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ItemThe political ecology of "post-neoliberal" gas: extraction, conflict and the making of an unstable commodity in Bolivia( 2013)In Bolivia, new waves of mineral and hydrocarbon extraction have set off social conflicts and become embroiled in existing disputes. Changes to hydrocarbon governance have led to the production of new forms of inequality, new disputes and new social movements that draw together politics of nation and nature. The multidimensional character of Bolivia's gas conflicts indicates a political ecology approach is need in order to contextualise struggles over flows of commodities and power across local and translational spaces. This paper examines the political ecology of natural gas in Bolivia as a commodity with peculiarly conflictive qualities. It examines how political ecology frameworks are different from other approaches that may position resources as causing conflict directly. The political ecology approach demands that resource struggles be conceptualised in ways that move beyond asserting basic generalisable causal relationships around scarcity or abundance and conflict. To this end, the paper outlines how gas has worked as not only a commodity with material value, but as a symbolic component in wider ideological battles taking place in the politics of distribution and recognition. It fmds that gas in Bolivia can be a powerful exclusionary or transformative force and argues that a political ecology of hydrocarbon disputes in Bolivia needs to incorporate an understanding of the historical constitution of gas as both a destabilising resource, and as a commodity of nation-building, if this power is to be understood. As well the study outlines how more contemporary currents of indigenous identity politics has played into contests over Bolivia's gas resources. Many conflicts seemingly over gas in the country are in fact struggles over broader issues of distribution and for political spaces to express identities and culture, and delineate territories. The paper outlines how conflict events are occurring in Bolivia as part of broader processes transforming subsoil commodities in South America and imbuing them with new political significance. In a context of regional extractivism, the political ecology of gas in Bolivia is one of a resource with particular circumstances in a broader context. It has come to be established as materially and symbolically vital for the construction of a new Bolivian nation and competing regionalist projects in a "post-neoliberal" political landscape. These disputes provide windows into the way subsoil resources are being incorporated into the politics of recognition and identity. This reflects other contemporary analyses of the political ecology of conflict that demonstrate how similar disputes are about much more than resources, but channel competing claims around nation-building, community, and identity