Extractive Economy Research Articles

Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa By Delinda Collier

Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa By Delinda Collier

Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum by Mab Segrest

Reviewed by: Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum by Mab Segrest Dennis Doyle Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum. By Mab Segrest. (New York and London: The New Press, 2020. Pp. xvii, 396. $28.99, ISBN 978-1-62097-297-7.) Scholar-activist Mab Segrest's latest book is not simply another entry in the growing list of publications arguing for the centrality of the South, race, and African Americans to the history of U.S. asylums and psychiatry. Segrest's ultimate aim is different. Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting [End Page 554] of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum is an ambitious retelling of the history of long-nineteenth-century Georgia that presents the now-defunct Milledgeville Asylum as a touchstone whose microhistory mirrors larger shifts in both the state and the South. Segrest conceives of antebellum Georgia as, first and foremost, a white settler society erected on land forcibly wrested from Indigenous peoples and transformed into a cotton kingdom through racial slavery. All of that was accomplished through violence and exploitation of the vulnerable, aided and abetted by a cheerleading state insensate to the pain it inflicted. That is when the Milledgeville Asylum entered the story in 1842. As the largest institution in Georgia's public sector, it served the state's interest. And this frontier state had a vested interest in both growing its plantation-based extractive economy and ignoring the suffering that racial slavery inflicted on the people it exploited. According to Segrest, archival records reveal that doctors served that interest by taking in the white victims of such a violent settler society while conveniently eliding the possibility that racial slavery could inflict pain and suffering on Black people. Georgia's leading alienists theorized that people of African descent were somehow racially immune to stress, helping justify the exclusion of Black people from the asylum and render invisible the plantation system's cruelty. The key to Segrest's thesis is that the asylum doctors' obliviousness to the violence and racism endemic to Georgia endured well after slavery's end. It lasted through the Civil War, with psychiatrists hesitating to attribute the cause of the soldiers' and refugees' ills to the horrors of war. Segrest then argues that in 1867, as the asylum became racially segregated, it joined the Black Codes, the Milledgeville penitentiary, a convict-lease system, and chain gangs in providing postbellum Georgian elites with a carceral state that could compel Black labor. As African Americans suffered terrorism, lynching, debt peonage, and the indignities of Jim Crow, the asylum's clinicians helped the state overlook that violence by blaming Black asylum commitments on the Black race's alleged lack of emotional fitness for emancipation. As the asylum entered the twentieth century, the superintendents' tendency to blame Black illness on racial heredity led them to ignore how the asylum's overcrowding and inadequate menus produced disease. Segrest rounds out her narrative by contending that by eventually embracing eugenics and therapeutic nihilism, the asylum superintendents located the blame for the failings of racial capitalism squarely within the biology of Georgia's citizens. Segrest ultimately argues that Georgia and the South's current reliance on mass prison incarceration to care for mentally ill African Americans is a legacy of a society that habitually confined suffering African Americans rather than reckon with how it caused that suffering in the first place. Administrations of Lunacy is engaging, but advanced graduate students might find its epistemology, methods, and style problematic. Almost every chapter makes use of an individual patient's record to create illustrative vignettes, but it is unclear how representative these cases are. More troubling, Segrest takes liberties in second-guessing the clinicians, imposing contemporary diagnoses, and speculating on disease causation. She also falls back on techniques of narrative fiction to imagine a historical actor's perspective or life [End Page 555] details when the historical record is silent. Undergraduates will be more likely to overlook these flaws, as Segrest's style is irreverent and conversational, makes no apologies for her support of prison abolitionism, and enlivens the page with gripping and...

Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific

Historian Yesenia Barragan has produced a profound and cutting-edge interpretation of American freedom and unfreedom. In Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific, Barragan weaves a case study of Colombia into the larger fabric of Black Atlantic history. One of her major interventions is to rethink the significance of the early republican period in general and gradual slave emancipation in particular. These are well-known but rarely studied conjunctures, and the latter receives short shrift from scholars. Yet as Barragan asserts, Colombia's 1821 gradual emancipation law was a “relatively successful biopolitical experiment in social control” that generated a new racial order, new labor regimes, and new (if rarely fulfilled) antislavery sensibilities (22). This gradual emancipation rule, as Barragan calls it, took three main forms: self-purchase, public manumissions, and the so-called Free Womb provision. The book analyzes each from both the legal-political perspective and the perspective of the affected African-descended people. Together they shaped the possibilities of bondage and liberation for a generation.Freedom's Captives zeroes in on the Chocó, a relatively remote, rainforest-covered, and gold-rich province of northwest Colombia. Historically and to this day, the Chocó's population has been overwhelmingly of African descent, a legacy of Spanish colonialism, Atlantic slavery, and coerced gold extraction from the region's mineral-rich waterways. Yet as Barragan argues, the region's remoteness and mineral wealth opened possibilities for autonomy and even legal freedom for Afro-Colombians.Early chapters trace the rural and town-based worlds of both enslavers and unfree peoples of the Chocó, with a focus on the men who rowed boats and women who prospected gold along the infinite waterways of this jungle region. The story then zooms out to a national perspective of early republican legal and political cultures, with a focus on the 1821 gradual emancipation law at the Congress of Cucutá. At stake was the legal creation of the much-contested Free Womb provision, whereby a child born to an enslaved woman would at adulthood gain legal freedom but remained a “captive” until then (134). Barragan then returns to the Chocó to examine how these national legal changes informed the social calculus of Pacific lowlanders. The Free Womb captives endured an active market in the buying and selling of their unfree labor while self-purchase, the main route to legal freedom, fueled the extractive economy of gold mining. Public manumission ceremonies, despite their political and emotional charge, nonetheless reinforced the subordination of enslaved people. The book's narrative ends around final abolition in the early 1850s, when a new subsistence-based society took hold in the Chocó, much to the chagrin of Colombia's ruling classes.Scholars will find that the book has many strengths. For one, its constant comparisons to other country contexts add up to a thorough accounting of hemispheric changes in gradual emancipation. The comparative analysis is capacious and deeply integrated into every chapter. Barragan has read widely in the scholarship. I have not seen a monograph that so systematically introduces relevant interpretations of other countries. As Barragan points out, Colombians at the time were in conversation with other Americans about emancipation, hence our need to understand how Free Womb provisions and other abolitionist ideas circulated beyond Colombia. Students of comparative slavery and emancipation in the Americas will appreciate such thorough cross-country connections that are rarely made by historians, as well as the most up-to-date bibliography and synopses of the state of the field. But it is much more than that. The effect of reading this constant comparative framework is substantial. For the first time, the Colombian example feels properly integrated into the wider story of slave emancipation in the Americas. Barragan has placed the country at the forefront of the scholarship on the subject.On top of the important comparative analysis, the book is deeply researched. Barragan carried out work in six archives in four Colombian cities plus archives in Britain and the United States. (Investigating notarial records—notoriously byzantine—in the Chocó could not have been easy!) In addition to these manuscript collections, Barragan uses an array of historical newspapers and published primary sources. The result of such comprehensive research is a narrative that portrays the world of the Colombian Pacific in vivid detail. The everyday lives of free and enslaved rural lowlanders rise from the page. While warning us about the lapses and silences in the written record, Barragan has nonetheless reconstructed to a remarkable extent the stories of individuals struggling for freedom.A final strength is the writing. Barragan is a wordsmith. The care she has taken in crafting sentences shines throughout, making the book a pleasure to read. The grace of the prose only adds to the intellectual bounty of this important book.

Ghosts on the Scene of Gas

Abstract This article describes a vision of time (the past and the future) in post-industrial dynamics that the author and her co-researchers could gain through shooting a film in the region of Lhokseumawe, Aceh, a once fruitful site of extraction of natural gas subsequently planned to become a Special Economic Zone. It engages with the notion of “worlding” processes and pinpoints, in the ethnographic case of Aceh, the difficulty to access them through discourse because specific strategies of silencing and erasure are enforced throughout an emotional landscape. It is argued that it was the use of film-making as a relational tool aiming to create images that enabled the researchers to see through time and beyond regimes of invisibility. This is how they met ghosts on the gas scene. The steps in the making of an ethnographic film are used as a narrative lead. A scene is set up where the extractive economy of gas is linked to a global vision of development and prosperity as well as to present and past national politics, including a thirty-year-long war of resistance (1975–2005). The creation of a Special Economic Zone is shown to provide a relevant interpretive prism. Different styles of self-staging reveal cultures of suffering in North Aceh. It is argued that fear as a collective emotion takes different shapes across time and serves different political scenarios. Dispossession of land and under-remunerated work appear on the scene; the film’s feminine characters’ positive look to the future appears as an active effort of elaboration of the evolving context. The film Aceh, After is on free access at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR89korhLwQ.

