Extractivism and Global Social Change

This chapter focuses on the concept of extractivism as an analytical device to understand multiple aspects of global social change. This review examines the core characteristics of extractivism as an analytical concept, its historical trajectories, and its recent expansion into new dimensions. It proposes global extractivism as an analytical device to understand complex linkages between different sectors of extractivism, occurring at multiple scales, and in a variety of realms. The review shows how extractivism has morphed, travelled, and expanded, theoretically and spatially, over time. More and more researchers and activists are deploying the concept, in order to understand how extractivism works as a complex ensemble of self-reinforcing practices, ideologies, and power differentials underwriting and rationalising socio-environmentally harmful modes of exploiting natural resources and organising human and nonhuman life. The review emphasizes the need for understanding intimate relationships of extractivisms and multiple global crises, including climate change, ecological degradation, pandemics, and social displacement. It calls for further refinement of extractivism as an analytical concept, with new theorisations, in order to enhance its utility and deployment across a variety of critical social sciences.