Not Only Natural Resources: Extractivism as an Organizing Concept

Abstract

The intensification of human impact on the environment, progressive global inequality and the escalating opposition to the resource logic of the perception of nature led to the formation at the beginning of the 21st century of a discourse surrounding extractivism — a special form of social relations leading to the transformation of development into resource exploitation with the alienation of local actors (communities, people, companies and even states) from the profits generated and exported from the territory where this resource is located. The concept of extractivism has spread beyond its original topic (from natural resources to human talent resources, data, green regulation, and many others) and has been subject to abundant and varied reflection by scholars of different disciplines. The practices described in Latin American material were discovered in other parts of the world, including in hidden forms that mimic environmentally and socially responsible development. The expanded concept of extractivism claims to be another large concept that organizes many processes, reducing postmodern development to the production of resource peripheries that renews and cements existing social cleavages not only on former colonial outskirts, but also in long-developed cores of countries of developed capitalism. The imagined emptiness of new resource hinterlands has become a new mechanism for excluding growing vulnerable groups from the distribution of profits produced in global value chains.