A/HRC/41/54 material well-being of the masses”. 6 Neo-extractivism is thus associated with leftist, popular Governments that reject neo-liberal policies such as privatization and deregulation. At the same time, neo-extractivism retains extractivist economic and political logics that reproduce inequality and regularly result in violations of human rights on a discriminatory basis.7 Although Governments promoting neo-extractivism often do so by arguing that their policies promote development, popular sovereignty and social redistribution, scholars have shown that the implementation of such a strategy shares many of the same pathologies as classical extractivism.8 Scholars have associated neo-extractivism with, among other things, authoritarian politics, a disregard for social, territorial and political rights, 9 and the continuation of indigenous and Afrodescendent dispossession. 10 11. As will be illustrated in the present report, the extractivism economy is not merely about the economic and material processes of natural resource extraction, it also has an impact on political and social relations (including race and gender relations) and advances particular cultural and normative world views that define the daily lives of many people and deeply influences their possible futures. 11 12. The international human rights system has firmly repudiated the concept of race as a biological category and ideologies and theories of racial supremacy that explicitly justified racial oppression and brutalization well into the twentieth century. 12 Instead, today, race is appropriately understood as a social construction, albeit it a social construction that for many determines their access to fundamental human rights, which can sometimes mean the difference between life and death. 13. One legal scholar has usefully defined race as “the historically contingent social systems of meaning that attach to elements of morphology and ancestry”.13 This approach rejects the notion of biological races but recognizes that the construction of race is informed by physical features and lineage, not because physical features and lineage are a product of racial variation but because societies invest them with social meaning. 14 Everywhere in the world, physical features, including skin colour, shape the way that people are treated by other people, and by the law itself. At the same time, race is by no means merely about physical attributes, such as colour, nor is it merely about lineage. It is centrally about the social, political and economic meaning of being categorized as black, white, brown or any other racial designation. 14. Blanket denials of the existence of race (as a social construction) or the relevance of race in shaping day-to-day experiences, including the enjoyment of rights, are disingenuous. In fact, what is sometimes termed a “colour-blind” approach itself produces and sustains prohibited racial discrimination in the extractivism economy. A colour-blind analysis of legal, social, economic and political conditions professes a commitment to an even-handedness that entails avoiding explicit racial analysis in favour of treating all individuals and groups the same, even if these individuals and groups are differently situated, including because of historical projects of racial subordination. Colour-blindness 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 4 Ibid., p. 129. Scholars identify Bolivia (the Plurinational State of), Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of) as countries that have experience of neo-extractivism. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., pp. 130–134. Ibid., p. 133. See Carolina Valladares and Rutgerd Boelens, “Extractivism and the rights of nature: governmentality, ‘convenient communities’ and epistemic pacts in Ecuador”, Environmental Politics, vol. 26, No. 6. As scholars note about neo-extractivism, although the same applies to extractivism generally, “the focus is thus not on policies alone, but also on the societal and political structures and the capitalist patriarchal, and imperial logics upon which they are based”. Brand, Dietz and Lang, “Neoextractivism in Latin America”, p. 150. See, e.g., the Preamble to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Ian Haney López, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York, New York University Press, 1996), p. 10. Ibid.