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- Convenors:
-
Doris Buu-Sao
(Université de Lille)
Karolien van Teijlingen (Radboud University)
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- Discussant:
-
Vladimir Gil Ramón
(Catholic University (PUCP) EI - Columbia University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 14 University Square (UQ), 01/007
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel intends to shed light on processes of normalization and subject-formation that the extractive industries set in motion in both Southern and Northern sites of extraction, in the context of the environmental deterioration and conflicts resulting from these ("green") extractive activities.
Long Abstract:
The extractivist enterprise, as an integral aspect of global capitalism and in particular of recent promises of the "energy transition" (Dunlap & Jakobsen 2020), continues to expand into Southern and Northern rural peripheries. In the context of the environmental deterioration and conflicts resulting from these ("green") extractive activities, there is a growing interest in the power relations that shape interactions between companies, governments, residents of extractive zones and social movements (Frederiksen & Himley 2020). This panel intends to explore governmentality (Foucault 1991) as a theoretical framework to study such interactions around the extractive frontier (Coleman 2013; Van Teijligen 2016; Buu-Sao 2021). We invite papers that address (one of) the following sets of questions.
On the one hand, the panel aims to deepen understanding of top-down extractive governmentality: what apparatuses (Foucault 1980) are produced by the promoters of extraction to render it possible and legitimate? What are the power/knowledge mechanisms at play at the extractive frontier? On the other hand, the panel wishes to take a more contextualized and ethnographic perspective "from below", that reveals how targeted populations appropriate, reject or twist governmental programs (Li 2007). What responses and forms of agency do attempts to govern provoke? What knowledges do people inhabiting extraction sites produce and how do struggles over knowledge and truth take shape? In articulating top-down and bottom-up views of extractive governmentalities, this panel intends to shed light on processes of normalization and subject-formation that the extractive industries set in motion in both Southern and Northern sites of extraction.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses development workshops organized between Lundin Gold and local actors in Los Encuentros, Ecuador. Though detailed ethnographic description, I discuss how power structures and governance are reflected, constructed and challenged within and in relation to these events.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on public events and workshops organised between Lundin Gold, its delegate Insuco and local actors in the proximity of the gold mining project Fruta del Norte, Ecuador. The objective of the workshops is to “generate a collective vision of the area’s development” (GADPR Los Encuentros 2022). However, by paying attention to how power structures are shaped within and in relation to these events, I describe the power the company has over local development, and the ways in which it is challenged.
During the workshops, local actors make claims for unkept promises and pleas for further support towards Lundin Gold. The events position the multi-national mining company as a patron, towards which aspirations of development, prosperity and hope are directed. Lundin Gold, in turn, has the power to decide whether or not they support presented development projects. The company is thus able to adjust the development interests of local actors according to company interests, rather than vice versa (Dolan & Rajak 2016).
In addition to determining types of development projects supported – a process which the company presents as apolitical (Ferguson 1994) – the events serve as a space for the company to “read” the public, “render it technical” (Li 2007), and identify potential sites of conflict. However, discontent has grown towards the events: locals are disillusioned with the results, and participation rates have dropped. Some of those who still attend use the space to make emotive speeches outside the scheduled agenda, attempting to politicize the “apolitical” events.
Paper short abstract:
Extraction-induced displacement processes are key in the (re)production of extractive subjectivities, entailing a process of "making legible" for company and the state. Based on research with resettlement managers in Mozambique, "making legible" results as a fraught and ambivalent process.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on a particular aspect of extractive governmentality: the management of displacement of people caused by land use for extractive projects. Technically called mining-induced resettlement processes, these often-controversial displacement and compensation processes are key in the (re)production of extractive subjectivities. Drawing from Trouillot’s (2001) notion of the “legibility effect”, I focus on how populations affected by such forms of displacement become legible for the company and the state and thereby possibly eligible for compensation. Key in this process are resettlement managers who conduct baseline studies, community consultations, manage expectations, and develop and implement Resettlement Action Plans. In this paper I explore the complex apparatus involved in “making legible” by drawing on my research with resettlement managers in Mozambique’s booming extractive sector and my participation in a course for resettlement managers in Maputo. I detail how resettlement managers through such trainings, international standards, and company rules acquire the language, knowledge, and techniques to “make legible”, which is perceived as apolitical, technological, efficient, and time-sensitive process. Additionally, I explore how Mozambican resettlement managers regard their role as being in-between the (often-foreign) extractive company and “local populations” and how they come to understand “local populations” as beneficiaries whom they can uplift potentially from poverty and as “profiteers”, who are likely to take advantage of the project. Consequently, I argue that “making legible” for mining-induced resettlement is a fraught and ambivalent process, that renders technical (Li 2007) and is part of the “quieter registers of dispossession” (Frederiksen and Himley 2020).
