Social movements have been viewed as vehicles through which the concerns of poor and marginalised groups are given greater visibility within civil society, lauded for being the means to achieve local empowerment and citizen activism, and seen as essential in holding the state to account and...

Recent years have seen increasingly aggressive expansion of the extractive economy in the Andean-Amazonian region, as both hard-rock mining and hydrocarbon frontiers move into new territories and deepen their presence in old ones. In ways reminiscent of the film Avatar, this expansion drives...