The Political Economy Of Extractivism

For many countries, primarily in the Global South, extractivism – the exploiting and exporting of natural resources – is big business. For those exporting countries, natural resource rents create hope and promise for development which can be a seductive force. This book explores the depth of extractivism in economies around the world. The contributions to this book investigate the connection between the political economy of extractivism and its impact on the sociopolitical fabric of natural resource exporting societies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. The book engages with a comparative perspective on the persistence of extractivism in these four different world regions. The book focuses on the formative power of rents and argues that rents are seductive. The individual contributions flesh out this seductive force of rents on different political scales and how this seduction affects a variety of actors. The book investigates how these actors react to the prevalence of rent, how they align or break with specific political and economic strategies, and how myths of resource-driven development play out on the ground. The book, therefore, underlines that rent theory bridges current debates in different area communities and offers fresh insights into extractivist societies’ social, economic, and political dynamics. This book will be of significant interest to readers in political economy, political science, development studies, and area studies.

Using the neo-extractivist model, The Political Economy of Agrarian Extractivism analyzes how the Bolivian countryside is transformed by the development and expansion of the soy complex and reveals the extractive dynamics of capitalist industrial agriculture.

This book empirically discusses recent struggles over land and mining, exploring state-society relations conflicts on various scales. In contrast with the existing literature, analyses in this volume deliberately focus on large-scale land use changes both in relation to the expansion of industrial mining and to agro-industry. The authors contend that there are significant parallels between contestations over different variants of resource extractivism, as they reflect the same global trends and processes. Chapters draw on critical theoretical approaches from political ecology, political economy, spatial theory, contentious politics, and the study of democracy. The authors not only provide empirical insights on actual resource struggles from different world regions based on in-depth field research, but also contribute to theory-building by linking concepts from various critical approaches to one another, developing a perspective for analysing struggles over resources related to current global crisis phenomena.

In a primary commodities boom spurred on by the rise of China, countries the world over are turning to the extraction of natural resources and the export of primary commodities as an antidote to the global recession. The New Extractivism addresses a fundamental dilemma faced by these governments: to pursue, or not, a development strategy based on resource extraction in the face of immense social and environmental costs, not to mention mass resistance from the people negatively affected by it. With fresh insight and analysis from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, this book looks at the political dynamics of capitalist development in a region where the neoliberal model is collapsing under the weight of a resistance movement lead by peasant farmers and indigenous communities. It calls for us to understand the new extractivism not as a viable development model for the post-neoliberal world, but as the dangerous emergence of a new form of imperialism.

The large-scale extraction of natural resources for sale in capitalist markets is not a new phenomenon, but in recent years global demand for resources has increased, leading to greater attention to the role of resource extraction in the development of the exporting countries. The term neoextractivism was coined to refer to the complex of state-private sector policies intended to utilize the income from natural resources sales for development objectives and for improving the lives of a country's citizens. However, this book argues that neoextractivism is merely another conduit for capitalist development, reinforcing the position of elites, with few benefits for working people. With particular reference to the role of neoextractivism within Latin America and the Caribbean, using Guyana as a case study, the book aims to provide readers with the tools they need to critically analyze neoextractivism as a development model, identifying alternative paths for improving the human condition. This book will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of international development, political economy, sociology, and globalization, as well as to policymakers and political activists engaged in social movements in the natural resources sector.

This cutting-edge book presents a broad picture of global capitalism and extractivism in contemporary Latin America. Leading scholars examine the cultural patterns involving gender, ethnicity, and class that lie behind protests in opposition to extractivist projects and the contrast in responses from state actors to those movements.

Iron Will lays bare the role of extractivist policies and efforts to resist these policies through a deep ethnographic exploration of globally important iron ore mining in Brazil and India. Markus Kröger addresses resistance strategies to extractivism and tracks their success, or lack thereof, through a comparison of peaceful and armed resource conflicts, explaining how different means of resistance arise. Using the distinctly different contexts and political systems of Brazil and India highlights the importance of local context for resistance. For example, if there is an armed conflict at a planned mining site, how does this influence the possibility to use peaceful resistance strategies? To answer such questions, Kröger assesses the inter-relations of contentious, electoral, institutional, judicial, and private politics that surround conflicts and interactions, offering a new theoretical framework of “investment politics” that can be applied generally by scholars and students of social movements, environmental studies, and political economy, and even more broadly in Social Scientific and Environmental Policy research. By drawing on a detailed field research and other sources, this book explains precisely which resistance strategies are able to influence both political and economic outcomes. Kröger expands the focus of traditionally Latin American extractivism research to other contexts such as India and the growing extractivist movement in the Global North. In addition, as the book is a multi-sited political ethnography, it will appeal to sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, geographers, and others using field research among other methods to understand globalization and global political interactions. It is the most comprehensive book on the political economy and ecology of iron ore and steel. This is astonishing, given the fact that iron ore is the second-most important commodity in the world after oil.