Extractivist States: Contesting and Negotiating the “Commodities Consensus” in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Across Latin America

Abstract

Resource extraction has become something of an unavoidable topic for scholars of Latin America. Whether one begins one’s career by studying Indigenous language politics in Bolivia (Gustafson 2009) or populism in Argentina (Martuccelli and Svampa 1997), it seems that, these days, all roads lead to extractivism. There are good empirical and political reasons for this focus. In a context where the provenance of money used to fund progressive political agendas is increasingly under scrutiny (spoiler alert: it’s resource rent) and extractive frontiers are cropping up in relatively new places (where they provoke relatively new social conflicts), extractivism appears as the root problem, the key contradiction, or the articulating concern of multiple social groups. Accordingly, it is also the shared topic of interest for the three books examined in this review. As Maristella Svampa underscores in her recent summary of the topic, Neoextractivism in Latin America, the commodity boom that started in 2003 prompted Latin American governments from across the political spectrum to lean into the “el dorado” promises of expansive and rapid resource extraction. However, it is the enthusiasm with which an emerging set of leftist governments approached resource extraction that has sparked the most debate.