“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
"[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
"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
"A compassionate and hopeful yet frustrated participant-observer … [Riofrancos] leaves much room for greater assessment of these issues." - Patricia Widener, Mobilization
“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
“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
"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
"An important contribution to burgeoning literature on resource politics and democratic practice." - Benjamin Brown Uneven Earth
“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] provide[s] important insights into Bolivia and Ecuador, and into fossil-fuel capitalism writ large." - Kim Fortun & James Adams, Public Books
"A thoughtful analysis of the origins and ground-level dynamics of the divergence within the Ecuadorean left."
- Tony Wood,
New Left Review
"Resource Radicals . . . tells a story with far broader ramifications in a time when much radical activism and critical academia —particularly in and pertaining to Latin America—is split between celebrations of a pluriverse of indigenous cultures and affirmations of the progressive capacities of the modernizing state." - Japhy Wilson, Antipode
"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’ 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
"This book is a theoretically original and empirically solid contribution." - Jeffery Paige, The Americas
"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
“The exploration of extractivismo in Resource Radicals is a gift...that Thea Riofrancos and Ecuadorian activists give scholars of Latin America, environmental policy, and the politics of development.” - Jayson Maurice Porter, Society & Space
“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
“More than a politics of resistance or refusal, Ecuadorian anti-extractivists have articulated a strategy that moves beyond a binary struggle and envisions a post-extractivist political economy.... [This is] masterfully analyzed by Dr. Riofrancos.” - Julie Klinger, Society & Space
“Resource Radicals has important lessons for international movements.... Riofrancos’ intervention into the ways we conceptualize sovereignty is important to me both as an activist and a scholar.” - Merle Davis Matthews, Society & Space
“Thea Riofrancos’ Resource Radicals presents a rich contemporary history of how anti-mining social movement activists tarry with the socialist Ecuadorian state and corporate elites.” - Kai Bosworth, 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-Diplo
"A fascinating analysis of the relationship between what she describes as two 'resource radicalisms,' or two divergent ways of thinking about the relationship between natural resources and progressive politics in Ecuador. . . . Although other scholars have identified this tension within Latin America's pink tide, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador, Riofrancos offers a compelling periodization of the two tendencies and situates them within a broader analysis of state–society relations." - Andrea Marston, Global Environmental Politics
"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
"The book is extremely thought-provoking. It raises absolutely fundamental issues about the relationships between sovereignty and sustainability, and identity and inequality, that speak to debates in political science, sociology, development studies, and not least of all ethics and political philosophy, and these issues will only grow more important and pressing in a warming world." - Andrew Schrank, European Journal of Sociology
"Resource Radicals is a well-researched and well-written book that will help readers understand how a country with a large and progressive indigenous population could include the rights of Pachamama (Mother Earth) into its progressive constitution and still be so torn over petroleum extraction and mining." - Tod Dillon Swanson, Journal of Religion, Nature, and Culture
"Extensively researched, empirically grounded, theoretically engaged, and carefully argued, Riofrancos’s Resource Radicals is a substantial and generative contribution to the well-established and growing scholarly literature concerning the histories, present, and possible futures of the diverse political struggles that continue to shape life throughout Latin America. Scholars of the political and environmental economy of Ecuador, and of other countries in the region (each with their own, distinctive encounter with extractivism) and the region as a whole, will find much to nourish their thinking in this book. It is also, not incidentally, a model for how to conduct multimethod, emplaced, and politically engaged research and analysis that is sensitive to its own positioning and ethically responsible." - Darin Barney, Constellations
