The discursive landscape in Ecuador is marked, on the one hand, by an antagonistic and dialogic interaction between official claims and the critical discourses of a variety of distinct but overlapping social movements, namely the environmental, anti-mining, anti-oil and indigenous movements. On the other hand, these same dialogic encounters manifest themselves between different elements of the state itself, generating a politically productive ambiguity around what constitutes the official position on resource extraction and environmental policy. Both the increasingly tense conflict between movements and the state, most recently in the form of the heightened criminalization of protest, and the discursive ambivalence of the Correa administration, point to the centrality of language and meaning as sites of political contestation, as the uneven terrain of domination and resistance. That the positions that constitute this terrain are not only fundamentally relational, but dynamic, is demonstrated by the unforeseen and inventive uses of both official and critical discourses. Formulations that originated as critiques of the state find themselves unexpectedly incorporated into the latter's repertoire of justification. At the same time, social movement organizations continually reclassify and redescribing state activities, shifting the site of conflict to a new set of terms: thus the neoliberal state becomes the extractive state and ‘sustainability' is revealed as a codeword for the expansion of mining activity. This rewriting of the terms of debate is a continually unfolding process that coalesces around salient terms, and that at certain conjunctures erupts into physical confrontations, arrests, roadblocks, and paramilitary deployments. These latter serve as a new ground for political conflict, a new economy of stakes and risks, of possibilities and defeats, and demands a new language to render the emerging array of forces intelligible
