In 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued the world’s largest environmental contamination liability: a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. Within years, a U.S. federal court and an international tribunal determined that the Ecuadorian judgment had been procured through fraud and was unenforceable. In The Small Matter of Suing Chevron (Duke University Press, June 2022), anthropology professor Suzana Sawyer delves into this legal trilogy to explore how distinct legal truths were composed through chemical, scientific and legal technique — transforming a contamination claim into an environmental liability, then a racketeering scheme, and ultimately a breach of treaty.

Her research has focused on controversy surrounding resource extraction. Her first book, Crude Chronicles (2004), explores the conflictive intersection of indigenous politics, petroleum corporations, and neoliberalism in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It suggests that struggles over resource use are simultaneously struggles over identity and territoriality. In a country scarred by inequalities, contrary logics of resources use represented challenges to the legitimacy of an historically exclusionary state, as well as occasions for redefining the terms of nation, nature, and sovereignty in a globalizing world. Tracing the emergence of one of twentieth-century Latin America’s strongest indigenous movements, she shows how hydrocarbon conflict was as much about reconfiguring national and transnational inequality—that is, rupturing the silence around racial injustice, exacting spaces of accountability, and rewriting narratives of national belonging—as it was about the material use and extraction of hydrocarbon capital.

View the book at Duke University Press