Foliage and Fog: Uncanny Petrocultures in Tash Aw’s We, the Survivors and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water

EcoGothic studies has, so far, primarily focused on uncanny environments imagined by Western writers. In response, this article compares polluted, haunting environments in two contemporary Anglophone novels from the Global South: Tash Aw’s We, the Survivors(2019) and HelonHabila’s Oil on Water(2011). Through vivid representations of the forbidding jungles of Malaysian palm oil plantations and the toxic waters of the oil-rich Niger Delta, both novels render extractive economies palpable and monstrous. This essay analyses how dystopian atmospheres, fragmented first-person narration, and circular crime fictions contribute to the EcoGothic aesthetic in both novels. Re-focusing scholarly attention from the dark woods of Europe and North America to the decaying mangroves across Asia and Africa foregrounds the ruinous aftermath of Western imperialism and neoliberal capitalism. By examining uncanny environments in Aw and Habila’s novels, this essay sheds new light on the neglected EcoGothic effects of Global South petrofiction.

Transformation or the next meal?

This article presents conversations across difference that took place among community partners and researchers at a week-long workshop in T’Sou-ke First Nation territory in 2019. The workshop launched the Four Stories About Food Sovereignty research network and project, which brings together food producers, activists, and researchers representing T’Sou-ke Nation in British Columbia, Wayuu Indigenous communities in Colombia, refugee communities in Jordan, and small-scale farmers in South Africa. We focus here on conversations that highlight global-local tensions in food justice work, the pressures of extractive economy, and pressures arising from climate crisis – challenges that some participants framed at the level of global extractivism and colonial-capitalism, others at the level of the soil. As the conversations reveal, there was more common ground than conflict in shared histories of dispossession, shared predicaments of extractive capital and its government allies, and shared concern to renew and reinvigorate ancestral practices of care for territory.

Isotopic Poetics: The Petrocultural Appropriations of Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons

Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons (2015) broadens the scope of what might be considered a politicized ecopoetics. Battler’s collection, which I suggest works through a poetics of appropriation, links experimental poetic form with Anthropocene criticism in the humanities and critical studies of settler colonialism, addressing the contiguities between ecological degradation and land expropriation, while also making the appropriation of language one of its central formal concerns. In the context of the Canadian nation-state and its extractive economies, I argue that Battler’s “isotopic poetics” appears as a politically motivated formal praxis for working through the tangled exigencies of ongoing settler-colonial dispossession and the accelerating environmental crisis.

Archiving the Anthropocene: New Taxonomies Between Art and Science

Call for papers. Since its initial formulation and popularization in the public sphere, the Anthropocene thesis has triggered several critical debates across scientific disciplines and artistic practices, which have included non-anthropocentric and decolonial perspectives, critiques of species thinking and extractive economies, and insights from political ecology and the natural sciences. While scientific institutions have increasingly initiated collaborations with artists and designers, visual artists from different geographies and traditions have creatively engaged with the geological and planetary imaginaries mobilized by the ‘epoch of man’. They have done so by maintaining a critical relationship with the forms of knowledge reproduced by geoscientific research and communication.

Marginal cities in conflict: emerging geographies of spatial accumulation

This paper discusses how marginal cities surrounded by rich hinterlands in geographies of conflict display city-building processes that transform them into emergent geographies of spatial accumulation. Embracing recent debates on geographies of accumulation in the global South, this paper reveals three interrelated strategies that shape capitalist urbanisation in marginal cities of conflict. The empirical findings of a case study in the Colombian Pacific region indicate that: 1) extractive economies supported by national neoliberal policies nurture weak governance, as reflected in city-building processes that increase sociospatial segregation; 2) the circulation of illegal capital within status quo spatial politics seems to result in rapid urban transformations via land use changes; and 3) spatial accumulation in marginal urban settlements conceals processes of systematic social injustice through euphemisms of economic development. This paper contributes to new conceptualisations derived from an analysis of spatial transformations in marginal(ised) cities under geopolitical economies of violence. Published open access under a CC BY licence. https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/