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the simultaneous production of enclosures and commons at the intersection of various extraction regimes (coal, green and financial) within the greek energy sector. The workings of structural violence feed on legitimacy struggles around rights, responsibility, and social worth.
Paper long abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic and the current war have accelerated global concerns and interventions for mitigating the climate socio-economic crises. The skyrocketing energy prices and shifting geopolitical interests have boosted the pressure for energy sovereignty, pointing, among others, to a more intensified renewable energy production within Europe. In Greece, the quest for sustainable futures rests on violent decarbonization processes (including privatization and financialization of energy) and the revalorization of particular (rural) spaces and livelihoods, enabled by fast-track legislation and the financial crisis of the past decade. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the main phasing-out coal region of Western Macedonia, massively shifting to mega-solar projects, the paper discusses the production of social worth at the intersection of various extraction regimes ( coal extraction, green extraction, financial extraction). I argue, first, that the struggles of legitimacy for decarbonization and the renewable-energy turn are embedded within the historical patterns/frictions of citizenship-making in the region; and, second, that the concrete workings of structural violence at play involve, in this case, the simultaneous creation of enclosures and commoning (energy cooperatives), renegotiating concepts of rights, responsibility, and opportunity.
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to make an empirical contribution to the existing debates on green energy extraction, governmentality and subaltern agency based on the study of windfarm projects in Gujarat. It will discuss extraction patterns and parallel resistance alliance and political (re)actions "from below".
Paper long abstract:
Renewables are presented as the modern pathway for sustainable development and unlimited growth in India, and the turnkey solution to address and mitigate the global climate crisis. But this hegemonic consensus around the need for energy transition also entails a specific land politics and structural patterns of socio-economic marginalization and dispossession associated to traditional extraction.
It is essential therefore to adopt perspectives from political geography and political ecology to understand the territorial process, the persistence of class-caste relations and the legacy of coloniality underlying renewable projects in India: green energy infrastructures are specifically targeting so-called “deserted”, “empty” and “waste” lands where subaltern groups (pastoral and low-caste communities) have been historically deprived of any agency. These violent logics of colonial and destructive green extraction are in the meantime contested by a diverse range of insubordination acts, open resistance and a renewed repertoire of political (re)actions coming ‘from bellow’. Resistance to renewables is specifically conducted on the ground of biodiversity and environmental protection, the defence of common lands and their attached livelihood practices. It re-energises traditional agrarian struggles and becomes a practical tool to contest class-caste domination and violent absorption into capitalist modes of production.
This paper aims to make an empirical contribution to the existing debates on green energy extraction, governmentality and subaltern agency based on the study of Kutch (Gujarat). I will highlight the extraction patterns underlying the development of 2 windfarm projects, and the parallel resistance alliance and political (re)actions that emerged from Dalits organisations, pastorals and environmental NGOs.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the Skouries gold-copper mining project (Greece) and examines the governmentality techniques employed by the state and private investors that reinforce the power relations over land ownership and resources, and the subsequent social struggles that resist such power apparatuses
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the governmentality techniques employed by the state and local authorities and private investors that reinforce the power relations over land ownership and resources, in the case of the ‘Skouries’ gold-copper mining project (Chalkidiki, Greece). Given that governmentality according to Foucault (1978) involves the ‘ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power’ (Burchell et al., 1991: 102-103) and that the space of the extractive project is not restricted to the mining area but extends across several sites and scales we examine: 1. the entanglement of extractivist projects with logistical operations (Grappi & Neilson, 2019) that link the ‘Skouries’ extractivist project to the shipped containers with concentrated minerals from the port of Thessaloniki and 2. the multifarious mechanisms of biopolitical control of the population (Svampa, 2012) and the techniques of social infiltration through an in-depth look at the local and interlocal social struggles against this mega-development extractivist project.
Moreover, through the lens of the "energy transition" paradigm that expands resource frontiers (Dunlap & Jakobsen, 2020) we explore the extension of the mining activities from gold to copper and the articulation between the ‘Skouries’ extractivist project and the intensification of renewable energy mega-projects throughout Greece. In this framework we further explore the subsequent proliferation of various social struggles that resist the energy mega-projects throughout Greece, question the hegemonic reasoning of development projects and defend their territories and environments.