MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Divide and rule
GAVIN O'TOOLE applauds the argument that multicultural policies, aimed to empower indigenous peoples, are a smokescreen for their exploitation
TIPNIS marchers arrive in La Paz, Bolivia, 19/10/2011. Isiboro Secure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) became the epicentre of a conflict over the construction of a road, initiated by Evo Morales’s administration, that would run through the park. Indigenous peoples from the lowlands opposed the scheme, and, together with their counterparts in the Andean region, organised a march that was violently dispersed by the Bolivian armed forces.
[Szymon Kochanski/Flikr] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
The Indigenous Right to Self-Determination in Extractivist Economies
Marcela Torres-Wong, Cambridge University Press, £17
THE resounding vote by Ecuadorians to stop the development of all new oil wells in the Amazonian Yasuni national park is an emphatic signal that indigenous people have steered the global debate on extractivism to a historic juncture.
The binding referendum decision permanently prohibits oil drilling in the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oil project and is a major blow to the fossil fuel industry led by Ecuador’s own state oil company, Petroecuador.
The move has fuelled hysterical warnings by mainstream economists that it will further harm this cash-strapped South American country, with the praetorian guard of global capitalism, the credit ratings agencies, already penalising Quito.
More from this author
GAVIN O’TOOLE explores the resistance expressed by central American artists to their own erasure by US imperialist policies
Here’s an antidote to the Venezuela election-induced tantrums of Western elites. GAVIN O’TOOLE reviews it
GAVIN O’TOOLE applauds an analysis of culture that explains why political conflicts today are focused more on values and identity than the economy and social questions
GAVIN O’TOOLE observes that the call for a new international framework for conflict mediation is fatally marred by a partisan position on the Isreali-Gazan conflict
