‘Politics of resistance against mining: A comparative study of mining conflicts in Intag, Ecuador and Ida, Turkey’

'Politics of resistance against mining: A comparative study of mining conflicts in Intag, Ecuador and Ida, Turkey'

Abstract:

This presentation is based on a comparative analysis of two local socio-environmental conflicts over mining (open-pit copper mine in Intag region, Ecuador and cyanide-leaching gold mine in Mount Ida region, Turkey) and explores how progressive politics around the relationship between environment and development are constructed in and through conflicts around mining Building on a Gramscian approach to state-society relations and its more recent uses in political economy of the environment, I study to what extent and in which ways the oppositional social actors in these conflicts challenge hegemonic understandings and practices regarding the relationship between environment and development. These questions, in turn, speak to the broader state and society relations in the respective countries, conceptualized as processes of construction of and challenges to capitalist hegemony.

Based on an initial analysis of the field data, I argue that these conflicts develop within particular spaces where politics are enacted; and that the construction of autonomy in these spaces—in terms of the discursive and material processes that allow social actors to exercise greater control over their lives - is crucial for the realization of their transformative potential. I further maintain that construction of progressive politics entails the linking of everyday productive and reproductive activities of local rural communities to a critical understanding of the larger processes of expansion of capitalism into new commodity frontiers, and articulation of concerns and demands through rights-based discourses; that is the transformation of the ‘common sense’ to ‘good sense’ through the organic relation between organizers and communities. To appreciate their progressive potential, it is also necessary to consider specific challenges and constraints these local resistances face to sustain organization and mobilization. I finally emphasize the effect of these conflicts on the role of the environment in development processes, in other words on state-society relations as they pertain to the relationship between development and environment. 

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Roy Huijsmans