A neoliberal nationalization? People, politics, and power in Bolivia's natural gas sector

Since the Spanish stumbled across the mines of Potosi, Bolivia has been oppressed by global hegemonies, its neighbors, and even by some of its own people. But something happened over the past twenty-five years. The country moved from being a neoliberal ideological testing ground to part of the purported new wave of Latin American socialism. During this time, Bolivia privatized its natural gas only to renationalize it a decade later. But how has a state situated within the resource periphery for centuries been able to gain control of a high-value, high-demand commodity in a sector dominated by some of the world's most profitable transnational corporations?;To answer this question, I challenge existing work on neoliberalization that oversimplifies the changing role of the periphery in the world system. I argue for a theory that better acknowledges the distinct role that different places play within global circuits of production and how these roles have changed or been reinforced through neoliberalization. In addition, I assert that to better understand the periphery in processes of neoliberalization we need to examine how peripheral class structures affect and are affected by such processes, and thus how class struggle mediates neoliberalization.;In this dissertation, I make three key arguments. First, I argue that a burgeoning comprador elite class fraction in Bolivia aligned with transnational capital to implement processes of neoliberalization. Doing so, they sought to open up new spaces of investment by undermining the control that country's landed agrarian elite and the working and campesino classes had over the state. Second, I argue that the adverse effects of processes of neoliberalization led to a consolidation of Bolivia's popular classes. Through this alignment, they eventually took control of the state as the alliance between the comprador elite and transnational capital made a series of iterative mistakes. And third, I argue that while Bolivia's popular classes have enhanced their power, their ability to use the country's natural resources as an engine of socioeconomic change has been constrained by the path dependent sociomaterial realities that surround Bolivia's primary export, its natural gas.