Anthony Bebbington and Jeffrey Bury (eds.) (2013) Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil and Gas in Latin America, University of Texas Press ( Austin, TX), xiii + 361 pp. $40.00 hbk. Subterranean Struggles, edited by Anthony Bebbington and Jeffrey Bury is the culmination of many years of collaboration between researchers and activists on the issue of mine-community conflicts. It is no exaggeration to say that Bebbington, Bury, and other collaborators such as Denise Humphrey Bebbington, Leonith Hinojosa and Martin Scurrah have defined this field – extending the analysis of the ‘resource curse’ to highly localised socio-environmental struggles in communities near the point-source of extraction. For those familiar with their first collaboration in this series, ‘Mining and Social Movements’ in World Development (2008), and subsequent works including Social Conflict, Economic Development and Extractive Industry (Routledge 2012), this is familiar territory, but finally synthesised in this book into an overarching argument about the nature and consequences of extractive industry. Bebbington and Bury provide the theoretical coherence for the collection taken as a whole, which is characterised by a wide variety of context-rich accounts of social mobilisation around mining, oil and gas projects in the Andes (principally Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru). The title, Subterranean Struggles is a play on words that underlines the transformative but often hidden consequences of expansion of the extractive frontier to the subsuelo (subsoil), in terms of its direct impact on people's lives and livelihoods, their identities, social struggles for rights and territory, and institutional innovation across scales of analysis. In the broadest terms, this oeuvre is a plea for the relevance of a political ecology framework to the social struggles related to the subsoil, as a way of rendering visible the effects of resource-led development. In narrower terms, Bebbington and Bury bring together the themes that have characterised much of their writing: how extraction has transformed peasant livelihoods; how local social struggle has contributed to institutional innovation across different scales and actors; and how the state uses extraction to further its interests, is also drawn into social conflict as a regulator, arbitrator, and is even manipulated by other actors to attain legal or territorial objectives. The other contributors cover a diverse set of cases and topics, including the relationship between resource extraction, nationalism and identity (Perreault; Warnaars); activist strategies to defend alternative livelihoods (Bury and Norris; Moore and Velásquez; Postigo, Montoya and Young); the consequences for state-building and institutional innovation (Bebbington and Scurrah); and the regionalisation of extractivism (Hindery). Within the organising theoretical framework of political ecology, there is considerable diversity in the methodologies pursued by this diverse group of contributors. Bebbington and Bury recognise as much, describing their approach to the case studies as guided by a ‘similar protocol’ (p. 244), but evolving over the course of the project. They are also explicit about the challenges of engaging in grounded research in conflict zones, writing that ‘simply being able to operate in the midst of such conflict depends on the insights and legitimacy bestowed by long periods of fieldwork’ (p. 15). What goes unsaid here is that the challenge of working in a politically polarised environment makes rigorous impartiality difficult if not impossible. While Bebbington and Bury are careful to present a balanced and analytical rigorous framework for the analysis, some of the chapters are clearly the product of politically engaged activist scholars (as is most of the published case-study literature on firm-community conflict). In this respect, it is worth noting that the book as a whole is characterised by the relative absence of corporate or governmental voices, which results in downplaying the possibility that resource extraction could constitute a development opportunity for these countries. Subterranean Struggles is an important book for the study of extractive industry in Latin America, constituting as it does, the culmination of the most important collaborative project on this topic to date. Bebbington and Bury were pioneers in bringing this objectively important phenomenon to academic attention, which has literally been reshaping the socio-environmental, political and institutional environment of many Latin American countries. However, we must admit that much of the case study work on mine-community conflict over the last decade has attracted limited attention from the mainstream journals, in part, due to the descriptive empiricism of case studies and a failure to frame the problem of the new extractivism in a theoretical language that renders it visible and important to political scientists, sociologists and economists outside the activist community. Bebbington and Bury take an important step forward in this theoretical unveiling of the problem by contextualising these struggles in a political ecology framework imported from geography, and by examining the impact of extractive industry on societies, politics and institutions across scales. Researchers from other disciplines need now to build on this foundation.