Penelope Anthias's Limits to Decolonization: Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco is a thorough and thought-provoking ethnographic examination of the contradictions inherent in Bolivia's refounding as a plurinational state. Bolivia at the same time recognises the existence of indigenous peoples and their right to autonomy, and yet continues to be economically wedded to a hydrocarbon economy. This is contradictory, because, as Anthias shows in her case study from the Bolivian Chaco (in the south-eastern region of Bolivia), many of the areas that are richest in hydrocarbon resources lie beneath the ancestral territory of indigenous people. As Anthias points out in her conclusion, while Bolivia's governing Movimiento al Socialismo party ‘has called into question traditional understandings of citizenship, the nation, and the state in Bolivia', it has continued the expansion of ‘indigenous rights alongside intensifying hydrocarbon extraction’ (p. 242). This has created what she refers to as ‘Hydrocarbon Citizenship’, whereby the priority given to hydrocarbon extraction means that it is inescapable as the motor behind all government policies, including the state recognition of indigenous territorial autonomy that the industrial extractive economy impinges on.

The book follows the struggles of 36 indigenous Guaraní communities to obtain legal recognition of themselves and the land they historically occupied as one indivisible communal territory, known as Itika Guasu. This struggle is complicated not just by the priority given by the state to the exploitation of hydrocarbon resources, such as those in the subsoil of Itika Guasu, but also by the presence of several non-indigenous claimants (called ‘Karai’ by the Guaraní) in the same territory. The conflict over the collective titling of Itika Guasu between the Guaraní, with a holistic vision of the area as shared territory (shared not just between various Guaraní communities, but also with spiritual entities that own sacred places), and both large landowners and peasant smallholders who relate to the land as private property, is the main theme of the first four chapters of the book. In Chapter 1 we understand why and how the current Guaraní struggle over territory is taking place. Anthias explains how the Guaraní have been gradually dispossessed of their land, first by white settlers during Bolivia's colonial period, who over time forcibly increased the size of their land holding, and in the republican period (since Bolivian independence in 1825) by the state's donation of parcels of their land to migrants from the Andes who had fought in the Chaco War in the 1930s. When the Ley del Servicio Nacional de Reforma Agraria (National Agrarian Reform Service Law, INRA), which provided for the establishment of a new kind of collective property known as Tierras Comunitarias de Origen (Native Community Lands, TCOs), was passed in 1996, the Guaraní, with the support of NGOs and INRA, began the process of mapping their land and seeking a collective title. However, what unfolded was a process of mapping of territory that was defined more by non-indigenous actors (NGOs supportive of the Guaraní and non-indigenous claimants to land) than the Guaraní themselves (as we see in Chapters 2 and 3). In order to make what they saw as realistic demands, NGO technicians pared back visions of unencumbered ancestral territory to more pragmatic claims that took into account the properties of these other actors. On the one hand, Anthias makes clear that this process – including translating indigenous understandings of territory into the language of the state – disempowered ordinary Guaraní, the very people the land-titling was supposed to be empowering. On the other, the non-Guaraní campesino smallholders felt they belonged to the place their grandparents settled in, and the reader will probably feel they had a right to be taken into account as well. Although Anthias's sympathies appear to lie more with the Guaraní, with whom she spent the most time, she carefully conveys the perspectives of each of three main groups of claimants over land. In doing so, she does not allow the reader to view the Guaraní simplistically as the only group with claims to identify as indigenous or with the right to land (where would the non-Guaraní campesinos go?). She also conveys the differing relationship of the Guaraní with the land as territory, and of the non-Guaraní settlers with the land as private property. Ironically, the land-titling process has forced the Guaraní to engage with the land as private property to be fenced off and protected against neighbours as the land-titling has fragmented Itika Guasu, taking into account the non-Guaraní (Chapter 4).

In irony upon irony, as the Guaraní gave up hope of the state recognising their territorial autonomy through land-titling, they began to see their best chance of controlling the land themselves by approaching it as private property, and by-passed the state to reach an agreement with Repsol, the oil and natural gas company, directly. In Chapters 5 and 6, Anthias narrates how the Guaraní reached an agreement with Repsol in which the company recognised their claim as owners of Itika Guasu, and paid them US$13.5 million over 20 years on the proviso that they did not protest publicly during that period. While the money meant that they could buy properties from non-Guaraní within Itika Guasu, the Guaraní saw the agreement itself as representing recognition of their own rights over the territory, and more valuable than titling by the state. The presence of hydrocarbons beneath Itika Guasu imposed limits on decolonization (in other areas where there were no hydrocarbons, Anthias informs us, TCO titling had proceeded faster), yet it also, ultimately, allowed the Guaraní to by-pass the state, creating their own autonomy, directly in an agreement with Repsol. This is hydrocarbon citizenship. For good or bad, their destiny is determined by the resources beneath the soil.

This book then, will make a fascinating read for anyone interested in the practical realities of Bolivia's refounding as a plurinational state with autonomies. What has changed since Evo Morales was elected in 2005 amid a discourse of decolonising the state? The answer, for the Guaraní of Itika Guasu, would appear to be: not much.