Rapid separation of High-viscosity phosphorous Acid/Tributyl phosphate extraction system by a stable anticorrosive Super-PA-phobic mesh

Inefficient, slow separation resulting from the high viscosity of phosphoric acid (PA) is a crucial problem that limits the process economy of industrial PA extraction. In this work, a super-PA-phobic stainless-steel mesh (SPPSSM) with excellent anticorrosion properties and stability is prepared and used for rapid separation in various PA/tributyl phosphate (TBP) extraction systems. The separation efficiency in batch operation of a PA-enriched raffinate (PER) and TBP-enriched phase (TEP) mixture formed from pure PA and TBP exceeds 97.59%, and the maximum TEP flux is 19.2593 L·m−2·h−1 at 60 °C. The maximum TEP flux of 886.1571 L·m−2·h−1 is obtained for a 20 wt% TBP kerosene solution and 20 wt% PA aqueous solution. A continuous separation device using the SPPSSM as the core component maintains a recovery rate of more than 95.57% in long-term operation, confirming its performance stability and robustness. The stable selective penetration of the SPPSSM originates from its super-PA-phobicity, which results from its rough surface with low surface energy; the SPPSSM repels PA but allows TBP to pass through. The separation ability of the SPPSSM is determined by the viscosity, density, and surface tension of the two liquid phases after extraction. It can be predicted using an equation based on the filtration mode after correction by a coefficient representing the Reynolds and Weber numbers. This work proposes a material for the rapid separation of PA/TBP in extraction systems and broadens the application field of superwetted materials under harsh conditions.

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Modernity from Elsewhere: Psychoanalysis, Ethnography, and Speculative Horizons of Self-Assertion

Organizing for material possibility in a community-led science program

ABSTRACT This case study examined how Mexican-American community educators developed material repertoires of practice to support a just and environmentally conscious afterschool program. Based on historical, environmental, economic, and sociopolitical circumstances, educators designed imaginative learning opportunities for predominantly working-class youth through the thoughtful cultivation of discarded, donated, and natural materials. Through these designs, educators offered young people new pathways for learning in their community. The author traced the constitutive relationships between the afterschool program, young people, educators, community, and the material environment to understand how these practices supported justice-oriented STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Math) education. The community educators created new “material possibilities” through practices of repurposing and developing material-rich projects to support youth. Simultaneously, they critiqued material consumption with youth in order to push back on an extractive economy that did not support a thriving community and environment. This work builds on the notion of material possibility in order to extend our pedagogical imaginations.

Driving Utah's Rivers: Working Water in the West

Driving Utah's Rivers: Working Water in the West

Searching for New Political Spaces: Negotiating Citizenship and Transnational Identities on Mongolia’s Mining Frontier

With two of the world’s largest mining projects, Mongolia has become one of Asia’s key mineral producers in the past 20 years. Mongolian pastoralist communities living in the South Gobi region in the vicinity of large-scale mining operations have recently turned to transnational dispute resolution arenas to lodge their grievances and seek redress. Notably, these pastoralists have sought to trigger international grievance mechanisms on the basis of being indigenous people, even though they are not recognised as such by their government. This article situates this contemporary mobilisation of pastoralist communities in relation to large-scale mining projects within a longer history of state (de)regulation of the pastoralist economy. It reflects on the role of non-state legal norms and mechanisms in introducing new forms of legal and political subjectivity into the milieu of discourses surrounding Mongolian pastoralist identity and livelihoods. The article reflects on the potential implications of extractive economy upon transnational identity formation, local/national political spaces, and strategic negotiations with state and corporate power.

