There is perhaps no better time to make a further appraisal of the impact that mining and extractivism more generally have had on the global South. Depressed mineral prices, partly driven by the global coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing slump, have again brought to the fore the highly contested notion that resource-led growth can provide a platform for more generalised and sustained economic growth. The persistent ebb and flow of optimism and pessimism for third world development, linked to resource extraction, have been shaped by World Bank and mainstream economists’ belief in mineral-led growth. But we know beyond doubt that under current configurations of globalisation, sustainable mining is an oxymoron. The deleterious consequences of mining outweigh the benefits that accrue from it, if measured, by among other things improved generalised well-being: mining, and extractivism more generally, has tended to affirm and deepen global (and local) combined and uneven development.
What more is there to say, then, about mining and extractivism, especially when the editors of this important collection indicate in their introduction that contestation over extractivism, mining, and land grabbing is not new? First, as they note, there is no single volume that brings together ‘diverse research across world regions on the particularities of contested extractivism’ (11) and, second, struggles are seldom discussed ‘with regard to state–society relations’ (12). This is an ambitious collection partly assembled around the outstanding research initiatives by Kristina Dietz and Bettina Engels at the Freie Universität, Berlin, entitled ‘Global Change – Local Conflicts?’ The editors say modestly that it is a book intended to start a debate on the ‘interdependencies of extractivism, contestation and state–society relations’ (9), yet the book does much more than this. The shift in focus to state–society relations is significant, as it seeks to drill down to issues of scale and scope, struggles over decision making and especially possibilities for decentralisation and how power is maintained in states where mining capital (usually international) is strong and local comprador classes are (relatively) weak. The chapters cover a wide geographical range from Venezuela (Stefan Peters), Ghana (Gordon Crawford, Coleman Agyeyomah and Atinga Mba), Philippines (Boris Verbrugge), Colombia (Dietz and Victoria Marin-Burgos) Burkina Faso (Engels), Argentina and Brazil (Renata Motta) and Malawi (Davide Chinigò). Although there is no obvious attempt to distil comparison, there are emergent and persistently recurrent themes that highlight some continuities and discontinuities in the case study approach.
The two that are the clearest are, firstly, the persistent forms of struggle and resistance to mining and land grabbing, a documentation that remains vital to try and discern new political platforms for an alternative to the current societal mayhem created by mining. And, second, the authors try to unpack the different forms that state–society relations take in a selection of countries in Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
Written during the commodity boom, Engels highlights a range of protests and struggles in Burkina Faso that bring together what she sees as structural and place-based factors. She also interrogates links between everyday mining struggles with national social movements. She draws on fieldwork that explores the shifts and challenges in artisanal small-scale (ASM) mining, and how protest can be viewed as ‘repertoires of contestation’ shaped by the specificity of place, local organisation and forms of representation. She also highlights the emergence of social movements that are critical of large-scale industrial mining and how protest emerges shaped by the character of industrial mining and social movement organisation. These are themes picked up and developed elsewhere for the Philippines and Venezuela and over land struggles in Malawi. The Ghana study by Crawford et al. also factors in the dynamics created by Chinese mining companies and ASM. Their detailed analysis in the Upper East region of Ghana highlights local resistance, state complicity with external capital and repression to quell conflict in the context of informality, corruption and neoliberalism.
Debate and contributions relating to state–society relations inch towards new insights. There is less concern from the contributors to explicitly identify the state as a vector and instrument for capital accumulation. Instead, a more Weberian, and Foucauldian, analysis emerges across the contributions with importance attributed to understanding the spatial dimensions of mining and power that emerge from controls over space and territory, zones of exclusion and how institutions of governance and struggles for democratisation rise and fall. Dietz, for example, charts how capital-intensive mining in Colombia can be understood beyond the more generalised understanding of the transformation of nature and appropriation of value by exploring ‘existing scalar configurations of power and exclusive, centralised decision making’ (128). In short, she argues that, among other things, social engagement in struggles over mining are shaped by re- and de-centralisation of policies and legal frameworks (143–144) and these change over time influenced by a constellation of different social and economic forces.
There is an absence in the volume of a macro-political economy framing. That might have affirmed the possible generalised critique of why this volume is so important in shifting the gaze and analysis. A systematic review of ‘pink tide’ radicalism beyond the chapter on Venezuela would also have been useful. It would have given more weight to Motta’s interesting chapter that highlights how radical governments in Argentina and Brazil seemed unable to loosen ties with agrarian elites and support peasant movements for land reform and improved rural conditions of existence. There is no reference to imperialism in the collection, perhaps the proverbial elephant in the room.
There are many lessons that can and should be distilled from this collection, and it is very timely, not least because it seems that the much vaunted Africa Mining Vision 2030 (http://www.africaminingvision.org) has run out of steam.