Dredged: Worldwide Protests against Mining
The research journal devoted this volume to the worldwide protests against the extraction of ressources. Mining, especially the industrial variant, has extensive social and ecological effects: in many places it causes environmental pollution and attached to this increases health risks for the population, as well as resettlements and ousting of alternative basis for life. Conflicts with relation to mining arouse on the use of land and water, air pollution, the distribution of profit, employment relations and conditions as well as political participation, protection of cultural and ecological valuable places and dominant perceptions of development. Mining is socially and politically highly contested and causes worldwide protests on the local, national and transnational level.
Bettina Engels: Mobilization and resources in mining conflicts: the case of Bissa Gold in Sabcé, Burkina Faso (FJSB 1/2017: 44-53)
The article investigates how resource poor social groups – in is example, local people in a rural and peripheral region in Burkina Faso, one of the poorest and ,least developed‘ countries worldwide – can succeed in organizing and mobilizing into protest. Building upon Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social, cultural, and economic capital, resources at the disposal of the respective groups in the villages are analyzed. It is argued that cultural, socio-organizational, and moral resources – notably, contacts, networks, legal and organizational support, language and legal-administrative skills and expertise – can hardly be compensated by material resources.
Louisa Prause: „Our fathers and forefathers mined here“: Framing strategies in gold-mining g conflicts in Senegal (FJSB 1/2017: 53-62)
The article aims to explain the success and failure of framing strategies in mining conflicts, using the case of the Sabodala Gold Mine in Senegal. Framing and discursive opportunity structures form the theoretical framework. Protest actors in Senegal were unsuccessful in using available discursive opportunities due to their livelihood activities and related identities as artisanal miners. They also failed to build a coherent frame aligning their partly differing claims, which addition- ally weakened their framing. The company used available opportunities more effectively which explains their successful counter framing against the claims of the protest actors.
Kristina Dietz: Local referenda against industrial-scale mining? The conflict surrounding the gold mine La Colosa in Colombia (FJSB 1/2017: 62-71)
Since 2012 community consultations have gained momentum in conflicts over industrial mining in Latin America. In this article, based on the protest against the La Colosa gold mining project in Colombia, I analyze under what conditions processes of direct democracy are deployed by collective actors as a strategy of protest. In the conclusion, the political effects of consultations in relation to mobilization and prevention of mining projects are discussed.
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