Analyzing the interactions among multiple ecosystem services in a rural mining region in Central Appalachians

ABSTRACT This study analyzed the interactions among a set of ecosystem services (ES) and derived ES bundles in the Headwaters of Coal River West Virginia (WV), in the Central Appalachians, an area historically characterized by surface mining and coal extraction. ES were modeled using the InVEST system, while a custom model was used to link water quality to freshwater ES, deriving information at two different spatial scales based on hydrologic units. High-resolution remote sensing data (1–2 m resolution) were used to incorporate historical information from land-cover (LC) transitions since 1976 to differentiate reclamation processes and characterize the forest class. Consistent ES tradeoffs were confirmed in areas characterized by surface mining processes that reported significant losses of carbon sequestration, habitat quality , and freshwater ES. The interaction of complex anthropogenic processes within the specific landscape led to the definition of different ES bundles, characterized not only by coal mining processes but also by the distribution of settlements and developed areas. The utilization of relatively small hydrologic catchments (1–25 km2), the comparison with a more extensive set of spatial units, and the inclusion of high-resolution data with multiple LC classes that included historical information, allowed the authors to infer knowledge about the interactions between ES changes and their drivers in the study area. The results can be used to implement conservation, as well as development-restoration strategies, by including ES assessments to promote a more sustainable land management approach in the rural-mining region of Central Appalachians and support future alternatives to extractive economies.

Indigenous Knowledge Is Crucial to Confronting Climate Change and Supports Psychiatric Practice

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Climate ChangeFull AccessIndigenous Knowledge Is Crucial to Confronting Climate Change and Supports Psychiatric PracticeJoseph Neidhardt, M.D.Joseph NeidhardtSearch for more papers by this author, M.D.Published Online:28 Feb 2022https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2022.03.3.6AbstractMy career arc includes having a long-time practice in preventive and environmental medicine. Over the years, I have become increasingly concerned about the impacts of the climate crisis. My wife, Mary Roessel, M.D., a Navajo psychiatrist and APA Area 7 Trustee, introduced me to Navajo healing, ceremony, and philosophy from which I learned that “we are part of nature.” I redirected my professional focus to climate and health. I read extensively and consulted Indigenous leaders about their perspectives.This led me to become interested in the interface between Indigenous knowledge and climate change, eventually leading to the creation of the book Groundswell: Indigenous Knowledge and a Call to Action for Climate Change. The book combines the writings of Indigenous people with those of experts on climate change. This merging of two perspectives crystallized the relationship between two systems: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Western science.We recently made a presentation at COP26 in Glasgow. COP26 stands for the 26th Conference of the Parties. My collaborators and I formulated questions for our presentation: How can Indigenous knowledge be utilized to address the climate crisis? How can complexity science and traditional ecological knowledge assist our search for new solutions? How can Indigenous futurism impact our perspective? The title of our presentation was “Walk in Beauty—Future Dreaming Through Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science.” Our intent was to persuade others that applying Indigenous knowledge can change the world.Our presentation resonated with attendees and other presenters at COP26. Many participants were young and enthusiastic and offered creative solutions. We attended fascinating presentations by and about the Sami people from Finland, Russia, and Norway and Indigenous people in Canada and discussed the “Yellowstone to the Yukon” project and nature-based solutions to climate change. There was significant support for the Land Back movement in Canada and the Amazon. Indigenous people could add significantly to nature-based solutions, especially if the Land Back movement takes hold and leads to the return of stolen lands.The marches and public expressions of urgency were high points of the COP26 experience. The Youth March was filled with enthusiasm; many young people gave compelling speeches, leading us to hope that young people may break through current leaders’ inability to keep global warming increases under 1.5 C.The final governmental agreement, the most publicized component of this massive conference, was simultaneously significant and disappointing. Although there were some major commitments to reduce methane and to continue the pursuit of other forms of carbon reduction, the overall lack of concrete global commitments and the absence of meaningful reparations and protections for more endangered nations (which are not major contributors to climate change) were glaring omissions from the final agreement that emerged from the conference.Psychiatry plays significant roles in responding to the climate crisis. An obvious use of our expertise is to recognize, prevent, and treat the traumatic impacts of extreme weather events, the neuropsychiatric consequences of heat and pollution, and eco-anxiety and mood disorders attributable, in part, to climate change.As we expand our perspective, we can address denial, disavowal, and “green washing” of the scientific facts about the harms of continued extraction and consumption of fossil fuels. As health professionals, we have ethical obligations to speak up about health threats to individuals and the community. More frequent extreme climatic and weather events must be recognized as not just “another bad storm.” The extensive loss of coral reefs and measurable sea-level rise must be brought to our society’s attention.Eco-anxiety, denial, and dissociation are within the purview of psychiatry. We must address these with our patients. We are good at reframing and motivating our patients to change, and we have excellent treatments for anxiety. Unfortunately, I did not encounter these topics at COP26.Our collective has decided to engage with young people with some emphasis on artists who are members of minority groups. They are among those affected “first and worst” by the climate crisis and may benefit the most if the world makes the necessary changes to mitigate, prevent, and reverse the causes and harms of global warming. Taking action is one of the best ways to address eco-anxiety. We can simultaneously foster prevention, help those with eco-anxiety, and make changes that mitigate the climate crisis (see www.envisionthebigpicture.com).Following the lead of our Indigenous allies will produce reciprocity with nature. It would assist in changing our consumer, extraction economy. It will foster equity and equality within our diverse society to reverse nature-based injustice. ■Joseph Neidhardt, M.D., practices in Santa Fe, N.M. He has worked for tribal health programs and is the author of Groundswell: Indigenous Knowledge and a Call to Action for Climate Change. ISSUES NewArchived

