Ecological Sovereignty: Practicing Peace as Liberation from Extractivism

When peace is reduced to stability, defending national security, and protecting economic growth, it becomes subservient to the extractive model of development. In her contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, Barbara Magalhães Teixeira argues for a different understanding of peace as liberation. This involves dismantling the structures that make communities vulnerable and restoring land, autonomy, and dignity.

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Across territories in the Global South, the language of peace does not always resonate with the struggles of those defending land, water, and life. For environmental defenders, Indigenous peoples, quilombola and peasant communities confronting the expansion of mining, agribusiness, and energy megaprojects, the idea of peace is often linked to ideas of development that have threatened their survival since the beginning of the colonial era.

When peace is reduced to stability, defending national security, and protecting economic growth, it becomes obedient to the extractive model of development, as it assumes that mining, agribusiness, and other extractive industries will deliver progress, and that communities should adapt to their impacts rather than question them. Here, resistance is framed as a problem to be managed, not as a legitimate defense of territory, and communities are treated as obstacles to growth and development rather than subjects of political imagination. In this context, peace appears to be a convenient term for states, corporations, and international institutions. However, it rarely speaks to the lived realities and desires of those on the frontlines of ecological degradation and violent conflict.

In this essay I argue for a different understanding of peace as liberation: the dismantling of the structures that make communities vulnerable and the restoration of land, autonomy, and dignity. Peace, in this sense, is the collective reimagining of futures beyond extraction. To understand why liberation is central to peace, we must begin with extractivism as a system of violence, and with the practices of ecological sovereignty emerging across the Global South that confront this system in concrete ways.

Extractivism as a system of violence

Extractivism is often treated as an economic model, a policy choice, or a necessary phase of development. However, from feminist and decolonial perspectives, it can be understood as a system that organizes power, space, and life itself around the logic of extraction and capital accumulation. In this system, violence is not an aberration but structural and embedded.

Extractivism is sustained through three mutually reinforcing forms of harm. Direct violence appears in land dispossession, toxic exposure, intimidation, and the killing of environmental defenders. Structural violence manifests in unequal access to land, health, and livelihoods, and in the transformation of whole regions into sacrifice zones. Cultural violence operates through narratives that normalize all this as inevitable ‘progress,’ often through an Eurocentric and colonial worldview.

Together, these forms of violence stabilize an order in which some territories and lives are continually treated as expendable. The structural marginalization of communities enables their violent dispossession, which depends on cultural narratives that normalize their sacrifice for the ‘greater good.’ In the case of economic growth, for example, it is sacrifice for the sake of the nation. In the case of climate breakdown, it is for the sake of the world. In turn, these narratives are enforced through direct repression when communities resist the expansion of extractive frontiers.

Understanding this systemic nature of extractivism highlights that addressing only direct violence is not enough to create peace. As long as cultural violence legitimizes structural harm, and structural violence keeps communities vulnerable to direct attacks, the cycle of extraction and violence will continue.

A liberatory approach to peace

A liberatory peace focuses on negating both the symbolic and material structures that produce and reproduce violence and domination in the extractive system, instead of stabilizing them. From this perspective, it is impossible to establish peace as a liberatory practice when it is based on violent systems of extractivism, oppression, and colonization. If the pathway to peace is imagined only through the intensification of extraction and economic growth, then peace remains confined within the very architecture that generates vulnerability and violence.

A liberatory understanding of peace broadens the scope, treating peace as a political struggle over how territories and life are organized rather than a technical problem of conflict management. Transforming the structures that enable violence requires addressing questions such as: Who controls land and resources? Who holds decision-making power? Whose knowledge is valued? Whose lives are protected? Whose territories are sacrificed?

This is where redistribution of both resources and power is central to this understanding of peace. If extractivism produces and sustains a system of direct, structural, and cultural violence, peace cannot be achieved by merely tweaking how this system is managed. Peace requires transforming the material and political relations that allow these violences to persist. In other words, it necessitates a redistribution of both resources and power, so that communities are able not only to protect themselves from harm, but to undo the structures and narratives that normalize that harm.

