Photography, plants, and care in a changing Arctic

Extinction in the Anthropocene.

Resource extraction, FinTech, and social equal access: A quantitative analysis of resource-rich countries

Natural resource extraction has fueled protest movements in Latin America and existing research has drawn considerable scholarly attention to the politics of antimarket contention at the national level, particularly in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina. Despite its residents reporting the third-highest level of protest participation in the region, Peru has been largely ignored in these discussions. In this groundbreaking study, Moises Arce exposes a long-standing climate of popular contention in Peru. Looking beneath the surface to the subnational, regional, and local level as inception points, he rigorously dissects the political conditions that set the stage for protest. Focusing on natural resource extraction and its key role in the political economy of Peru and other developing countries, Arce reveals a wide disparity in the incidence, forms, and consequences of collective action. Through empirical analysis of protest events over thirty-one years, extensive personal interviews with policymakers and societal actors, and individual case studies of major protest episodes, Arce follows the ebb and flow of Peruvian protests over time and space to show the territorial unevenness of democracy, resource extraction, and antimarket contentions. Employing political process theory, Arce builds an interactive framework that views the moderating role of democracy, the quality of institutional representation as embodied in political parties, and most critically, the level of political party competition as determinants in the variation of protest and subsequent government response. Overall, he finds that both the fluidity and fragmentation of political parties at the subnational level impair the mechanisms of accountability and responsiveness often attributed to party competition. Thus, as political fragmentation increases, political opportunities expand, and contention rises. These dynamics in turn shape the long-term development of the state. Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru will inform students and scholars of globalization, market transitions, political science, contentious politics and Latin America generally, as a comparative analysis relating natural resource extraction to democratic processes both regionally and internationally.

The subject of this research is the theory and methodology of taxation of natural resource extraction, including raw hydrocarbon materials and solid minerals, approaches towards allocation of tax burden between economic agents, development trends in taxation system of extraction of different types of minerals. Special attention is given to the questions of improvement of tax administration of extractive sector based on implementation of the new digital information technologies of transmitting data on the output of minerals and reform of the institution of declaration of tax. Research methodology includes: consideration of the principles of taxation system of natural resource extraction; determination of interconnection between the elements of this system and its disturbance; formulation of theoretical conclusions on the basis of studying the practice of taxation and tax administration. The scientific novelty consists in identification of vulnerability of taxation system of natural resource extraction from external factors, including world prices for mineral raw materials; substantiation of measures on neutralization of such dependence; proof of the need for harmonization of the key concepts of Taxation Code of the Russian Federation and legislation on the depth, and formation of the system of direct assessment of reasonableness and effectiveness of point-based and categorical incentives on extraction of natural resources. The article substantiates the vectors of reform of tax declaration system regarding the extraction of natural resources and determination of tax liabilities on the records of government reserve of natural resources. An algorithm is developed for organization of direct oil metering at the wells, using the modern digital technologies.  

Natural resource extractions can generate economic bene? ts for some countries. The income generated can ? nance their developments programs, such as for human resources development. The bene? ts from natural resource extractions also ? ow to companies that have the right for managing the resources. For these companies, the economic bene? ts from natural resource extraction are often returned to communities using corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. Unfortunately, for some countries, natural resource extractions create negative impacts due to overexploitation. Unsustainable natural resource extractions often caused social con?icts as people, compete for rent seeking. Frequently, these con?icts involved citizens against the government. In order to sustain the bene? ts from the natural resources extractions, the government and the community should manage the resources with full consideration of their sustainability.

In this article I want to interrogate the political, economic, and social conditions that enable the extraction of natural and mineral resources from Indigenous and rural communities in Africa, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific. The end of direct colonialism and the emergence of the development state did not necessarily translate into forms of local sovereignty for these communities who bore the brunt of development. I describe the emergence of resource wars in the postcolonial era and how organizational technologies of extraction, exclusion and expulsion lead to dispossession and death. I conclude by discussing possibilities of resistance and develop the notion of translocal resistance where local actors most affected by development are able to forge a series of temporary coalitions with international and national groups in an attempt to promote some form of participatory democracy. The article advance debates on postcolonialism by developing theoretical insights from translocal modes of resistance that open up new analytical spaces marked by particular configurations of market, state and civil society actors.

On 30 July 1984, 11 mercury miners locked down in the mines of Almadén (Ciudad Real, southern Spain) to protest against their precarious economic and social conditions. 650 metres deep inside the oldest and most productive mercury mines in world history, the miners endured the dark and contaminated galleries for 11 days and nights until their claims were addressed. As an emigrated local filmmaker, I come back to post-industrial Almadén in 2019 to make a documentary film about the mining strike. The premise is to find young locals willing to live inside the now-closed mines for 11 whole days in homage to the older miners and to recreate the experience of 1984, 35 years later. Apart from engaging our collective mining past, performing the form and duration of a previous workers strike, Encierro proposes the underground as a living and symbolic space to foster a series of conversations, encounters, and social and political propositions to reimagine Almadén, which rose from a mine shaft more than 2000 years ago, as ‘something else besides’ a mining town. This exposition explores the potential of documentary film fieldwork to take on a different relationship to normal life that the same or similar events would have as ‘untransformed reality’ – a strike versus the reenactment of a strike – and its potential for activism and social transformation. I will also explore the use of the conditional tense in documentary; a speculative and hypothetical approach to reality sensitive to the ‘potentially’ real, the ‘possible’, and the ‘what if’ as modes of documentation. What happens when the forms of ‘documentary’ and ‘reenactment’ are exceeded, and act upon the world rather than only represent it?

