The Multiple Amazon

Abstract

What is the Amazon? At first sight, the question may seem inconsequential, or even silly. The Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world, home to millions of species, many of which are still to be catalogued. From a geographical perspective, however, the Amazon is more than the rainforest, encompassing a large region of South America in the basin of the Amazon River, and spanning across eight South American countries and France—the only European power that retains a direct colonial foothold in the region. The sheer size of the Amazon begs belief. Without denying the immensity of the Amazon, we believe a better way to approach it is by emphasizing not vastness or pristine nature, but spectacular multiplicity. That is, we are interested in the internal variety of ways of life, state policies, and challenges in the region. With COP30 set to take place in Belém, a city in the Brazilian Amazon, the region is once again in the spotlight and the subject of exoticizing narratives. In this context, this special issue of Latin American Perspectives is the first in the journal to ever be entirely dedicated to the Amazon. It does not attempt to offer a totalizing or synthesizing view of the Amazon. Instead, the eleven original articles collected here, alongside a set of literary texts from Amazonian writers, embrace and showcase the multiplicity of approaches, styles, methodologies, imaginations, and narratives that can be built around the Amazon. The articles not only offer analysis of a range of themes, but also include empirical material on different parts of the region in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

What is the Amazon? At first sight, the question may seem inconsequential, or even silly. The Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world, home to millions of species, many of which are still to be catalogued. Throughout decades of climate change debates, the Amazon has received increased attention as a critical carbon sink at risk of becoming a net carbon emitter due to rapid deforestation and degradation (Gatti et al., 2021; Lapola et al., 2023). The hosting of the historic Climate Summit COP30 in Belém, Brazil, marks the first time the summit has been held in the Amazon, underscoring its unique relevance. From a geographical perspective, however, the Amazon is more than the rainforest, encompassing a large region of South America in the basin of the Amazon River, and spanning across eight South American countries and France—the only European power that retains a direct colonial foothold in the region. The sheer size of the Amazon beggars belief. Extending over six million square kilometers, it is inhabited by over forty-five million people organized in modern nation-states and in more than three thousand recognized and unrecognized Indigenous territories (Asamblea Mundial Por la Amazonia, 2023).

Politically, the Amazon is thus multiple. Several countries in the region have states called “Amazonas.” The Amazon hosts large urban centers, such as Leticia-Tabatinga, Manaus, and Belém, alongside small, isolated communities, and vast areas with some of the lowest population densities in the world. The disproportionate concentration of inhabitants in a few cities has led Brazilian geographers to call the Amazon an “urbanized forest” (Becker, 1995). Culturally and symbolically, the Amazon is often seen as synonymous with impenetrable and inexhaustible immensity.

While famous Amazonian Indigenous and socioenvironmental movements—emblematically, the rubber tapper movement led by Chico Mendes in the 1980s—have garnered international recognition, the region often continues to be viewed primarily as a source of natural wealth and as a sociocultural and economic void. A related vision of endless bounties is shared by international and national mining companies, commodities traders, loggers, cattle ranchers, miners, and soy farmers, who continue to erode the borders of the rainforest through extraction and land grabbing. In fact, since the beginning of the expansion of modern nation-states into the region, the perception of the Amazon as a uniquely abundant reservoir of resources has been displacing localized understandings of the region as a source of life and a precondition for existence. From the point of view of modern states in the region, the Amazon is often seen as an empty, wild territory to be fully studied and controlled, that is, integrated into national capitalist economies. As the Brazilian military dictatorship would put it in the 1970s, “a land without men for men without land” (Hecht and Cockburn, 2010: 122).

Without denying the immensity of the Amazon, we believe a better way to approach it is by emphasizing not vastness or pristine nature, but spectacular multiplicity. That is, we are interested in the internal variety of ways of life, state policies, and challenges in the region. Epistemologically, the Amazon thus defies definition. It offers within itself a multiplicity of ways of conceptualizing the Amazonian reality and the world at large. Unlike well-established regions that have been controlled, catalogued, and represented—in short, those which have become the object of area studies departments in U.S. and European universities for decades—the Amazon is one of the few parts of the globe that still challenges external, totalizing, and “orientalizing” (Said, 2003) conceptualizations.

