ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on multiple formulations of extraction as promise and point to the centrality of energy infrastructures in shaping plural and often competing visions of the future and the good life. It reviews at particular assemblages of state, corporate, and transnational forms and at emergent energy infrastructures and their consequences within and beyond the spaces of their enactment. The book highlights the indeterminacies of law and how it is proliferates power through the trope of the rule of law, the legitimation of force, and even through the recognition of multiple and competing interests around extraction. Tom Perrault examines the legal infrastructure governing extraction in Bolivia as a case in which the proliferation of laws designed to appease different constituencies seems to both reflect and exacerbate tensions and contradictions that remain to be worked out in practice.
