In 2007, the left came to power in Ecuador. In the years that followed, the “twenty-first-century socialist” government and a coalition of grassroots activists came to blows over the extraction of natural resources. Each side declared the other a perversion of leftism and the principles of socioeconomic equality, popular empowerment, and anti-imperialism. In Resource Radicals, Thea Riofrancos unpacks the conflict between these two leftisms: on the one hand, the administration's resource nationalism and focus on economic development; and on the other, the anti-extractivism of grassroots activists who condemned the government's disregard for nature and indigenous communities. In this archival and ethnographic study, Riofrancos expands the study of resource politics by decentering state resource policy and locating it in a field of political struggle populated by actors with conflicting visions of resource extraction. She demonstrates how Ecuador's commodity-dependent economy and history of indigenous uprisings offer a unique opportunity to understand development, democracy, and the ecological foundations of global capitalism.

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“Resource Radicals presents an insightful first-hand account of fierce political conflict over extractivism within the Ecuadorian Left during the era of Rafael Correa’s governance.... The book’s analysis...offers a timely contribution to critical scholarship.”

"“Resource Radicals is an insightful and ultimately optimistic interpretation of social mobilization around natural resource extraction in Ecuador. Thea Riofrancos eschews simple resource curse theory, viewing mobilization as a potential pathway toward more productive modes of governing extractive industry. Sensitive to both anti-extractivist and ‘Pink Tide’ approaches to resource extraction, she offers a nuanced analysis of resource politics and the complex challenges facing regimes that seek to govern the subsoil for progressive change.”" - Governing Extractive Industries: Politics, Histories, Ideas

"“This is a valuable, sensitive, and generous study of the new shapes that left politics has taken in the twenty-first century as crises of ecology and inequality swirl together. It's an essential basis for understanding the challenges ahead.”" - This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth

"[Resource Radicals] provide[s] important insights into Bolivia and Ecuador, and into fossil-fuel capitalism writ large." - Public Books

"[Riofranco's] scholarship is an example of internationalist solidarity in critical practice, the kind to which we may all aspire, and to which our current moment demands." - Jacobin Magazine

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"A thoughtful analysis of the origins and ground-level dynamics of the divergence within the Ecuadorean left."

"By examining how activists envisioned a post-petroleum future, Riofrancos transcends the superficial debates on the legacy of the Pink Tide and, in turn, helps chart a path forward for creating a society as equitable as it is ecological." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"Resource Radicals will be a key text in the expanding genealogy of extractivism in the Americas, particularly for the light it sheds on how competing understandings of the state and of neoliberalization shape sociopolitical and ecological relationships to development." - Latin American Research Review

"“Resource Radicals presents an insightful first-hand account of fierce political conflict over extractivism within the Ecuadorian Left during the era of Rafael Correa’s governance.... The book’s analysis...offers a timely contribution to critical scholarship.”" - LSE Review of Books

"Resource Radicals’ surgical take captures what Riofrancos rightly defines as one of the greatest contributions to critical theory to come from this part of the world: the political economy of postmillennial extractivism and the capacity of an increasingly global, globalizing Left to imagine itself beyond it. Perhaps pitched at a level beyond general audiences, this is a rigorously researched, fundamentally interesting book." - Economic Geography

"“Through archival and ethnographic research, [Riofrancos] explores the conditions and consequences of the radical politicization of resource extraction in what she calls two leftisms.... She concludes with crucial reflections about the dilemmas of resource dependency for both the Left in power and the Left in resistance.”" - NACLA Report on the Americas

"This book is a theoretically original and empirically solid contribution." - The Americas

"A complex and nuanced understanding of the praxis of politics in Ecuador during this time-period…. A remarkable first-hand account of the internectine conflict within the left during the ten years that Rafael Correa was in power." - European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

"A must-read book for scholars interested in issues of Indigenous rights, extractivist resistance, environmental justice, and the future of humanity." - Perspectives on Politics

"“Thea Riofrancos’ Resource Radicals is a powerful and important book, grounded in the deft navigation of demanding field research and political and theoretical complexity.”" - Society & Space

"Resource Radicals brings remarkable theoretical sophistication to bear on a wealth of empirical research in analyzing potential political problems. . . . [It is] a particularly timely and essential book." - H-Diplo