Redistributing resources and power in this way allows communities to challenge direct and structural violence while also undermining the cultural violence that legitimizes them, opening space to redefine development and peace on their own terms.

Saying no as a practice of ecological sovereignty

Decisions about megaprojects are usually taken far from the territories they transform, through opaque licensing processes and state – corporate arrangements that privilege national growth narratives or global decarbonization efforts over local well-being. Communities may be invited to ‘participate,’ but rarely have the authority to say no. Without veto power, or real capacity to set terms of territorial transformation, participation becomes a way of managing dissent, and peace becomes a demand for compliance within an extractivist horizon.

This is why my understanding of peace as liberation is built on the right to say no: the refusal to accept extractivism as the universal pathway to development and progress. Such refusals are often framed as threats to economic stability, but they express a foundational democratic claim: the right to protect the ecological and social conditions of life, and to decide collectively what counts as sustainable, what counts as progress, and for whom. In practice, saying no interrupts the cultural violence that portrays sacrifice as inevitable, while also challenging the structural arrangements that make dispossession politically possible.

Here, the idea of ecological sovereignty helps name what is at the center of this refusal beyond the simple ‘local control’ over resources but focusing on the collective capacity to maintain and regenerate the ecological bases of life and to decide democratically how these bases are governed and used. This concept links the need for redistribution of resources as the material conditions of life with the redistribution of power as the authority to decide, while also confronting the narratives that legitimize extractivism as the single and universal future.

Practice of world-making

Saying no, then, it not only an act of refusal, but also a practice of world-making. It creates space for other ways of inhabiting and governing territory to emerge, and for communities to choose agroecology over monoculture, or community energy over corporate grids, and commons over enclosure.

Across the Global South, communities are already practicing ecological sovereignty in their struggles against extractivism. Two examples from my research in Brazil help illustrate how saying no becomes a concrete practice of peace as liberation.

In the Jequitinhonha Valley, lithium mining is promoted as a gateway to inclusion in the green transition. The region is rebranded as ‘Lithium Valley,’ and its rivers, soils, and people are repositioned within global supply chains. Local movements contest the cultural violence of this renaming and the territorial transformations it justifies. They draw attention to water depletion, land grabbing, and the social fragmentation associated with mining, insisting that their region cannot be reduced to a reservoir of critical minerals. Their refusal is coupled with proposals: strengthening agroecology, protecting water sources, and sustaining quilombola and Indigenous ways of life. Here, saying no to lithium extraction is inseparable from saying yes to other territorial futures. Ecological sovereignty appears as both defense and imagination, as communities resist extractive projects while cultivating alternative horizons of life.

In the outskirts of Brazil’s capital, the Movimento Bem Viver offers another powerful example of peace as liberation in practice. Working across rural and urban territories, the movement brings together peasant farmers, favela residents, feminist and Black collectives, and Indigenous activists to reclaim land and politics from agribusiness and rising authoritarianism. Its work ranges from building agroecological settlements and community seed banks to running solidarity economy markets, mutual-aid networks, and shared electoral mandates that treat political office as a commons rather than a private career. Ecological sovereignty here takes shape both in the soil and in the sphere of representation: in the capacity to regenerate degraded territories and to use democratic institutions to defend them.

A democratic threshold

In this essay, I have argued that peace as liberation is built through the redistribution of resources and power, and through the refusal of sacrifice as the price of progress. The right to say no interrupts the violence that extarctivism normalizes and makes room for ecological sovereignty as the collective, democratic authority over the ecological bases of life. It is not only resistance, but a democratic threshold: a claim to decide what development means, what is worth protecting, and how territories should be organized, shifting away from being managed to being self-governed.

While the world is experiencing a resurgence of fossil capital, ‘green’ imperatives are deepening old and new frontiers of dispossession. In contrast, liberation practices advocate for a path to peace that is not subservient to extraction, but rather the slow and contested process of communities building their own territorial futures.