“Establishing the State” in territories of the Amazon: Petroleum extraction between production and contestation of the national order

While the environmental conflicts of Latin America seem to test public powers head-on, observation of the extractive fields lets us catch a glimpse of more ambivalent processes. Starting from an ethnography carried out in the area around the oldest petroleum extraction site in the Peruvian Amazon, I explore the links between the exploitation of the subsoil resources of a nation, the contestations that this provokes, and the formation of the State. I thus develop an analysis from below of the modes of government and of the contestations that are deployed around the exploitation of nature, as processes that influence the production of a national political order. I demonstrate above all how, in the long history of the Amazon, the exploitation of natural resources has been an instrument in the service of control exercised over the territory. I then return to how the development of the petroleum industry has contributed to the government of populations in the Amazon since the 1970s. Finally, I am interested in the inhabitants confronted with the petroleum industry, which, in mobilising against the State, contributes to consolidate its legitimacy and its territorial base at the countries’ borders.