This special issue of Latin American Perspectives is the first in the journal to be entirely dedicated to the Amazon. Other major Latin American studies journals have failed to pay sufficient attention to the Amazon as a region, despite a number of articles on specific related topics. This special issue does not attempt to fill this gap with a totalizing or synthesizing view of the Amazon. Instead, the eleven original articles collected here, alongside a set of literary texts from Amazonian writers, embrace and showcase the multiplicity of approaches, styles, methodologies, imaginations, and narratives that can be built around the Amazon. The articles not only offer analysis of a range of themes, but also include empirical material on different parts of the region in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Together, they are animated by a simple “Reminder,” well-captured in the verses of Thiago Kazu, published in this issue:

The Amazon is not what

you wish to see

Neither only that

That you can see

Multiplicity Beyond Multiplicity: In Search Of A Theoretical Frame For Amazon Studies

The recent multiplicity debate in international relations (IR) and social sciences more broadly challenges the limits of methodological nationalism (Kurki and Rosenberg, 2020). Proponents of the concept foreground the fact that social life necessarily comprises a multiplicity of interacting entities, in contrast with consolidated postulates about political, economic, or social life, which start from each society taken in isolation. The promise of this research agenda is to start from the extremely diverse modes of human existence as a distinctive angle for social analysis, thereby freeing international relations from the “prison of political science” (Rosenberg, 2016). In the Amazon, where the lines between polities can be quite blurred, starting from multiplicity may indeed offer a promising way to approach an incredibly diverse reality. Rather than simply juxtaposing nationally defined studies of different Amazonian polities, which could end up reifying the problematic lines between nation-states, we are particularly interested in exploring the depth of multiplicity across the Amazon.

This does not mean an uncritical appropriation of the concept of multiplicity, however. In fact, the kind of multiplicity that this special issue aims to capture defies the narrow limits of political and social multiplicity, encompassing a variety of modes of being and understanding (or worlds), many of which are beyond conventional Western theorization. The problem here is not so much that multiplicity may rebrand “difference” more loosely without offering a distinct critique, especially of power relations, as claimed by Ole Wæver (2024). Instead, by limiting multiplicity to societies defined as the “social formations that also exist as geopolitical sub-divisions of the human world” (Rosenberg, 2025: 5), the current IR literature on multiplicity may end up missing a more subtle form of social existence at the interstices of nation states.

At the same time, from a historical materialist perspective that draws from the Latin American dependency school (Marini, 1972; Bambirra, 1974; Antunes de Oliveira, 2024, among many others), we are also interested in highlighting the position of the Amazon in the global capitalist economy, as well as the material forces disrupting alternative Amazonian worlds. Our own approach thus has important overlaps with Koddenbrock’s (2020), who proposes a historical materialist understanding of “hierarchical multiplicity,” showing how hierarchies in the international monetary system restrain the autonomy of societies in international trade, such as those in West Africa, historically shaped by the trade of enslaved people and raw commodities. We also build on Corry’s (2019) insight that societal multiplicity can ground a new understanding of IR and the international by integrating materialist ecological and international dimensions. From this perspective, the climate and environmental crisis should be seen as a material global polycrisis, shaped by global inequalities, crosscutting different worlds and connecting the Amazonian reality with that of other parts of the globe.

This special issue thus highlights the tense intersection between anti-colonial and historical materialist approaches, with some authors tending towards the former and some authors tending towards the latter. The discussions around the environment and Indigenous communities, in particular, reveal the limitations of Eurocentric theoretical frameworks, which omit Global South worldviews and the search for alternatives, but also underscore the importance of integrating localized views with global capitalist dynamics. For instance, Indigenous worldviews such as sumak kawsay (good living) are inherently based on relational moral and ethical principles for pluralist societies and interactions. With the protection of Mother Earth at their center, these cosmovisions conflict with neo-extractivism, as well as global capitalist lifestyles more broadly (Beling et al., 2021; Gudynas, 2011). These conceptions do not necessarily imply harmony or the absence of conflict but presume interconnectedness among multiple societies rather than anarchy.

Before us, Brazilian author Eliane Brum (2019) called the Amazon the “center of the world” and engaged with some understanding of multiplicity as a way to overcome the self-other dialectics and decolonize knowledge production about the Amazon. In the same vein, this special issue takes on the challenge of centering the Amazon. It aims to start a conversation about how to grasp the breathtaking multiplicity of the Amazon and conceptualize an emerging field of Amazon studies.

Our suggestion is that the concept of multiplicity may account not only for global structural unevenness at different scales and in different forms, but also offers a language to transcend Eurocentric, state-centered, and essentialist tendencies, limitations, and gaps in social theory. Concerning the analysis of the Amazon, we argue, multiplicity enables the integration of diverse relationships and even non-academic forms of expression, such as the poems in this special issue. Moreover, it is this very multiplicity that extractivism and international and local capitalist ruling classes seek to destroy, coopt, oppress, and integrate into global value chains.

Threats To Multiplicity And Resistance Efforts

At present, Amazonian societal multiplicity is not only omitted by dominant representations of the region, which tend to make invisible many of its ways of life, but also actively threatened by developments that aim to force it to conform to those simplistic views. Roughly put, these developments are driven by three forces: i) extractivist capital, ii) green extractivism, and iii) organized crime. These topics appear and reappear several times in the articles collected in this special issue. Here, we discuss them summarily, laying the ground for the articles to come.

