Thea Riafrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke, 2020)

For those of us interested in the politics of resource extractivism, oil economies, anti-capitalist and post-colonial political formations, and Indigenous resurgence and resistance, the so-called “pink wave” inaugurating the 21st-century in Latin America has been vexing. How to account for the neo-extractivisms and resource nationalisms of erstwhile socialist governments, many of which were brought to power with the support of Indigenous movements opposed to extractive industry and burdened by its impacts? Thea Riafrancos’s meticulously researched Resource Radicals walks us though this complex terrain with care and precision. Set in the particular context of post 2007 Ecuador, the book offers a comprehensive, empirically rich and theoretically astute account of the political struggles over extraction, economic development, and what it means to be a leftist in a complicated setting where established ideological categories and reflexes are stymied and unhelpful. There is also much here for scholars interested in questions of social movements, environmental publics, the manufacture of legitimacy and consent, and the forms of mediation at work in them. This even-handed, but consistently engaged and engaging analysis is a model of what “staying with the trouble,” and refusing the easy route of ideological reduction, can accomplish. - DB