Abstract
This edited collection brings together an impressive set of cases from diverse locations across three continents. Grassroots Responses to Extractivism: Case Studies from around the World includes 12 case studies from both the global North and South. Seven of these cases are rooted in specific localities in Asia and Africa, and they document extractivist developmental projects and people’s resistance to them. The other five cases embrace not just collective action against “developmental” projects but also broader anti-colonial-capitalist-Eurocentric perspectives from sites in the Americas, Asia, and the Pan African universe of experiences. These counter-perspectives help visualize ways of thinking about life in general, our relationships with animate and inanimate others on the planet, and organic ways of organizing our interconnected lives independent of the parochiality of modernity and capitalism.
The collection includes an initial framing by two of the book’s editors, Mariko Frame and Felix Mantz, that contextualizes the cases around existential anxieties tied to our ongoing polycrisis, their roots in the extractivist mode of being, and their historically particular antecedents in the narrow, but influential, provincialism of modern Europe. Among other things, European modernity birthed violent impulses of capitalism-colonialism that have not only commodified everything, but in the process have wrought irreparable harm on the planet’s inhabitants, both more-than-human and human, and their relationships. While the repercussions of European modernity and capitalism-colonialism triggered in 1492 on the global South are now frequently discussed, Frame and Mantz also use the introduction to remind the reader about equally important shifts brought about within Europe during the same time. These include the purging of Jews and Muslims, witch hunts, and the extermination of peasants. These were indeed the necessary conditions for establishing a singular extractivist, Christian, heteropatriarchal, colonial-capitalist worldview. Other ways of being, knowing, and acting were violently marginalized as they were forced into the so-called “inferior" positions on the binary conceptions of civilized/savage, Christian/heathen, rational/emotional, scientific/spiritual, developed/backward, and human/nature, to name a few.
Cases in this collection reflect the neoliberal drives of extractivism shaped by Eurocentrism, modernity, and the colonial-capitalist impulse. Extractivism has serious consequences, as the editors argue and the cases demonstrate, including ecocide, genocide, and epistemicide. But more importantly, cases in the collection also document the reactions to these consequences expressed from below through demands, resistance, activism, and mobilization rooted in a plurality of worldviews and value systems of survivors. It is these heterodox ethics of relating with the planet, the environment, and non-human species and the political imaginaries based on them that make this collection special for a variety of readers.
Part II of the collection trains these ideas through the modern state and its ideological self-legitimization through the narrowly defined Eurocentric version of industrial development. This section includes seven cases where the state masks genocidal, ecocidal, and epistemicidal projects of land grabbing, mining, dam building, power generation, and infrastructure development. These extractivist projects take place at the cost of indigenous sovereignty and political institutions, as in Jharkhand, India; pluriversal ontologies and spiritual beliefs, as in mountain communities of Sikkim; popular autonomy over land use and cultural erasure, as in Tanzania; local livelihoods and identity, as in Liberia; and biodiversity loss, gendered violence, and economic marginalization of women, as in Cambodia.
While these cases emphasize the three interrelated tendencies of coloniality—genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide—the collection also curates empowering cases that strike back at the heart of coloniality through their own regenerative and grounded imaginaries. Abigail Pérez Aguilera’s essay on the pluriversal history of precolonial Mexico takes a counter-anthropocentric position arguing that perhaps we will do well if we suspend the hubris associated with being human and instead learn from non-human species that seem to transcend interspecies boundaries in forging collaborations aimed at resilience and survival. This is how various indigenous communities and nonhuman species lived in the past. The author sees weaknesses in contemporary human societies since the rise of modernity especially in how processes of capitalism and coloniality detach humans from abject nature, rupturing foundational connections that integrated us with more-than-human entities in complex webs of life.
Ali Kassem’s essay on present-day Lebanon delves deep into Shia Muslim mysticism where the Prophet communicated with animals and trees, and humans as well as other-than-human entities shared affective relations. His ethnography of present-day Beirut helps measure the vast distance from these esoteric narratives and life today, where inhabitants yearn to see a single tree or a green patch in the concrete fortress that Beirut has become (it is unsurprising that Lebanon is an artificial nation carved out through the colonial squabble between the French and English). Kassem’s respondents are not satisfied with these stories remaining only fables meant to socialize children into kindness. They demand that these relations between humans, trees, and animals be revived as we will into being a more compassionate future.
Cases reflecting on alternative ethics of being from the Americas and the Black diasporic world add to these discussions, bringing in both collective action and thought from below. Yet the cases in this collection do not simply signal neat social movements detached from the state. As several cases show, people’s resistance engages the state, acknowledging its central position in the contemporary possibilities of governances, yet indigenous groups, mountain folk, peasant communities, and urban citizens also demonstrate pluriversal possibilities of governance beyond the capacities of the modern, liberal, extractivist state.
This collection will enthuse an audience that is tuned into dimensions of our ongoing polycrisis from a broad multidisciplinary perspective. A missing element from the synthetic chapters in this collection, both the introduction and conclusion, is degrowth. While the book’s framing suggests alternative imaginaries that can be independent of past and present institutions, several cases document the necessary, even if undesirable, negotiations with the state. One of the forces that the modern state has not been able to tame, and against which it often stands humbled, is nature. Be it hurricanes, tsunamis, or earthquakes, more-than-human actors often cut the state down to size, as is also documented in the case of flooding in the Mexican basin, where water returns to reclaim its own. Given that the state, with imperfect control over nature, will stay as a critical institution that will collude with and/or resist capital in the short and medium term, degrowth is a plausible pathway that can engage the state. Political will, even if preliminary, in nations like Iceland and New Zealand is evident and underlines its promise.
Contributing authors are community leaders, organizers, nonprofit professionals, and scholars from the social sciences and humanities, many among them sharing heritage in indigenous communities and rooted in lived experiences. Cases reflect their aesthetic styles and training and provide passionately produced narratives. Having recently co-authored Decolonizing Environmentalism (2025), which engages cognate ideas, analyses, and recommendations, I find this collection valuable for anyone who is willing to see through the shallow benefits of modernity, and who is open to alternative, regenerative, just, and humble ways of being in the company of diverse humans and more-than-humans.