The American Path of Bourgeois Development

The American West as a social-ecological region: drivers, dynamics and implications for nested social-ecological systems

“…Finally, as an indicator of the political economy of land, we use a measure of the proportion of land per county that is owned by the federal government using the Gap Analysis Program Protected Areas Database v 10.3 (Gergeley and McKerrow 2013). The political economy of land tenure and management in the West includes federal policies that reserved large expanses of surface and subsurface resources for state ownership and management, and privileged a particular set of beneficiaries while dispossessing Native communities of their land and associated resources (White 1991, Wilkinson 1993, Robbins 1999, Gaido 2002, Hixson 2013, Bonds and Inwood 2016. Political economy cannot be measured directly, and so we use the proxy of federal land ownership to represent the 'footprint' of this legacy on the West (Spence 1999, Vincent et al 2017.…”

Multinational Corporations, Rentier Capitalism, and the War System in Colombia

“…There, the function and value of land were transformed into speculation and the extraction of oil, rather than production; that is, rentier capitalism. This transformation of the subsistence economy was resisted by subsistence and small peasants, as well as colonos (Gaido 2002). Resistance was evident in peasants' mobilization in the municipalities of Arauca (Arauca City, Tame, Fortul, Arauquita, and Saravena) and in Yopal in the department of Casanare (Reyes Posada 1997).…”