Political Life of Kimsacocha: Conflicts over Water and Mining in Ecuador’s Southern Andes
by Teresa A. Velásquez


In 2009, farmers in the highlands of Ecuador challenged a proposed water law by staging public rituals to venerate their watershed, called Kimsacocha, as the embodiment of the Pachamama (Mother Earth). They rejected the proposed law because it allowed for mineral extraction in communal watersheds. They argued that human and nonhuman entities are interconnected and that the state should designate communal watersheds as no-mining zones to defend the right to life. While some scholars have argued that indigenous ontologies decolonize the political realm, in fact they have uneven outcomes when mobilized in contentious mining politics. Indigenous ontologies enabled farmers to build a multiethnic movement in defense of life, but this did not lead to the implementation of their demands. Instead, the state appropriated the language of the Pachamama to produce a revised water law that promoted piecemeal environmental conservation.

Abstract, Indigenous Peoples and the New Extraction: From Territorial Rights to Hydrocarbon Citizenship in the Bolivian Chaco

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Indigenous Peoples and the New Extraction: From Territorial Rights to Hydrocarbon Citizenship in the Bolivian Chaco
by Penelope Anthias 


A growing body of literature examines how the rise of “neo-extractivist” states in Latin America is reconfiguring the relationship between resources, nation, territory, and citizenship. However, the implications for indigenous territorial projects remain underexplored. Ethnographic research in the Bolivian Chaco reveals the ways in which indigenous territorial projects are becoming implicated in and being reimagined amidst the spatializing struggles of a hydrocarbon state. The tension between indigenous peoples’ desire for inclusion in a hydrocarbon-based national development project and their experiences of dispossession by an expanding hydrocarbon frontier has given rise to competing modes of “hydrocarbon citizenship” in the Guaraní territory Itika Guasu, where a vision of corporate-sponsored indigenous autonomy is pitted against new forms of state-funded development patronage. These dynamics challenge resistance narratives and resource-curse theories, revealing how resources act as conduits for deeper postcolonial struggles over territory, sovereignty, and citizenship.

Abstract, Part-Time Miners: Labor Segmentation and Collective Action in the Peruvian Mining Industry

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Part-Time Miners: Labor Segmentation and Collective Action in the Peruvian Mining Industry
by Omar Manky


Over the past two decades, besides the transformation of the organizational structure of the mining industry, there has been a shift in the spatial organization of production, expressed by the replacement of mining towns with mining hotels. Two case studies in Peru show that these changes have produced new forms of labor segmentation affecting workers’ capacity to mobilize by turning those who are directly employed by the company into a minority. While subcontracted miners have managed to overcome organizational segmentation by organizing across companies, the spatial segmentation of the mining hotel model has made local coordination difficult. Workers are not, however, necessarily defeated, as greater spatial mobility may offer possibilities of networking with new actors.

Abstract, Moving Glaciers: Remaking Nature and Mineral Extraction in Chile

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Moving Glaciers: Remaking Nature and Mineral Extraction in Chile
by Fabiana Li


The controversial Pascua-Lama mining project, straddling the border between Chile and Argentina and operated by Canada’s Barrick Gold, gained international notoriety when the company proposed to “move” three glaciers located at the mine site. The glaciers variously appeared, changed form, and disappeared as the project was developed, presented to the public, subjected to various modifications, and ultimately put on hold. The environmental impact assessment process created an inventory of the landscape that turned nature into an object of environmental management. At the same time, the element of public participation embedded in Chile’s environmental impact legislation helped to mobilize local and international activism.

Abstract, International Financial Capital and the Brazilian Land Market

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International Financial Capital and the Brazilian Land Market
by Maria Luisa Mendonça and Fábio Teixeira Pitta


International financial capital stimulated the production of industrial agricultural supplies in Brazil during the foreign debt crisis of the 1980s. In the mid-1990s new financial sources became available for debt rollovers, and this fueled a new cycle of industrialization in agriculture. This trend intensified in the years that followed, when commodity prices were high on the international markets. It led to an increase in the concentration of capital in agricultural assets such as machinery and land, which in turn generated a new cycle of indebtedness for agribusiness. This process of crisis accumulation was marked by the overexploitation of labor and predatory control over natural resources.

