This book reflects on the continuing expansion of extractive forms of capitalist development into new territories in Latin America, and the resistance movements that are trying to combat the ecological and social destruction that follows.
Latin American development models continue to prioritise extractivism: the intensive exploitation and exportation of nature in its primary commodity form. This constant expansion of the extractive frontier into new territories leads to a continuing process and dialectic of colonization, de-colonization and re-colonization which the authors describe as 'territorialities in dispute'. This book uncovers the underlying trends and dynamics of these territorialities in dispute, and the socio-ecological resistance movements that are emerging as marginalised communities struggle to reclaim their territorial rights and defend and protect their right of access to the global commons. A focus on territorialities in dispute renders visible the unsustainable expansion of extractivist territories and opens up new horizons to learn from these processes and to consider post-extractivist/post-development imaginings of another world and alternate futures.
This book will be of interest to both students and researchers in the fields of international development, political ecology, critical geography, social anthropology, as well as to activists engaged in socio-ecological/eco-territorial movements.
About the Author: Pabel Camilo López-Flores is Bolivian-Italian social researcher, with a PhD in Sociology at Scuola Normale Superiore / University of Milan 'Bicocca' (Italy). Associate Researcher in Postgraduate in Development Sciences, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés CIDES-UMSA (Bolivia) and distinguished visiting researcher at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Sevilla, IEALC-US (Spain). His current research activities are situated in the fields of political sociology, sociology of social movements and sociology of territory, in a trans-disciplinary perspective.
Penelope Anthias is Assistant Professor in Human Geography at Durham University, UK. Her research investigates struggles over territory, resources and citizenship in Bolivia, engaging debates in political ecology, critical geography, and postcolonial and settler colonial studies. She is the author of Limits to Decolonization: Indigeneity, Territory and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco (Cornell University Press, 2018), which was recently published in Spanish (Plural Editores, 2022). In 2022, she directed and produced Tariquía no se toca, a documentary film on women's resistance to hydrocarbon development in the Tariquía National Reserve of Flora and Fauna. Penelope has a PhD in Geography from the University of Cambridge (2014) and completed postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Copenhagen.