Project at HIAS

Carolina Viola-Reyes is here in the framework of a CALAS/ HIAS Fellowship. During her stay at HIAS, she will develop the project Energy Transition, Extreme Extractivism, and Sacrificial State Reason in Ecuador, which proposes an analytical framework for the empirical research of extractivist processes. To do so, she develops the concepts of extreme extractivism and sacrificial state reason in relation to the current geopolitics of the energy transition. The project asks how the global competition for critical minerals among the US, China, and the EU is translated into concrete practices of state governmentality that inscribe sacrifice on bodies and territories across the Global South. Comparing two contrasting Ecuadorian extractive frontiers — a Chinese-financed hydroelectric megaproject in the Northern Amazon and a Canadian-led mining concession in the southern Andes — the project further theorizes criminal governance as a necropolitical dimension of extractive margins, arguing that the entanglement of state reconfiguration, superimposed extractive matrices, and criminal territorial control produces uncontainable ecological and social effects. Grounded in long-term fieldwork and an original empirical infrastructure, the project positions Ecuador as an analytical laboratory for a configuration of extreme extractivism that recurs across the Global South in different registers.

Carolina Viola-Reyes’ Tandem Partner is Miriam Prys-Hansen, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, as well as Head of the Research Programme “Global Orders and Foreign Policies” at GIGA – German Institute for Global and Area Studies (Institute for Latin American Studies).

Biography

Since 2021, Carolina Viola-Reyes has directed the Socio-Environmental Observatory of Chinese Investment in Ecuador (OSICHE) at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE) in Quito. She is currently Researcher-Professor at the Faculty of Law, Administrative and Social Sciences of UTE University, where she also collaborates with the Laboratory of Multidisciplinary Social Research. Since 2015, she has taught political theory, political sociology, and research methods at PUCE and as an invited professor at FLACSO Ecuador. Her academic training combines a degree in Political Science from the Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy), a Master’s in Social Sciences (Energy Governance) from FLACSO Ecuador, and a PhD in Political Science, also from FLACSO Ecuador, awarded for the dissertation Extreme Extractivism and Sacrificial State Reason in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon — based on nine years of ethnographic fieldwork and multimethod research on the socioecological impacts of the Chinese-financed Coca Codo Sinclair hydropower project. This trajectory has been extended through book chapters on extractivism, Chinese investment, and geopolitics, consolidating a publication record that moves between empirical territorial analysis and broader debates on democratic erosion in Latin America.

Carolina Viola-Reyes’s research agenda develops along two closely articulated lines, integrated within a single overarching concern: how the geopolitics of extraction reconfigures both territories and democratic institutions in the Global South. The first addresses political ecology, extractivism, and energy transitions — the political economy of Chinese intervention in Latin America, the socio-environmental effects of resource extraction, and, extending this doctoral framework, the conditions under which the current energy transition reproduces patterns of dispossession and sacrifice in the extreme peripheries of the Global South. The second, developed from a more strictly political-science standpoint, addresses processes of de-democratization — the trajectories of political parties, right-wing political elites, and the erosion of democratic institutions in Latin America. Rather than running in parallel, these two lines converge in a single research agenda asking how extractive governance and democratic erosion mutually reinforce one another — an inquiry sustained through a multi-method design integrating political ethnography, survey research, process tracing, and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) in comparative perspective, grounded in OSICHE’s long-term, officially registered territorial databases and her collaboration with the Laboratory of Multidisciplinary Social Research at UTE University.

Her HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.