Abstract, From Food Production to Commodity Production in Argentina’s Agricultural Sector

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From Food Production to Commodity Production in Argentina’s Agricultural Sector
by Tomás Palmisano


An analysis of the semiotic and productive transformation of food crops under Argentina’s agribusiness model through a study of the diffusion of the term “commodity” in the discourse produced/reproduced by the rural sections of the hegemonic media, combined with statistical data that allow a dialogue between discourse and measurable quantities, concludes that defining the Argentine countryside as a place for commodity production is linked with increasing crop production for export that leads to the erosion of food sovereignty and food security.

Abstract, Extractive Capital, Imperialism, and the Colombian State

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Extractive Capital, Imperialism, and the Colombian State
by Kyla Sankey


Since the turn of the century, Colombia has become increasingly dependent on mining exports to drive economic growth. While the surge in mining investments in Colombia and the problems associated with this form of economic development have received much attention from scholars and policy analysts, the common explanation is that the state has been undermined or eroded by emergent global forces. However, nation-states should be seen not as victims but as authors and enforcers of new processes of capital accumulation. The Colombian state has acted as the principal guarantor of the political and territorial conditions necessary for this form of extractive capitalism by reconstituting property and contract laws, signing free-trade agreements, reconfiguring the internal state apparatus. and expanding military forces.

Abstract, Coloniality in the Appropriation of Nature: Agrofuel Production, Dependency, and Constant Primitive Accumulation in the Periphery of Capitalism

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Coloniality in the Appropriation of Nature: Agrofuel Production, Dependency, and Constant Primitive Accumulation in the Periphery of Capitalism
by Wendell Ficher Teixeira Assis, Sérgio H. Rocha Franco


The expansion of sugarcane monoculture for the production of agrofuels since the early 2000s has caused territorial reconfigurations in the Brazilian countryside. This territorial reordering represents both a lucrative way of employing idle capital and the geographical expansion of capital domains. In the process, new markets are created and leveraged by discourses of environmental conservation while air, soil, and water are depredated and indigenous people, peasants, and quilombolas are dispossessed and dragged into new circuits of accumulation. Linked to the continuous search for new fronts of accumulation and the increasing commodification of nature, Brazilian agrofuel production may be understood as an expression of the logic of coloniality.

Abstract, Foreign Direct Investment Policy and Development in Bolivia under Morales

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Foreign Direct Investment Policy and Development in Bolivia under Morales
by María J. Paz and Juan M. Ramírez-Cendrero


Since 2006, Bolivia has made major changes to its economic policy and development strategy, especially with regard to the treatment of foreign capital. Analysis of the change in foreign direct investment policy as applied to the oil and gas industry reveals that it has produced greater state involvement in and control of oil revenues but no great strides in gas investment, production, or industrialization. This result contributes to the current debate on whether foreign direct investment policy is the best means of development for resource-rich countries.

Introduction, Open Veins Revisited: Charting the Social, Economic, and Political Contours of the New Extractivism in Latin America

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Open Veins Revisited: Charting the Social, Economic, and Political Contours of the New Extractivism in Latin America
by Nicole Fabricant and Linda Farthing


Ever since the search for the elusive El Dorado began in the sixteenth century, the history of Latin America has been a tale of resource extraction. Key resources (such as silver, gold, tin, and copper) drew foreign investment but left local populations deeply impoverished. As Eduardo Galeano (1973: 29) described it, “the Spanish colonies’ economic structure was born subordinated to the external market and thus centralized around the export sector, where profit and power were concentrated.” Five centuries later, this overall pattern remains unchanged.

Its persistence propelled twentieth-century social scientists to use Marxist analytic frames, Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer’s theories on declining terms of trade, and dependency theory more generally to explain how resource extraction created geographic and historic asymmetries between nation-states and peoples.....