Brenda C. Baletti

This dissertation examines the relationship between new regimes of governance and resistance in the Brazilian Amazon at a time when the “progressive” government seeks to solve food, energy, and environmental crises through neo-extractive development. Governments and their corporate partners are re-organizing Amazonian territory to meet environmental, social, and accumulation imperatives of identified relevant actors. By exploring the logic and practices of government-led territorial re-ordering, as well as everyday practices and rebellions through which social movements break with this logic and re-territorialize their spaces, this dissertation builds a theory of governance and resistance adequate to the impasse of seemingly unending crisis and the superimposition of multiple social and spatial logics.