Capitalist violence nad explotitation are not inevitable.

The link between extraction and violence has been a major theme of political economy and political ecology for some time. Key works in political economy have contributed an important analysis of the relationships between resource-based conflict and geo-politics, the structure of the international economy, and nationallevel political and economic competition over rents and territory (Homer-Dixon, 2001; Harvey, 2009; Mitchell, 2011; Ross, 2012). The political economy of resource conflict also explores the linkages between the opening of new extractive frontiers and civil war (Auty, 1993; Humphreys et al., 2007). Despite the frequent expectations of wealth produced by new discoveries, the resource curse literature argues that the exploitation of “point” resources commonly generates low levels of economic growth and a series of adverse effects on governance, including authoritarianism, militarization, regional secessionism, chronically unstable governments, and high levels of conflict (Lynn-Karl, 1997; Collier, 2000). Despite widespread acceptance of the resource curse concept both in academic and policymaking circles, significant critique is now made of its common rational-actor and behaviorist assumptions, particularly the view that extraction necessarily represents an opportunity for elites and the weaponized to maximize their advantages and wealth. This analysis of extractive violence is now countered by a growing body of studies (McNeish and Logan, 2012). Instead, these studies highlight the roles of history and social structure in guiding or catalyzing the direction of political actions (Rosser, 2006; Stevens and Dietche, 2008; Omeje, 2008). While some writers highlight a heightened level of conflict resulting from either naturally occurring or politically induced resource scarcity (Kahl, 2006), a contrasting body of literature suggests that such conditions can also lead toward increased cooperation (Wolf et al., 2003). There is also a growing understanding that the study of extractive violence has been positioned too often at the national and international levels. This has fed reductionist assumptions regarding the inevitability of civil war or the paradox of plenty in resource-rich societies (Lynn-Karl, 1997; Collier, 2010). Moreover, it has left understudied the relationship between sub-national political dynamics and extraction. In contrast to the costs of extraction emphasized by political economy, political ecology has emphasized the close relationship between environmental costs and impacts on local life and culture, from corruption to changing patterns of consumption (Peluso and Watts, 2001; Le Billon, 2001; Le Billon and Bridge, 2012). While a “political ecology of the subsoil” is still in its early days as compared to political economy (Bebbington and Bury, 2013), a growing literature recognizes the need to study the emergence of extractive conflicts over the distribution of costs and benefits associated with the subsoil. For example, water can become unavailable or contaminated, while few of the supposed financial benefits of its use in extractive processes are accrued in the community (Kirsch, 2014; Perreault, 2017). Another important strand to the political-ecological study of extractive conflicts considers the way that natural resources are differentially valued and understood in different contexts (McNeish et al., 2015). There is a growing awareness that environmental goods such as water, land, and soil cannot be understood in merely physical terms. For example, the concept of “waterscape” recognizes water as a “socio-natural entity” (Loftus, 2009) rather than as something to be theorized purely in material terms. Boyer’s (2017) recent proposals for energo-power as a means to express an alternative genealogy of modern power further contribute to a biopolitical take on extractive violence, arguing that our very bodies are intertwined with the pipes and ductwork of energy installations and the logic and expression of extractive politics. The environmental impacts of extractive activities are also increasingly recognized in political ecology as leading to the formation of environmental movements in defense of rural livelihoods and resources (Li, 2015; Bury and Bebbington, 2015), and visible expressions of an “environmentalism of the poor” (Guha and Martinez-Alier, 1997). This rich bibliography, only partly surveyed here, provides an important foundation for this volume. However, there is much room to build on this to understand the expressions of violence in a hyper-extractive age. Volume contributors draw on the analytical benefits of both political economy and political ecology by employing multiple scales of analysis, economic and cultural understandings of how value is differentially created, and the possibility of combining structure and agency in decoding power relations. Here we also suggest the need to understand violence not only as physical action but also as a force with a plurality of expressions and consequences. Kiechel, for example, in her chapter on the built environment, comments, “In a seeming paradox, construction involves destruction—not only of raw material stocks, but often of local economies excluded from benefit, of the socio-spatial fabric of neighborhoods, and of construction workers themselves.” The built environment, she suggests, whether beneficial or oppressive in its social and ecological effects, owes its very existence to extractive actions. In highlighting these connections Kiechel provides a powerful new twist to previous studies that highlight the links between technology and asymmetries in global exchange and that uncover the relationships between ecology and power. In an earlier comment on imperial thermo-dynamics, for example, Hornborg (2001) argued that we should reconceptualize “the machine”—or industrial technomass—as a species of power and a problem of culture. As technological devices multiply exponentially in a vain attempt to make life “efficient,” “luxurious,” and “productive,” Hornborg argues that on planet Earth everything is a zero-sum game, and that one person’s gain is always another’s loss. Kiechel’s extension of technomass from machines to the built environment not only updates the civilizationary nature of this zero-sum game, but its violent reconfiguring of humans and nature, animate