Bolivia in the Age of Gas by Bret Gustafson

Reviewed by: Bolivia in the Age of Gas by Bret Gustafson Luis Sierra Gustafson, Bret. Bolivia in the Age of Gas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Bolivia in the Age of Gas examines fossil fuel capitalism in twenty-first-century Bolivia. Sociocultural anthropologist Bret Gustafson analyzes how the fossil fuel industry centered in North America and Western Europe, has historically shaped, bent, and twisted the mechanism of the Bolivian state. Bolivia in the Age of Gas demonstrates how Standard Oil and the United States in the 1930s stood to benefit from the Chaco War, 1932–35, between Bolivia and Paraguay. American political and economic interests dovetailed nicely with any conflict between the two nations and would result in favorable terms for American firms to extract and commercialize fossil fuels for consumption in the Global North and among Bolivia's wealthier, more industrial neighbors. Gustafson explores the growth of what he calls the "gaseous state" from a historical perspective, placing the latest developments in gas extraction in the longue durée economic framework of oil and mineral extraction. Bolivia in the Age of Gas details how, just like silver, tin, and copper mining and oil extraction, natural gas extraction [End Page 232] also generates state violence and repression, coercive labor regimes, limited economic and social gains for most of the population, and a subjugation of local, regional, and national political sovereignty to the interests of national and transnational capital flows. In this context, Gustafson traces how the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS; Movement toward Socialism) political party envisioned a political program that slowly but surely transformed from a radical revision of the relations of the state to the people—the proceso de cambio (process of change)—toward a reactionary state that made tactical alliances with lowland elites, largely ignoring the structural economic problems that maintained Bolivia's vastly unequal society. Like other Bolivian historical reform movements, the MAS project stalled out and faced severe backlash. In the Bolivian lowlands, regionalism and autonomy became metonymic political discourses that embodied the racialized notions of the traditional political class within Bolivia. The autonomist movement of the eastern Bolivian lowland provinces employed political violence to shape their demands on the state and seek greater autonomy from the national government to retain control of the gas rents. Andean migrants to the eastern lowlands were seen as invaders who brought their disorderly politics, culture, and indigeneity. Indigenous peoples of the lowlands were ignored, disempowered, and targets of violence. Natural gas found in Guarani lands brought many fissures and tensions out into the open: political projects are co-opted, leaders are bought off or killed, the local power relations and structural conditions remain with the local indigenous and poor population aiming to capture a minuscule portion of the excess generated through state rents, employment, services, and financing in gas extractions. As the MAS government became more conservative and focused on maintaining political power and control of the state, it came to a détente with Big Gas and with Bolivian lowland elites. Bolivia in the Age of Gas asks readers to think through the contradiction of establishing a liberatory politics via the rents drawn from fossil fuel extraction. For the MAS government—or any government for that matter—to challenge the status quo, Gustafson argues that such liberatory political projects had to serve the interest of the multinational corporations and globalization, and at the same time chart a path independent of high fossil fuel prices through high fossil fuel prices—a clear contradiction in terms. Bolivia in the Age of Gas should readily serve a broad range of scholars, demonstrating how the gaseous state is a conduit through which global capitalism [End Page 233] continues to subjugate Bolivia—and places like it—to this day. Scholars of the Global South, especially those interested in the effects of the extractive economy in highly unequal societies, would benefit greatly from Bolivia in the Age of Gas as it illustrates how resource nationalism cannot escape the pressure of global capital. Scholars of business history, economic history, and institutional history could find much utility in Gustafson's approach and ideas. Bolivia in the Age of Gas insightfully and nimbly paints a complex...

