University thesis:
Dissertation, Universität Freiburg, 2018
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Description:
Abstract: How does China’s critical need for oil and minerals affect the political and economic conditions of Latin American states? This thesis addresses these problems by analyzing China’s resource policies towards Brazil and Peru over the period 2000-2015. It uses IR-theories of power and a comparative case study approach to make sense of a new phenomenon of South-South cooperation driven by the workings and drawbacks of “extractive power.” While the Chinese economy gains increasing access to strategic resources, Brazil and Peru struggle to maintain political and economic stability in their function as Beijing’s peripheral suppliers. In the case of Brazil, China’s oil quest has induced a relationship of structural subalternity unfolding within emerging power blocks that seek to destabilize US hegemony in international politics. In Peru, by contrast, Chinese investments in mining and consequent power asymmetries have unfolded within (and not against) the norms and values of the Washington Consensus: free trade, deregulation, and market liberalization. Despite short-lived gains, neither Brazil nor Peru have been able to leverage China’s quest for oil and minerals as a way to move out of the global periphery. Against this backdrop, the thesis exposes the limits of extractive power as a strategy for political and economic emancipation in the context of South-South relations