Paper short abstract:

As Chinese mining projects have soared in Africa lately, we compare local and transnational struggles against Chinese and Western mining companies. Based on protest event data from Guinea and the DRC, we find notable differences of contention, showing that the investor's country of origin matters.

Paper long abstract:

There has been a “boom” of Chinese mining (and other) investments in Africa lately. While scholars documented certain particularities of Chinese investment, they found that Chinese miners face similar contestations as those from other regions. These studies, however, have some data weaknesses that we aim to address. In a protest event analysis, we compare major mining investments from Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) regarding protest frequency, tactics, and contentious interactions. We find that, although the contention is resembling in many ways, there are notable differences of how Chinese and Western mining companies become contested. These differences are due to the respective mining stages, corporate practices, and political opportunity structures. Hence, we show that the investor’s country of origin is a relevant (yet so far neglected) factor to understand the contention against large-scale investment projects.