Frontiers of Development in the Amazon

Frontiers of Development in the Amazon: Riches, Risks, and Resistances contributes to ongoing debates on the processes of change in the Amazon, a region inherently tied to the expansion of internal and external socio-economic and environmental frontiers. This book offers interdisciplinary analyses from a range of scholars in Europe, Latin America, and the United States that question the methods of development and the range of socio-ecological impacts of those methods by examining the theoretical, methodological, and empirical dimensions of frontier-making along with evaluating and refining existing frameworks. Contributors focus on the complex politics of border formation shaped by institutional, economic, and political forces, placing them in relation to ethical, imaginary, and symbolic elements. In doing so, contributors explore the dynamic production of identities, values, and subjectivities, covering matters of migratory patterns, complex power struggles, and intensive-at times violent-clashes. Among other topics, this book assesses the recent encroachment of export-driven agribusiness into the Amazon Region in the context of recolonization, resource exploitation and multiple programs of modernization and national integration. Scholars of Latin American studies, international development, environmental studies, and applied social sciences will find this book particularly useful.

Antonio Augusto Rossotto Ioris is reader in human geography and director of the graduate program on environment and development in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University.
Rafael R. Ioris is associate professor of Latin American history at the University of Denver and affiliated faculty in the Latin American Center at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies.
Sergei Shubin is associate professor of human geography at Swansea University.

Chapter 1 - What is New in the Amazon and What is Amazonian in the New? The 21st Century Brand-Old Frontiers of Exploitation and Development
Antonio Augusto Rossotto Ioris and Rafael R. Ioris
PART I - Thinking and Making the Amazon Frontier
Chapter 2 - Revisiting Frontier Theory and the Experience of Frontier-Making
Antonio Augusto Rossotto Ioris
Chapter 3 - Conservation Frontier: The Creation of Protected Areas in the Brazilian Amazonia
Frederico Freitas
Chapter 4 - Politics of Floodplain Tenure in the Amazon
Fábio de Castro
PART II - Questioning the Basis of Progress, Power and Poverty
Chapter 5 - What is New in Agribusiness in Brazil? The Long Path of Conservative Modernization in the Perpetual Country-of-the-Future
Rafael R. Ioris and Aaron Schneider
Chapter 6 - The Socioenvironmental Contradictions of Contemporary Developmentalism: Urbanization, Food Sovereignty and Sustainable Development in the Amazon
Tatiana Schor and Gustavo S. Azenha
Chapter 7 - Rethinking Fluid, Complex and Uncertain Poverty in Amazonian Ecosystems in Bolivia and Brazil
Sergei Shubin
Chapter 8 - Illegal Gold Mining and the Struggle to Save the Amazon in Peru
Lynn Holland
PART III - Identities, Cultures and Subjectivities
Chapter 9 - Hidden Histories: Frontier Situations and Indigenous Agency
João Pacheco de Oliveira
Chapter 10 - Moving Beyond the Human-Nature Dichotomy: On the Cosmopolitics of the Amazon
Maria Fernanda Gebara
Chapter 11 - Territorial Conflicts on Brazilian Amazonian Frontiers: A Research and Public Policy Framework
Paul E. Little
Chapter 12 - Slow Violence and Slow Seeing in Beyond Fordlândia
Marcos Colón
About the Contributors