Capitalist plunder of the resources of the rainforest has been taking place, of course, for centuries. When the Latin American veins were opened wide by European colonialism, to borrow Eduardo Galeano’s famous phrase (Galeano, 2009), the Amazon River became a major extractive route. Much later, during the Cold War, the Amazon rainforest became a battleground for geopolitical influence, nationalist development projects, and migration programs, which, especially under Brazil’s military dictatorship, consolidated the power of local land and military oligarchies and their oppression of Indigenous, Quilombola (former enslaved workers and their descendants) and other local populations. In the last two decades, the pillage was given a new lease of life by a reordering of the world economy that ballooned the flows of minerals, fuels, and agricultural products between Latin America and both the Global North and the new Asian workshops of the world.

Thus, a vast critical literature in the region has been denouncing the global “commodity consensus” and the “neo-extractivism” it drives in Global South resource frontiers like the Amazon (Svampa, 2019). New coalitions of local extractivist capital and multinational corporations have been wreaking havoc in biomes and livelihoods across Latin America. In the Amazon, the main threats are oil, minerals (copper, tin, nickel, bauxite, manganese, iron ore, and gold), soy, and beef. As described by Alberto Acosta in this issue, the case of oil drilling in one of the most biodiverse parts of the rainforest—which also houses Indigenous groups living in voluntary isolation—shows that extractivist capital has been facing growing resistance. Popular mobilization in Ecuador pushed for a referendum on oil extraction in the Yasuní National Park in 2023, in which almost sixty percent of the voters called for halting drilling in the name of saving the area’s unique sociobiodiversity. As Acosta puts it, “It was driven by genuine acts of participatory democracy, a grassroots project built and propelled by civil society rather than any political party.” More recently, a similar struggle has been playing out in Brazil regarding the drilling of oil in the mouth of the Amazon River, following in the footsteps of the establishment of global oil corporations in Guyana and Suriname. The contradiction between these plans and environmental policies and green economy narratives foregrounds civil society mobilization and debate around the Climate Summit, COP30, in Belém, Pará, Brazil.

The Amazon has also been threatened by the role played by South America in a new emerging global food regime, which transformed the region into a main global source of soybeans, predominantly aimed at feeding livestock in China (Wesz Jr., Escher, and Fares, 2023; Rugitsky and Da Costa, 2025). Currently, about sixty percent of global soybean exports come from the Southern Cone and a similar share of global imports is absorbed by China—in the mid-1990s, these shares were twenty percent and less than five percent respectively. The rise of South American soy led to massive cropland expansion in many biomes, from the Argentinian Pampas in the South, to the Brazilian Caatinga in the Northeast, to the Bolivian Chiquitania in the West. Between 2001 and 2016, the Amazon was second only to the Brazilian savannah (cerrado) in area deforested, in hectares, to make space for cattle and soy (Song et al., 2021). As transnational extractive capital drains ever more resources from the Amazon, local resistance and international civil society pressure push for halting deforestation, advancing agrarian reform, demarcating Indigenous lands, and regularizing collective areas so that the biome does not overstep the tipping point beyond which its degradation cannot be stopped (Lovejoy and Nobre, 2019).

However, more often than not, the alternative to undisguised extraction is a set of allegedly green policies that serve simply as cover for continued degradation of the biome and that further threaten the livelihoods of the Amazonian peoples (Horn, 2024). Alternatively referred to as “green grabbing” or “green extractivism,” these practices have been gaining traction and pose insidious threats to the Amazon, preserving the extractivist status quo while adapting it, mainly discursively, to an era of climate crises. The present issue offers invaluable analyses of this novel trend. In their article, Ana Carolina Alfinito, Brian Garvey, Hugo Affonso, Mauricio Torres, and Yamila Goldfarb focus on the cases of a national forest and a sustainable development project in the state of Pará, in Brazil, which have been used to shield mining and logging interests from the demands of local communities. As they put it, “[t]he institutions that should guarantee land tenure and political rights are manipulated and integrated into processes by which new spaces are introduced into the circulation of capital.” Another such manipulation is analyzed by Nirvia Ravena, Pedro Pablo Cardoso Castro, Diego Mendonça, Shaozeng Zhang, and Sarah Brasil, namely the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil in the Brazilian Amazon. Their analysis reveals how the certification process—part of a common set of neoliberal multistakeholder instruments—promotes corporate interests rather than accountability, thereby greenwashing violations against labor and environmental rights. Adding to the weakness of these instruments, as Francisco Bidone and Antonio Pedro Melchior show in their article, are enduring colonial and authoritarian imaginaries and framings about the Amazon, which are embodied in Bolsonarismo politics in Brazil, including efforts to dismantle environmental institutions altogether and undermine indigenous territorial claims. In his article for this issue, Andrea Rizzi zooms in on carbon offset projects in the Colombian Amazon. Such projects imply “new de facto enclosures—often on Indigenous land—and require(s) the disciplining of forest communities.” As he states, these allegedly environmentally friendly initiatives are perhaps “the ultimate instrument to temper potential resistance to what could be called ‘land grabbing by carbon grabbing.’”

