Resource Radicals

“Resource Radicals presents an insightful first-hand account of fierce political conflict over extractivism within the Ecuadorian Left during the era of Rafael Correa’s governance.... The book’s analysis...offers a timely contribution to critical scholarship.”

-- Sibo Chen * Resilience *
“Resource Radicals is an insightful and ultimately optimistic interpretation of social mobilization around natural resource extraction in Ecuador. Thea Riofrancos eschews simple resource curse theory, viewing mobilization as a potential pathway toward more productive modes of governing extractive industry. Sensitive to both anti-extractivist and ‘Pink Tide’ approaches to resource extraction, she offers a nuanced analysis of resource politics and the complex challenges facing regimes that seek to govern the subsoil for progressive change.” -- Anthony Bebbington, coauthor of * Governing Extractive Industries: Politics, Histories, Ideas *
“This is a valuable, sensitive, and generous study of the new shapes that left politics has taken in the twenty-first century as crises of ecology and inequality swirl together. It's an essential basis for understanding the challenges ahead.” -- Jedediah Purdy, author of * This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth *
"[Resource Radicals] provide[s] important insights into Bolivia and Ecuador, and into fossil-fuel capitalism writ large." -- Kim Fortun & James Adams * Public Books *
"[Riofranco's] scholarship is an example of internationalist solidarity in critical practice, the kind to which we may all aspire, and to which our current moment demands." -- Hilary Goodfriend * Jacobin Magazine *

"A thoughtful analysis of the origins and ground-level dynamics of the divergence within the Ecuadorean left."

-- Tony Wood * New Left Review *
"By examining how activists envisioned a post-petroleum future, Riofrancos transcends the superficial debates on the legacy of the Pink Tide and, in turn, helps chart a path forward for creating a society as equitable as it is ecological." -- Jared Olson * Los Angeles Review of Books *
"Resource Radicals will be a key text in the expanding genealogy of extractivism in the Americas, particularly for the light it sheds on how competing understandings of the state and of neoliberalization shape sociopolitical and ecological relationships to development." -- Donald V. Kingsbury * Latin American Research Review *
“Resource Radicals presents an insightful first-hand account of fierce political conflict over extractivism within the Ecuadorian Left during the era of Rafael Correa’s governance.... The book’s analysis...offers a timely contribution to critical scholarship.” -- Sibo Chen * LSE Review of Books *
"Resource Radicals’ surgical take captures what Riofrancos rightly defines as one of the greatest contributions to critical theory to come from this part of the world: the political economy of postmillennial extractivism and the capacity of an increasingly global, globalizing Left to imagine itself beyond it. Perhaps pitched at a level beyond general audiences, this is a rigorously researched, fundamentally interesting book." -- Juan M. del Nido * Economic Geography *
“Through archival and ethnographic research, [Riofrancos] explores the conditions and consequences of the radical politicization of resource extraction in what she calls two leftisms.... She concludes with crucial reflections about the dilemmas of resource dependency for both the Left in power and the Left in resistance.” -- Nicole Fabricant * NACLA Report on the Americas *
"This book is a theoretically original and empirically solid contribution." -- Jeffery Paige * The Americas *
"A complex and nuanced understanding of the praxis of politics in Ecuador during this time-period…. A remarkable first-hand account of the internectine conflict within the left during the ten years that Rafael Correa was in power." -- Francis Adams * European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies *
"A must-read book for scholars interested in issues of Indigenous rights, extractivist resistance, environmental justice, and the future of humanity." -- Roberta Rice * Perspectives on Politics *
“Thea Riofrancos’ Resource Radicals is a powerful and important book, grounded in the deft navigation of demanding field research and political and theoretical complexity.” -- Geoff Mann * Society & Space *
"Resource Radicals brings remarkable theoretical sophistication to bear on a wealth of empirical research in analyzing potential political problems. . . . [It is] a particularly timely and essential book." -- Alyssa Battistoni * H-Dip