A new 'El Dorado'? Transnational mining, dispossession and resistance in the Americas. The case of Bolivia

The purpose of this dissertation is to sketch out the unfolding of the new Pax Americana at the continental level from the perspective of three ten year development planning stages--"market reforms" in the 1980s, "good governance" in the 1990s and "poverty reduction" in the new millennium- to illustrate how the world order, states and, social forces are being reconstituted through ideas, institutions and material capabilities. The central argument is that the masculinist and ethnocentric social construction of the emergent new hemispheric order under the neo-liberal developmental paradigm is an unsustainable plan. It is unsustainable because rather than focusing on people's wellbeing, it is geared towards the constant capture of new enclosures for the primitive accumulation of capital.;In fact, the resistances that took place in Amayapampa and Capasirca shifted the way in which the World Bank and foreign investment in mining would deal from then on with labour and indigenous peoples. This shift is shown in the San Cristobal chapter, which looks at the World Bank's problem-solving response through the introduction of the Impoverishment Risk and Livelihood Reconstruction Model and the mining company's creation of the Foundation Llama de Plata: both are examples of restoring a minimal social contract as a strategy to prevent and manage the potential emergence of conflicts.;In order to analyze the three stages of the new Pax Americana the Coxian method of historical structures was expanded along both scalar and social relations lines, bringing in gender and ethnic relations in a more central way. The unfolding of one aspect of the new Pax Americana is examined by analyzing two case studies from Bolivia involving the internationalization of mining extraction as an example of the new market-driven approach to development. These two cases, which represent the core contribution of this dissertation, are interesting as they show how new constitutional mechanisms and forces are reconstituting the relations of social reproduction at the community and household levels in Amayapampa and San Cristobal. Yet, they also show the resistance of different cultures to being subsumed to the directives of capital and how such struggles can also modify the strategies of capital in a dialectical manner, triggering what Karl Polanyi called the "double movement.".