In 2007, the left came to power in
Ecuador. In the years that followed, the “twenty-first-century
socialist” government and a coalition of grassroots activists came
to blows over the extraction of natural resources. Each side declared
the other a perversion of leftism and the principles of socioeconomic
equality, popular empowerment, and anti-imperialism. In Resource
Radicals, Thea Riofrancos
unpacks the conflict between these two leftisms: on the one hand, the
administration's resource nationalism and focus on economic
development; and on the other, the anti-extractivism of grassroots
activists who condemned the government's disregard for nature and
indigenous communities. In this archival and ethnographic study,
Riofrancos expands the study of resource politics by decentering
state resource policy and locating it in a field of political
struggle populated by actors with conflicting visions of resource
extraction. She demonstrates how Ecuador's commodity-dependent
economy and history of indigenous uprisings offer a unique
opportunity to understand development, democracy, and the
ecological foundations of global capitalism.