Resource Extraction

Behzadi et al., 2024

• Argues extraction is a geopolitical and socio-environmental process, not simply the technical removal of resources.

• Extraction is fundamentally built on practical, epistemic, and ontological exclusions, while inclusion often deepens inequality rather than resolving it.

• Critiques inclusive growth, compensation schemes, and multi-stakeholder governance for concealing dispossession and colonial power relations.

• Links contemporary extractivism to colonial capitalism and 1980s neoliberal reforms (privatisation, deregulation, Structural Adjustment Programmes).

• Introduces extensification (expanding extraction as an organising concept) and intensification (examining the specific socio-material practices through which extraction operates).

Salite et al., 2021

• Argues Mozambique's fossil fuel strategy has entrenched poverty, conflict, and regional inequality rather than promoting development.

• Uses the Palma attacks near LNG infrastructure to demonstrate how extraction generates instability.

• Shows government prioritises extractive revenues over humanitarian needs and displaced communities.

• Despite major gas reserves, only 32% of Mozambicans have reliable electricity, illustrating that resource wealth does not guarantee local benefits.

• Links Mozambique's extractivist model to colonial legacies and dependence on global capital.

How the pursuit of carbon and fossil fuels harms vulnerable communities (n.d.)

• Argues fossil fuel extraction and carbon-based development disproportionately harm Indigenous peoples and vulnerable communities.

• Highlights extractivism's colonial roots across Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and the Americas.

• Shows developing countries bear the greatest climate impacts despite contributing least to emissions.

• Critiques carbon offset schemes (e.g. REDD) for providing limited local benefits while restricting local rights.

• Demonstrates tensions between energy development and Indigenous resistance.

Dunlap & Verweijen, 2021

• Argues extractive industries persist through social engineering as well as technological and physical infrastructure.

• Corporations manufacture consent using both hard (legal, bureaucratic) and soft (community relations) techniques.

• Uses Mozambique to show participation mechanisms can conceal structural inequalities.

• Explains the rise of green extractivism since the 1990s, where sustainability narratives legitimise continued extraction.

• Demonstrates how governance itself becomes part of extraction.

Jalbert et al., 2017

• Defines extraction as reshaping landscapes, communities, and ecosystems, while extractivism is the profit-driven logic behind it.

• Argues extraction has entered an "extreme" phase, expanding into deeper and more environmentally sensitive locations.

• Uses coltan mining in the DRC to illustrate links between extraction, armed conflict, child labour, and human rights abuses.

• Critiques Environmental Impact Assessments for reducing complex harms to measurable indicators.

• Calls for post-extractivism and extrACTIVIST movements to imagine alternative futures.

Watts, 2012

• Rejects the resource curse as an overly deterministic explanation of oil politics.

• Introduces oil assemblages, where political outcomes emerge through infrastructures, institutions, and social relations.

• Develops the idea of the permanent frontier, where extraction continually expands into new territories.

• Uses the Niger Delta and Gulf of Mexico to compare different oil frontiers.

• Argues oil frontiers create unequal regimes of life, dispossession, and violence.

Martinez-Allier, 2023

• Explores global environmental justice movements resisting extractivism.

• Uses the Philippines and Odisha (India) to show mining generates conflict, militarisation, and Indigenous resistance.

• Highlights the King-King Mine and Utkal Alumina Project as examples of contested extraction.

• Demonstrates governments frequently side with corporations while suppressing protest.

• Shows environmental justice movements connect land rights, Indigenous sovereignty, and anti-extractivist politics.

O’Rourke and Connolly, 2003

• Argues oil's benefits and burdens are distributed highly unevenly.

• Highlights the dominance of oil supermajors such as BP and Shell.

• Reviews environmental impacts including pollution, deforestation, emissions, and industrial hazards.

• Shows Indigenous communities disproportionately bear extraction's environmental and social costs.

• Argues regulations often fail because enforcement remains weak and politically biased.

Acosta, 2013

• Explains the resource curse as the product of political-economic structures rather than resource abundance alone.

• Identifies mechanisms including currency appreciation, deteriorating terms of trade, and economic dependency.

• Shows extractivism often reinforces authoritarian politics and delays structural reform.

• Defines neo-extractivism as greater state involvement while maintaining dependence on extraction.

• Concludes neo-extractivism redistributes some wealth but leaves environmental damage and global capitalist dependence intact.

Burchardt and Dietz, 2014

• Argues neo-extractivism presents a contradictory model of development in Latin America.

• Contrasts neoliberal extractivism with progressive governments' greater taxation and regulation during the 2000s.

• Shows extractive revenues funded poverty reduction and expanded social programmes.

• Warns economies remain vulnerable through commodity dependence, clientelism, and weakened democracy.

• Concludes neo-extractivism delivers social gains while reproducing structural dependence on extraction.

Leifsen, 2020

• Examines neo-extractivism through the Mirador copper mine in Ecuador.

• Introduces "surfacing", where extraction makes some socio-natural relations visible while obscuring others.

• Develops the concept of incorporation by non-recognition, where compensation excludes cultural and territorial values.

• Shows territorial planning reframes resistance as technical problems rather than political disagreements.

• Demonstrates compensation can reinforce extractive governance rather than challenge it.

Reyes, 2019

• Examines Afro-Colombian women's resistance to extractivism in La Toma.

• Uses the 400-mile march to Bogotá by 40 Black women as an example of collective mobilisation.

• Argues extractivism operates through racial capitalism and militarised governance.

• Highlights the gap between 1991 constitutional recognition of collective land rights and their implementation.

• Shows emotions and Afro-diasporic identities are central to political resistance.

Murrey and Jackson, 2020

• Introduces "localwashing", where corporations use narratives of local suffering to legitimise extraction.

• Argues localwashing operates through coloniality and racial capitalism.

• Identifies three strategies: anguishing, arrogating (racial ventriloquism), and admonishing the local.

• Shows corporations simplify local voices while claiming to represent them.

• Demonstrates how extractive legitimacy is produced through discourse as well as material practices.

Murrey, 2015

• Examines violence surrounding the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline.

• Argues extractive violence is embodied, emotional, structural, and historically accumulated, not simply physical.

• Introduces "displacement in place", where communities remain physically present but lose their social worlds.

• Links contemporary extraction to longer histories of slavery, colonialism, and racial domination.

• Shows ecological destruction, militarisation, and dispossession reinforce one another spatially.

Kennedy et al., 2017

• Argues legal and planning systems increasingly privilege extractive development over community opposition.

• Uses the Mt Thorley-Warkworth Coal Mine (Australia), where planning laws were amended after community legal victories.

• Examines Marcellus Shale Gas (USA) as an example of pro-industry policy.

• Shows environmental justice conflicts are shaped by unequal legal and political institutions.

• Concludes governments increasingly weaken opportunities for communities to challenge extraction.