Journal of Law and Political Economy

This article examines the historical and contemporary relations between law and extractivism in the Anthropocene. As an organizing concept of our times, extractivism describes the intensive removal of raw materials—largely from the Global South—for processing and consumption in the Global North. Extractivism is entwined with the histories and legacies of colonialism and imperialism and is central to the entrenched operations and politics of contemporary capitalism. It (re)produces a racialized global political economy and attendant climate and ecological crises. Although legal scholars have long been concerned with regulating extractive activities, attention has only recently turned to the notion of extractivism as a logic, ideology, imaginary, or imperative connected with law. This article furthers this engagement by exploring how law authorizes extractivist relations and proposing a research agenda for envisioning and building nonextractive legal and political economic orders.

Scholars characterize Latin American resource-dependent countries as “low-intensity democracies” with electoral competition and political rights. In this literature, undemocratic practices like participation exclusion and state repression are marginal phenomena. This article focuses on Peru—a country with many socio-environmental conflicts and a historical global provider of minerals—to understand the relationship between increasing extractive operations, social protests, and the enactment of emergency decrees as a crucial authoritarian feature of extractive states. By analyzing the case study of the “Southern Mining Corridor” and the emergency decrees enacted from 2015 to 2023 to protect mining, the article argues that emergency decrees have been normalized in extractive sites as a form of state control that excludes the political agency of Indigenous movements. Ultimately, the law establishes an unequal distribution of democratic institutions in Peru. The problem is not simply the “democratic deficit,” but the political and economic regime that requires localized authoritarianisms.

This article examines the relationship between law and the expansion of forestry extractivism in southern Chile since the country’s neoliberal Constitution of 1980 was put in place, as well as the prospects of that relationship in the context of constitutional reform. It does so by focusing on the ideological and distributive functions of law as constitutive of forestry extractivism. The article shows how, through the ideology of the private/public divide, law attributes a subsidiary role to the State in shaping forestry extractivism, obscuring the fact that it has fostered this sector’s growth through land-use regulation and legal-economic entitlements such as tax benefits and subsidies. Moreover, it shows how legal institutions, specifically property and freedom of contract, have shaped and enabled processes of land concentration in the hands of a few large-scale companies that dominate the forestry sector, creating an imbalance in bargaining power to the detriment of peasants and small landholders. The article further argues that the ideology of the public/private divide has turned social and economic conflicts related to forestry expansion into matters between private actors that do not require State intervention, depoliticizing the actors’ subjectivities and deepening the unequal distribution of power. Finally, it reflects on the dynamics of forestry extractivism and its relationship to constitutional change beyond exceptional moments such as constitutional reform processes.

International legal and financial organizations have recently been proposing that the acquisition of lithium and other critical minerals should be mediated through particular kinds of supply chain policy. In this article, I examine the legal practices that have shaped lithium extraction, and the modes of legal thought on the relationship between the nation-state and the corporation that have influenced how international lawyers often understand this intensifying extraction. I suggest that what we now call the lithium supply chain could be understood as an accretion of practices of international legal ordering, very often in a hierarchical manner. In my analysis, these historical practices of legal ordering can shed light on international institutions’ current focus on critical mineral supply chains, where demands for reparation or reorganization of the global economy often become sidelined through the promise of the energy transition: that more lithium is all we need.

This article investigates the rise of the global tropical timber trade in the post–World War II era by focusing on two key actors, Japan and Malaysia. It probes into the rise of corporate capitalism in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s and state developmentalism in Malaysia in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the creation of the International Tropical Timber Organization. It then turns to Malaysia’s defense of tropical logging both during and after the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, leading up to the internationalization of the Malaysian timber industry. The article argues that the development of international norms governing the tropical forests of the South in the 1990s was made possible by the assimilation of both the developing states’ aspirations for economic growth and the industrialized world’s environmental demands into neoliberal environmentalism as underpinned by technological fix and a retreat from the earlier narratives of “limits to growth.”

Focusing on the case of the municipality of Marmato, Caldas, within the Colombian mining regime, this article argues that a global economy based on intensive resource-accumulation activities reshapes the state apparatus in normative and institutional terms. This article discusses how the Colombian mining regime has been articulated within a transnational lawmaking process and is legitimized by a classic development discourse that reproduces the continuity of particular (neo)colonial forms of exploitation. It shows how certain forms of capital accumulation and exploitation in (neo)colonial contexts, like those developed in large-scale gold-mining projects, persist under constitutional democracies due to the reprimarization of the economic processes. The extractive dynamics of the twenty-first century not only demonstrate that the constitutional state is permanently re-inscribed in a (neo)colonial rationality, but also show how the (post)colonial period is reconfigured through a sort of constitutionalization of the (post)colony.