Bolivia in the age of gas

"BOLIVIA IN THE AGE OF GAS demonstrates how the push to nationalize natural gas in Bolivia has fomented a complicated mix of nationalism, imperialism, and indigenous sovereignty, destabilizing singular understandings of each of these processes and revealing intricate webs of power. Bret Gustafson aims to both document the heroic efforts of social movements seeking progressive change and to offer a critique of fossil fuel capitalism and the troubled relationship - past and present - between the Left and fossil fuel nationalism. Through this analysis, Gustafson pushes us to rethink how radical and progressive change can move beyond the violence inherent in the material things we know as fossil fuels and the excesses they intensify - war, pollution, patriarchy, and global warming. The book is divided into three parts with three chapters each. Part 1, "Time," establishes the frameworks for thinking critically about certain elements. It explores the historical link between finance capital, militarism, war, and fossil fuels; the particular role of the U.S. in aiding the expansion of military infrastructures in direct relation to oil and gas infrastructures; and the masculine excesses produced by fossil fuel economies, all of which coexist with the dispossession of native peoples and the exercise of multiple forms of violence against feminized bodies and nature. Part 2, "Territory," expands on the tension between the intensification of nationalist sentiment, its aspirations for an imagined unity and shared history, and the intensely regionalized ways that struggles over gas rents create other intense claims on a share of the excess. The third and final part, "Excess," explores ways in which the gaseous state can be read as a series of interlocking struggles over different forms of excess - excess violence, excess work, and excess money."