and inanimate life, or what Hornborg terms biomass. Our volume explores the multiple dimensions, scales, and local contexts of this global reconfiguration. Evidence and discussion of the violence against nature caused by resource extraction is visible in all contributions to the book. We concur with other studies that highlight that oil and petrochemical production has led to dumping millions of barrels of a cocktail of chemicals, drilling fluids, and formation water into our seas, rivers, and forests. Mining practices, including those for rare earths, have caused river courses to change and heavy metals and chemicals used in processing to leach into drinking water and aquifers. Persistent toxic leaks, periodic catastrophic spills, large-scale mining, and oil-exploitation projects play important roles in opening areas of sensitive biodiversity and human population to industrial development. Extractive activities involve the construction of supporting infrastructures such as roads, pipelines, hydro-electric dams, pylons and cable networks, ports and storage facilities (see Watts for a detailed characterization of these infrastructures in the oil assemblage). Many of these projects have their own direct costs for the environment and encourage problematic destabilization and displacement of human populations. The visible violence against nature is also being waged on human populations and individuals who dare to stand in the way of extractive development. In the chapters by Le Billon and Middeldorp, Graddy-Lovelace, Watts, and Richardson and McNeish, we see the extent of the physical violence waged against land defenders by the actors involved in resource extraction. In doing so, we mirror in our academic work the reports produced by journalists and human rights organizations that highlight a rising trend of violence against land defenders across the world. For the Past three years the The Guardian newspaper and the international human rights non-governmental organization Global Witness have worked together to form and update a global database that attempts to record and map what they call “a murder epidemic.” In its 2019 report, Enemies of the State?, Global Witness highlighted that on average more than three “land defenders” (civil society leaders, human rights activists, indigenous and peasant leaders) were killed every week in 2018. These attacks occurred in relation to extractive industries such as mining, logging, and agri-business. The report also reveals how countless more people were threatened, arrested, or thrown in jail for opposing the governments or companies seeking to profit from their land. Our work extends this picture by pointing to the relationships that exist between legal and illegal actors, companies, and politicians involved in the business of resource extraction. It also discusses the manner in which these relationships background the manipulation and circumvention of laws, regulations, and consultations meant to govern the sector, as seen in particular in the chapters by Graddy-Lovelace and Le Billon and Middeldorp. In their chapter, Glaab and Stuvøy study the nexus between extractivism and violence. Their work argues for a need to push beyond obvious violent impacts and their common normative explanations. In common with many of the other chapters, their work emphasizes the structural nature of extractive violence at different scales e.g. its character as horizontal and vertical (Watts); its grounding in histories of structural racism and criminalization (Graddy-Lovelace); its positioning within capitalist and now multipolar geo-politics (Li and Shapiro). However, their theoretical analysis goes even further. Arguing that “violence is ambiguous and transcends the local/global divide,” Glaab and Stuvøy suggest that researching violence in extractivism brings into discussion the multi-scalar and hetero-temporal character of violence. Instead of thinking of scales as separate, they stress the need for a focus on entanglements (Tsing, 2005). The global is in this perspective not a separate scale, but part of scale-making processes. Such a perspective moves a focus away from the directly observable to what is commonly unseen, or what they more precisely define as “site effects”—violence as built into structure, symbolism, and space; and the temporalities of violence on humans and the environment as both fast and slow, both immediate and incremental. Significantly, Glaab and Stuvøy recognize that the degree, character, and manifestation of extractivism have changed in the neoliberal age. This signposts the need for a more comprehensive, or suitably entangled, meta-narrative of our extractive age and the place within it of resource extraction and related violence. Watts’s chapter makes a particularly significant contribution to such a meta-narrative. His chapter here on extractive value formation in the global oil assemblage not only lays bare the complex licit constellation of science, technology, rent-seeking, and financial speculation, but also its hidden deep reliance on the illicit and criminal. Building on our colleagues’ observations and analysis we also suggest here that Mbembe’s (2019) deep, and necessarily complex, characterization of necro-politics could represent a timely meta-narrative in this regard. Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics is a “decolonial” meditation on the current epoch—one defined by a sense of global realignment, an inward turn, and the reorganization of space and being between the living and the dead. Acknowledging the renewed rise of the extreme political right and the camps imprisoning migrants, Mbembe posits that we live in an epoch defined by a politics of enmity and separation. If globalization and neoliberalism were said to shrink the world, Mbembe now sees a backlash of retrenchment and borderization. Democracy, he suggests, has begun to embrace its dark side, or nocturnal body, based on the historical fuel of the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. Necro-politics entails the “subjugation of life to the power of death” (Mbembe, 2003, pp. 39–40). To this end, a necro-economy encourages as one of its central features the predation of natural resources in which violence on humans and nature are justified, and populations are displaced and eliminated in the causes of consumer- or energy-protection and security.