Research

This book project offers an anatomy of green energy capitalism and climate governance in Latin America. It does so by exploring how frontline communities, energy workers, and state bureaucrats negotiate and experience the shift from coal mining to wind farming in La Guajira – a coastal region in northeast Colombia and one of the windiest places on the continent. Most of this peninsula is part of the ancestral territory of the Wayuu, the largest Indigenous people in Colombia and Venezuela. Following a long and ecologically damaging history of resource extraction, most notably of coal mining, La Guajira has gradually become the center of a wind energy rush, with over 57 projects currently being designed, licensed, and built. Based on over 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the manuscript traces the emergence of a form of “green” and racialized extractivism that recruits and transforms indigeneity as a crucial scaffold for wind power production and capital accumulation, as well as the multiple contestations it gives rise to. It documents the rise of new struggles over wind, land, and the future that seek to redefine the meaning of a “just” energy transition beyond state and corporate desires.