Since the late 2000s, (neo-)extractivism has been promoted in resource-rich countries such as Chile and Ecuador for economic reasons. Christine Löw and Tanja Scheiterbauer deconstruct this trend as a violent legacy of colonialism, arguing that extractivist violence must be understood as gendered.
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In March 2016, Berta Cáceres, a Honduran environmental and human rights activist, was murdered in her home by soldiers from the military. The targeted killing of this important ‘defender of life’ (defensora de la vida) and co-founder of the Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (COPINH) is not an isolated case. Cáceres was known for resisting the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project on the Gualcarque River, which is economically, spiritually, and culturally significant to the indigenous Lenca community. The planned dam would have restricted access to water, destroyed agricultural land, and threatened livelihoods.
Cáceres’s murder is part of a pattern of intimidation, racialized sexist criminalization, and violence against environmental activists and indigenous communities in the Global South who defend forests, rivers, mountains, and land against large-scale extractive projects. These projects are violently promoted by transnational corporations, governments, local elites, and private or state security forces in the name of ‘national development’ or, more recently, ‘green transition.’ Feminist activists, researchers, and NGOs have pointed out the specific forms of violence against women* associated with mining projects, oil production, and large-scale industrial agricultural production, such as the production of raw materials for export and further processing in new industrialized centers (e.g., China) and old industrialized centers (e.g., Europe). In order to address the structural patterns of violence to which these activists are exposed, extractivist violence must be understood as gendered.
In our research, we examine how extractivism, as a development model, produces gendered power relations and violence and perpetuates the coloniality of nature in novel ways. We do not view gender-specific forms of violence in extractivist territories as isolated elements of local patriarchal culture, consequences of national authoritarian resource exploitation, or side effects of local militarized conflicts. Rather, we view them as expressions of the historical and ongoing intertwining of colonialism and patriarchal capitalism.
Engendering extractivism
Since the late 2000s, (neo-)extractivism has been promoted for economic reasons in resource-rich countries, but it is highly controversial. It refers to a growth-oriented national development strategy in which generating rents through the massive extraction and export of minerals, oil, gas, and monoculturally grown agricultural commodities is politically and economically decisive. These raw materials are primarily intended for further processing and consumption in industrialized centers, such as the U.S., the EU, and China.
The latest ‘green extractivism’ focuses on exploiting raw materials such as lithium, cobalt, and rare earths for a supposedly climate-neutral transformation of the economy. This transformation relies on developing sustainable industries (e.g., hydrogen production in Chile and Morocco) to break down export-dependent positions on the world market, both economically and geopolitically. Extractivist economies require enormous amounts of land, forests, and water, and they are based on ‘production without reproduction.’ Land, forests, and water are appropriated by converting communal, collective, or state-organized ownership and usage rights into exclusive private property rights. These processes often involve violent expulsions and the pollution of water, soil, and air, threatening the health and nutrition of communities in extractivist territories. Researchers and activists speak of the systematic dispossession of common goods.
Extractivism promotes unequal gender relations and gender-based violence. It also leads to the “repatriarchalization of territories”: extractivist companies primarily negotiate land issues with male members of affected territories and subsequently employ mainly men in formal or informal work relationships. This reduces women’s decision-making power in communities and households, increasing their financial dependence on paid work or government support. However, nature is more than just extractable and exploitable ‘resources.’ Land enables the cultivation of food for personal use, and forests provide animal feed and wood for energy. Accessible, clean, and free water is central to the nutrition and health of humans, animals, and plants. Studies show that 77 percent of households in the Global South depend on accessible land, water, and forests for food. Women* are socially responsible for these activities of social reproduction. Therefore, extractive projects destroy not only the ecological foundations through land and water grabbing or pollution, but also the conditions for needs-based practices associated with women.
Extractivist violence and resistance
In local anti-extractivist struggles, women’s movements and networks are at the forefront of defending livelihoods, resources, and rights against extractivist violence and resistance. For instance, the National Network of Women* in Defense of Mother Earth in Bolivia stopped the Achachucani Gold Mining Project. Since its founding in 2014 as African Women* Against Mining, the Pan-African ecofeminist alliance WoMin has been extremely successful in raising awareness of the gendered impacts of mining and extractive industries and demanding alternative forms of development.
Because of their forms of political resistance, women* become targets of gender-based violence, including physical attacks, sexual violence, stigmatization, online harassment, threats, and sexual humiliation. UN Women and NGOs such as Frontline Defenders document that repressive techniques are systematically gender-specific. These organizations also demonstrate that companies, states, and allied local elites play a central role in this violence. The term “extractivist feminicide” refers to this deadly violence against women* as fundamental and structural to conflicts over extractivism.
Coloniality of nature
The coloniality of nature becomes apparent at two levels. First, material visions of energy transition or decarbonization, driven primarily by investments from industrialized centers, are based on global material cycles. Natural resources, predominantly originating from rural regions in Global South countries – as well as from the peripheries of BRICS and EU countries – perpetuate unequal international divisions of labor, financial and technological dependencies, and internal social inequalities in territories, bodies, and forms of work. Environmental historian Héctor Alimonda therefore proposes the concept of coloniality of nature, referring to the historical development and continuing influence of the close intertwining of predatory colonial economics, enslaved labor, the international capitalist division of labor, and the modern understanding of nature.
Alimonda considers not only the material level of exploiting nature for capitalist gain but also the epistemic level. It is only through the separation of humans (specifically white men) and nature into distinct spheres, established with the advent of modern science, that nature can become an object and a commodity. From this perspective, nature and the communities living within it can be plundered, exploited, and destroyed as commodities and commercializable objects. In this view, territories are reduced from habitats to stores of raw materials. The devastation of these territories by extractivist economies appears in industrialized centers merely as externalizable ‘costs.’
Decolonial feminist ecologies
In light of the numerous ecological crises, the interconnection and interdependence of humans and nature can no longer be ignored. Understanding nature through marginalized and suppressed perspectives, such as indigenous cosmovisions, buen vivir (the good life for all) in Abya Yala, and the African concept of ubuntu, is essential for post-extractivist futures. These perspectives consider nature to be alive, related, connected to humans, and sacred. These are practices and forms of knowledge based on ontological relationalities that attribute intrinsic value to more-than-human entities and perceive them as collective commons that secure the livelihoods of all humans and the non-human environment.
Current examples include indigenous, popular, and comunitario feminisms in the Global South. These feminisms demand an end to oil extraction in Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park, one of the most biodiverse areas in the world, and prevent the drying up of drinking water for lithium mining in Chile’s Atacama Desert. They also defend collective land in South Africa’s Northern Cape province against green hydrogen projects by European companies and states, such as Germany. These anti-extractivist struggles, led by various women* and feminist movements, are united by their resistance to the 21st-century coloniality of nature. Overcoming this requires viewing human life as connected to and dependent on non-human life, recognizing it as a prerequisite for the survival of all. In alliance with emancipatory feminist movements, especially in the Global North, this NO to extractivism – which opposes a ‘green’ revamping of the gender-specific coloniality of nature – must be made loud and clear.