Extractive Bargains: Exploring the State-Society Nexus is a new collection of essays, edited by Paul Bowles and Nathan Andrews, that explores how states are responding to conflicting demands around resource extraction. The book's 16 case studies include countries from both the Global North and Global South, as well as some majority Indigenous states, to understand how "extractive bargains" generate social consensus around resource extraction in different places. The book is the first to analyze in detail and in comparative perspective how states have sought to construct discourses and dialogues designed to support particular extractive policies. It demonstrates, however, that pathways are not pre-determined and that there are possibilities for progressive change.
In the third installment in our series on the impact of Timothy Mitchell's "Carbon Democracy," communication studies researcher Ayesha Vemuri explores Mitchell's larger oeuvre to argue that mainstream responses to address the climate crisis can be understood as extensions of what he calls “the rule of experts.” By maintaining a global hegemony of elite expertise over that of local and indigenous knowledges, efforts to address the ecological crisis uphold structures of power that undergird the ecological crisis. If we want to develop just responses to climate change, we will need a new approach to expertise.
Helios is an EH interview series about new research in the energy humanities and the creative processes that bring it to life. In this fifth installment, Nicholas Carby-Denning interviews University of Toronto political scientists Teresa Kramarz and Donald Kingsbury about their book Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador: The People's Oil? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Although this conversation took place in late 2022, its exploration of energy and populist politics continues to resonate in late 2024.
