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The natural wealth of the Amazon and Andes has long attracted fortune seekers, from explorers, farmers, and gold panners to multimillion-dollar mining, oil and gas, and timber operations. Modern demands for commodities have given rise to new development schemes, including hydroelectric dams, open cast mines, and industrial agricultural operations. The history of human habitation in this region is intimately tied to its rich biodiversity, and the Amazon basin is home to scores of indigenous groups, many of whom have populations so small that their cultural and physical survival is endangered. Landscapes of Inequity explores the debate over rights to and use of resources and addresses fundamen...
Case studies written by anthropologists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists provide empirical detail and analytical insight into states' and communities' relations to natural resource sectors, and show how resource dependencies continue to shape their political spaces.
This book explores how different corporate governance strategies affect community mobilization and the scope for influence when an area’s population is faced with the arrival of the extraction industry. Drawing on ethnographic research into Peruvian mining localities, the author analyses a series of relationships which are characterized by confrontations, clientelism, demobilization and strategic collaboration. By presenting a detailed account of micro practices and showing how these processes are interpreted by different groups, Gustafsson offers a refined understanding of the multiple layers and informal workings of power between transnational corporations and local communities.
Exploring indigenous life projects in encounters with extractivism, the present open access volume discusses how current turbulences actualise questions of indigeneity, difference and ontological dynamics in the Andes and Amazonia. While studies of extractivism in South America often focus on wider national and international politics, this contribution instead provides ethnographic explorations of indigenous politics, perspectives and worlds, revealing loss and suffering as well as creative strategies to mediate the extralocal. Seeking to avoid conceptual imperialism or the imposition of exogenous categories, the chapters are grounded in the respective authors’ long-standing field research. The authors examine the reactions (from resistance to accommodation), consequences (from anticipation to rubble) and materials (from fossil fuel to water) diversely related to extractivism in rural and urban settings. How can Amerindian strategies to preserve localised communities in extractivist contexts contribute to ways of thinking otherwise?
The essays collected here offer important new reflections on the multiple images of and rhetoric surrounding the rain forest. The slogan “Save the Rain Forest!”—emblazoned on glossy posters of tall trees wreathed in vines and studded with monkeys and parrots—promotes the popular image of a marvelously wild and vulnerable rain forest. Although representations like these have fueled laudable rescue efforts, in many ways they have done more harm than good, as these essays show. Such icons tend to conceal both the biological variety of rain forests and the diversity of their human inhabitants. They also frequently obscure the specific local and global interactions that are as much a part...
The scholarly debate on deliberative democracy often suggests that participatory processes will contribute to make environmental governance not only more legitimate and effective, but also lead to the empowerment of marginalized social groups. Critical studies, however, analyse how technologies of governance make use of participation to draw boundaries that separate technical knowledge from political concerns, direct the focus towards procedural aspects and contractual obligations, and reinforce hegemonic understandings of development and of local people’s relationships to their environment. This book focuses on the dynamics and use of participatory mechanisms related to the rapid expansio...
The subject of local government and post-conflict reconstruction sits at the intersection of several interrelated research areas, notably conflict/peacebuilding, governance, and political economy. This volume addresses a gap in the academic literature: whilst decentralisation is frequently included in peace agreements, the actual scope and role of local government is far less frequently discussed. This gap remains despite a considerable literature on local government in developing countries more generally, particularly with regard to decentralisation; but also, despite a considerable and growing literature on post-conflict reconstruction. This volume provides a mixture of case study, cross-c...
Security studies and international relations have conventionally relegated gendered analysis to the margins of academic concern, most commonly through the ‘women in’ or ‘women and’ politics and IR discourse. This comprehensive volume contributes to debates which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. By foregrounding the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, the authors pay particular attention to frameworks which query their very existence. In doing so, the collection as a whole troubles the ubiquitous concept and practices of ‘(in)security’ and their effects on differentially positi...
Research on global norm diffusion and institutional transfer has often neglected the agency of the governed. This collection argues that limited statehood – the lack of state capacities in most parts of the global South – provides opportunities for the governed to raise their voices and be listened to. Thus, people on the receiving end of development cooperation, state building, or security interventions can significantly shape global dynamics of normative and institutional change. Drawing on the emerging body of literature on the agency of the governed, this book assesses the current dynamics of transfer and diffusion studies at the interstice of political science and social anthropology. By focusing on the agency of the governed, the authors integrate a broad spectrum of issues and debates, from the proliferation of global norms to state and security building to international policy cooperation. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of global politics and international relations, particularly those focusing on the global South. It was originally published as a special issue of the online journal Third World Thematics.
Violence and the Third World in International Relations is intended as a contribution to the decolonization of international relations, and especially of international security studies, much of which is dominated by a self-sustaining Eurocentrism. Rather than focusing on the motivations of violence, this volume is concerned with the devastating and debilitating consequences of war against the Third World. Contributors delve into the violent structuring of Third World societies during colonialism, the Cold War, and globalization. A wide range of topics are systematically examined, including, but not restricted to, the role of racism in the construction of the international system; evangelical...