Capacity Development-oriented Service Delivery Structures and Programmes: Case Study of a Mineral-rich District Municipality

Bojanala Platinum District Municipality (BPDM), in the North-West Province, South Africa, is endowed with an extractive economy. The District experiences challenges of capacity development of service delivery structures and programmes. It is in this context that this paper examines how local government responses to challenges of capacity development and explores ways in which organisational structures and programmes can be used to overcome these challenges for enhanced service delivery. The theoretical framing of this study underpins capacity development as an enabler of service delivery and incorporates human capital, performance improvement and collaborative participation in the context of local government. The research employed a single case qualitative research approach with a component of descriptive statistics and a sample of 30 municipal senior managers and a social development mine manager. Key findings are that organisational learning and skills development play important roles in enhancing the capacity development of service delivery structures and programmes. It is against these findings that the study recommends the creation of supportive monitoring and evaluation systems to advance the strengthening of functional hybrid governance structures and an organic communication model within a transparent and accountable administrative-political environment.

Extinction in transition: coca, coal, and the production of enmity in Colombia's post-peace accords environment

At the Paris Climate Summit in 2015, then Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos proposed constructing a multi-national biodiversity corridor that would extend from the Andes to the Brazilian Atlantic coast. Santos highlighted increased militarization of the territory as one advantage of the corridor. In this model, ecological conservation becomes a matter of national/natural security, in the form of counterinsurgency to counter illegal economies. Climate change and ecological disaster mean the forest needs the military power of the State to save it from destruction. We argue that such conservation entails a form of necropolitics lying in wait; because to conserve one part is to condemn the other – framed as the enemy – to certain destruction, as land is simultaneously designated for large-scale development projects. Conservation, in effect, becomes tied to a form of extinction. Our article examines two increasingly militarized frontiers that work through conservation in Colombia. The first is where the Andes meets the Amazon rainforest, an area that has seen an increase in deforestation following the 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC. Deforestation is often attributed to the cultivation of coca (used to produce cocaine), and the solution posited by the government is to eradicate the plant. We argue that eradication of illicit crops is a form of enforced extinction that militarizes the forest, targeting both human and non-human inhabitants. The second frontier concerns coal mining on the Caribbean coast, where mass environmental devastation induced by the industry has led to a forced reorganization of life in the region. The military guards the sites of extraction and those who oppose coal mining become targets for elimination. We bring these two cases – coal and coca – into dialogue, to trace the extinction-driven expansion of extractive economies, a process intertwined with armed conflict, narcotrafficking, and now with transitional politics.

A critical assessment of Guyana's sustainability pathway: Perspectives from a developing extractive economy

The primary purpose of this research article is to present existing and forecasted sustainability indicators for Guyana in order to assess the country's sustainable development pathway. Genuine Savings, Carbon Emissions and Forest Cover were selected as appropriate measures of weak sustainability to investigate the country's sustainability trajectory. Further exploration of macro-economic variables such as natural capital stocks, wealth accumulation, resource rents and economic growth as empirical indicators, revealed that despite the effective forest management policies currently implemented in the country, Guyana is not on a sustainable pathway especially on the outlook for Genuine Savings. The country will experience an increase in economic growth primarily from the expansion of its oil sector. The potential boom in the economy from the non-renewable oil industry will provide a surge in foreign exchange that will require a robust investment structure to utilize resource rents in building the country's renewable capital stock. Positive Carbon Emission predictive trends emerging from this study are indicative of the country's growth towards more carbon intensive industries as the potential oil industry can stimulate a positive emission rating globally, indirectly from downstream industries on the international markets that purchases the country's oil.