Surplus Populations and Socio‐Ecological Conflicts in Latin America: The Case of the Mapuche Struggle in Southern Chile

ABSTRACT So‐called surplus populations have repeatedly been the focus of critical analyses in recent years. This refers to a large social group that comprises most of the population in the Global South and is characterised by the fact that it is not integrated into the capitalist mode of production to any relevant extent through wage labour. The consequence is that these surplus populations must reproduce themselves largely outside of capitalist relations of production in a strict sense. This article addresses two research gaps. First, the debate on surplus populations has so far focused mainly on Asian or African contexts and has hardly been related to Latin America; second, this debate on surplus populations has not been linked to the large number of socio‐ecological conflicts surrounding their social reproduction in this region. This article shows that this perspective is extremely insightful and illustrates this by looking at the conflict between the forestry industry and the indigenous Mapuche in southern Chile.