Green technology innovations, natural gas and resource extraction strategies in BRICS: Modeling impacts on CO2 emission intensity

Drawing on green criminology and its broadening of ‘crime’ to include harm to both people and environment, this chapter examines the extraction of natural and human resources as part of the economic ‘development’ of small islands, spurred by colonial and commercial interests. It focuses specifically upon the cases of Nauru and Bougainville islands in the Pacific, which illustrate the role of ‘extractivism’ in increasing the vulnerability of islands, damaging health and environment, causing instability and conflict, contributing to global climate change, and leaving many islands uninhabitable and economically dependent. The chapter interprets the impacts of extractivism in these two cases through a critical lens, returning to earlier arguments about how colonialism socially constructs crime in the image of undesirable Others (for example, by criminalizing political resistance), while the crimes of the powerful (for example, corporations, governments) are ignored. To conclude, the chapter briefly considers alternatives to extractivism that are health promoting, community building, and, arguably, crime preventative. Drawing on Indigenous philosophies, the chapter examines the notion of stewardship, which stands in contrast to extractivism, involving an emphasis on regeneration and ensuring future life continues as we continue to the move through the Anthropocene.

The embodiment of inequality: AIDS as a social condition and the historical experience in South Africa

A natural resource zoning of the Far Eastern macro-region within the boundaries of the modern Far Eastern Federal District (Okrug) has been carried out. The zoning is based on identifying territorial combinations of natural resources from the presence of two types of inter-resource links: direct and indirect links of resourcecontaining components in natural geosystems, and indirect links of resource-containing components through components of territorial socio-economic systems that are formed in the process of extraction and development of natural resources. The following algorithm for natural resource zoning was worked out and used. On the basis of physical-geographical zoning, a relatively integral natural geosystem is identified, in which resourcecontaining components are distinguished, including areas of land and forest resources. Next, geosystem interresource links are determined, including the links of certain natural resources with the largest ones. As a result, the territorial combinations of natural resources existing in this natural geosystem are revealed. After that, the inter-resource relations, formed in the process of extraction and use of certain natural resources through transport links and settlements, are determined. Taking them into consideration, the more complete territorial combinations of natural resources as the basis for natural resource areas are distinguished. In coastal areas, in-land natural resources can be interrelated with marine natural resources. This means that the maritime boundaries of such areas remain open.

96/02311 Lending terms, debt concessions, and developing countries' resource extraction

The wave of Latin American left-wing governments of the 2000s claimed to have redistributed the national wealth originating from the extraction of natural resources. Termed ‘neo-extractivism’, this strategy expanded the extractive frontier and relied on the intensive exploitation of natural resources to reinvigorate welfare programs. During this period, we contend, financialization took new shapes, both in how raw materials were commercialized and in the new forms of credit and consumption enabled by the social programs institutionalized by the progressive Latin American governments during the 2000s. Indigenous, mestizo, and afro-descendant populations were the ones that confronted the expulsion produced by this economic model, displaced by the repurposing of land to expand extractive projects. We frame the ghost of empire as an instrumental metaphor to understand the concrete impacts of extractive policies, the financial relations they produced, and the racial forced displacements they generate. The ghost of empire metaphor articulates the interrelation between culture and economy, with an economic realm focused on growing state revenues via the intensive extraction of natural resources, and a cultural imagination that legitimizes the displacement and dispossession of those affected by the model in a way that inevitably reconjures the spectral forces of the colonial past.

La inserción de América Latina en la economía mundial se ha caracterizado históricamente por la extracción de recursos naturales y materias primas dirigidos los países centrales. Recientemente el relativo declive de la hegemonía de Estados Unidos ha permitido dejar espacio para la emergencia de otras fuerzas. Entre ellas destacan Brasil como potencia regional y China como potencia internacional, necesitados de recursos naturales para el crecimiento de sus economías.
 Todas estas tendencias se reflejan en la articulación del megaproyecto IIRSA-COSIPLAN (Iniciativa para la Integración Regional Sudamericana), basado en la construcción de infraestructuras, especialmente corredores de transporte y energéticos, destinadas a facilitar dicha extracción y exportación de recursos. La historia de este megaproyecto está vinculada con los cambios políticos vividos en América Latina en la primera década del siglo XXI y los distintos procesos de integración regional, marcados por el paso de gobiernos abiertamente neoliberales a los llamados gobiernos progresistas.

This article studies the depiction of indigenous struggles against the grab of minerals, crude oil, and other natural resources by private and government corporations in works such as Arundhati Roy’s travel essay “Walking with the Comrades” (2010). Roy’s narrative of her journey across the dense forests of Bastar in east-central India re-articulates the significance of this contested environmental space from the perspective of the region’s indigenous minorities. Traveling with a troop of indigenous rebels hailing from the Gond, Halba, and Muria communities for more than two weeks, Roy describes their armed struggle to a global English audience. Exploring Roy’s role both as an itinerant narrator and a global cultural mediator, the author argues that descriptive accounts of travel through contested zones of extraction can foster a vocabulary of resistance that the author calls an itinerary of conflict. Drawing from Michel de Certeau’s conception of the tour as a descriptive approach to space, the author posits the itinerary of conflict as a spatial trope produced in Roy’s essay when the writer’s embodied travel narrative is inflected by indigenous journeys and spatial practices, such as marches across contested zones and ritual processions to sacred sites. Itineraries of conflict enact a semiotic and political resistance to resource grabs conducted by state agencies and powerful corporations, exemplified by the usurpation of tribal lands rich in iron ore, coal, and other minerals in Chhattisgarh state. Further, itineraries of conflict emphasize the embodied presence of indigenous communities and their activists in areas demarcated for the extraction of minerals, timber, and other resources in the face of continued armed conflict or toxic pollution. More broadly, the author suggests that narratives of conflict over the extraction of natural resources can be studied as the corpus of “resource conflict literature,” thus generating a global comparative framework for the study of contemporary indigenous struggles.