Several articles in this special issue also illustrate the conflictual encounter between capitalist extractivism and Amazonian multiplicity. Lucas de Oliveira Paes reveals how global environmental governance mechanisms, although ostensibly polycentric and inclusive, often reproduce existing hierarchies by privileging certain actors and knowledge while marginalizing others, particularly through gatekeeper international development organizations such as the Global Environmental Facility. Similarly, Maritza Paredes, Anke Kaulard, and Danitza Gil examine the hollow promises of participatory climate governance, revealing how “participation artefacts” conceal exclusionary practices that erode Indigenous autonomy and perpetuate unequal access to forest resources.

This pattern of marginalization extends beyond environmental governance to developmental interventions, as Thais de Carvalho demonstrates through a critical historical analysis of Indigenous child-centered interventions in the Amazon—from colonial education to modern welfare programs, which have consistently served as instruments of dispossession and assimilation under the guise of protection. Meanwhile, Debora Delgado Pugley, Alithu Bazan Talavera, and Alvaro Castro Mayo highlight the persistent invisibility of Indigenous women in bioeconomic strategies, despite their central role in sustaining forest-based livelihoods, pointing to gendered exclusions within sustainability discourses. Together, these articles reveal how extractivist logics continue to infiltrate governance, participation, and development under the banner of inclusion, while systematically sidelining the multiplicity of Amazonian voices and ways of life.

The third systemic threat to Amazonian multiplicity—namely organized crime and related violences—should not be overlooked. Relative to other extractivist industries in South America, illegal trafficking of cocaine from the Amazon has been referred to as “the one pan-regional sector that has boomed without a bust” (Adelman and Pryluka, 2024: 147). In this issue, the broader topic is unpacked in Laura Trajber Waisbich’s contribution, which analyzes the unfolding law-enforcement and illegality crisis in the Brazilian Amazon, with particular attention to the security-development-environment nexus. Focusing on the last decades, the paper describes the challenges of keeping policy coherence around a sustainable development agenda and explores long-lasting civil-military tensions in the region. Louisa Acciari, Concita Maia Manchineri, Helen Parrella, and Benedita Nascimento also examine the consequences of violent conflicts in the region, employing participatory methodologies to uncover the experiences of violence against Amazonian women. Mobilizing the concept of body-territory, Acciari and her co-authors connect environmental issues to bodies, livelihoods, and territories in the Amazon.

This special issue concludes by turning to poetic and narrative expressions from Amazonian authors themselves, reaffirming the central premise of reading the Amazon through the lens of multiplicity. The contributions by Juanielson Silva, Jéssica de Miranda Matos, Thiago Kazu, and Thiago Batista, curated by Claudia Horn and José Vianna, bring lived experiences along riverbanks, in rural communities, and urban peripheries like Belém, in Brazil—spaces that are often absent in dominant conservation and development discourses. Their texts offer alternative epistemologies and challenge the extractivist logic embedded in international cooperation and scientific “green” narratives that commodify the forest and frame its inhabitants as either romanticized “forest guardians” or passive beneficiaries. Against the exoticizing and reductive frames of external governance, these works foreground the everyday relationships, temporalities, and affective landscapes of Amazonian life. Together with the scholarly articles in this issue, they underscore the necessity of engaging with the Amazon as a site of heterogeneity and contestation—where multiple ways of knowing, being, and relating to territory continue to resist erasure, rework modernity, and assert plural futures.

Conclusion

Like many academic publication efforts, this special issue of Latin American Perspectives started from the perception of a gap in the literature. Major Latin American studies journals regularly publish excellent work on different aspects of specific Amazonian challenges, normally focusing on one of the region’s nation-states, or a specific sub-region within the Amazon. Nevertheless, comprehensive efforts at showcasing and conceptualizing the multiplicity of approaches, realities, and challenges in the region have been missing. As mentioned previously, this contrasts with the scholarship on other regions and subregions around the globe.

As the work of collecting and editing the contributions published in this special issue advanced, the editors quickly realized that the object itself—the Amazon—was almost an impossible object, due to its overwhelming multiplicity. Instead of trying to put the genie back in the bottle and proposing a restrictive cut to organize and discipline the issue and Amazon studies in general, we decided to embrace that multiplicity. The result is an unusually diverse set of papers, which we now present to the readers. It is our hope that this issue will spark several conversations and strengthen the sense of interconnectedness among researchers working on the Amazon and Amazonian communities more broadly.