Paper short abstract:

Exploring the anti-colonial narrative of environmental mobilisations in Siberia paves the way to a deeper understanding of the struggles for power and land control in contemporary Russia, while enriching a deeply rooted historical tradition with new knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

This paper unveils the entrenchment of environmental mobilisation and anti-colonial stances in Siberia. Dynamics of internal colonisation in Russia have been thoroughly addressed by historians and social scientists, who explored the different implications of Russia being both the coloniser and the colonised. The territorial dimension of colonial patterns is crucial in Siberia, its land being exploited in multiple ways across centuries by a centre that was both geographically and metaphorically distant. Nowadays, Siberia hosts invasive infrastructure that severely threatens its ecosystem: paper mills, dams, pipelines, and waste disposal practices in the Lake Bajkal, as well as mines, and newly designed but highly polluting waste disposal infrastructure in rural areas. Over the last fifteen years, these projects sparked protests in the local communities. While the tactical repertoires, turnout, duration, and outcomes of the mobilisations varied considerably across cases, their common trait is a markedly anti-colonial rhetoric directed towards the federal centre. Using qualitative methods and secondary sources (mainly local media outlets), I analyse the discursive elements of the frames adopted by local communities to protest against infrastructural projects. I shed light on the colonial and anti-colonial dynamics that characterise the relationship between Moscow’s powerholders and Siberian communities, which represent a continuation of a deeply-rooted historical pattern. I argue that, nowadays, this pattern is particularly noticeable within environmental mobilisations, and that the entrenchment of internal colonial dynamics and environmental grassroot mobilisations is of crucial importance to understand the struggles for power and land control in contemporary Russia.