ABSTRACT
South America is rich in natural resources. Following from colonial conquest by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, extractive industries have shaped the political economy of the region. Despite the importance of the natural resource sector, South America has not experienced the violent resource-based domestic conflicts that have scarred a number of African countries. Moreover – with a couple of key exceptions, the conflicts that have broken out have been low level and focused on issues of management and extraction strategies, not control or looting of strategic resource sectors. As such, natural resources have neither catalyzed violent conflicts – either greed-or grievance-based – nor have they sustained them. This is not to suggest that the possession of vast resource wealth has not been conflict inducing for South America. The distinction is that South American resource disputes have been of comparatively low intensity in terms of violence, and, more importantly, these disputes have been largely channelled through the political system. The ‘rentier space’ has consequently been a highly contested domain (see Chapters 1 and 2 in this volume for the definition of ‘rentier space’).
