Thea Riofrancos: “Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador”

Virtual event: Once the event starts you can view the live video below or on our YouTube channel.

Please join us for a special talk with Thea Riofrancos on her new book, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. Riofrancos will be joined in conversation by political theorist George Ciccariello-Maher.

From the publisher’s description:
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. 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.

Please note: Closed captioning will be provided by YouTube within 24 hours after the event has concluded.

About the Speakers

Thea Riofrancos is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2020-2022), a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2020-2021), and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Providence College. Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, green technology, social movements, and the left in Latin America. She is the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke, 2020) and a co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso 2019).

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George Ciccariello-Maher is Visiting Scholar of Decolonizing Humanities and Modern Languages and Literature at William & Mary. As well as being the inaugural Visiting Scholar of Decolonizing Humanities Project for 2019-2020, he is also ongoing Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. He is co-editor of the Duke University Press book series Radical Américas and the author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Duke 2013), Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela (Verso 2016), and Decolonizing Dialectics (Duke 2017).