By Cameron Macaskill (Department of Political Science)
With its broad representation of different regions and analysis at the global, state, and local levels, the Worlds in Contention conference succeeded in connecting different conceptualizations and cases of capitalist and neoliberal structures across geographies and across academic literature. As a graduate student fellow at the conference, the presentations on mining, land, and local resistance were particularly useful to my current and future work as a scholar.
My own work examines African states’ membership in international organizations (IOs) and how this membership is impacted by racial hierarchies and the neoliberal orientation of the international system. At the Worlds in Contention conference, I presented a project arguing that the international Kimberley Process falsely dichotomized diamonds as “conflict” or “conflict-free.” In doing so, the Kimberley process disconnected diamond extraction from the inherent violence within diamond supply chains and relied on NGO campaigns that leveraged bloody images of African citizens, a problematic reinforcement of racialized colonial stereotypes about African violence. By thinking through this process, my project seeks to unveil violence behind supply chains of luxury goods, such as diamonds. After participation in the conference, however, one critique of the piece stands out: the glaring absence of local resistance networks and their ability to disrupt these violent practices.
This critique refers specifically to the absence of the community at the forefront of extraction and their networks of local resistance. In my project, activities such as miner-oriented movements and local discourse surrounding the violence of extraction become largely absent due to the focus on connecting hidden practices of violence with the consumer-facing ethical commitments that impact policy at the global level. A more concrete example of what these resistance networks and grassroots efforts can look like is better defined in Riofranco’s parallel focus on the extraction of lithium-ion batteries. Lithium presents a “hard” case for resistance, as supply chains become more complex and less normatively intuitive when the commodities are critical goods rather than luxury items. In contrast to diamonds, lithium is a critical good that lays the foundation for decarbonization and renewable energy efforts. As Riofranco argues, however, this extraction is “marked by a pattern of ecologically unequal exchange,” in which local communities at the “frontiers” of this exchange lack democratic participation and provision for indigenous rights in decision-making. However, Riofranco describes grassroots responses to this anti-democratic planning from around-the-clock protests against plans for a lithium mine in Thacker Pass, Nevada to a combination of art installations and demonstrations against mines in Northern Portugal. Importantly, she highlights the global connections between these local movements, providing an example of a transnational movement that resists extraction and participates in shaping supply chains.
Activists are also given a large stake in Altamirano-Jiménez’s work, which identifies the Binizaá and Ikoot peoples’ resistance to economic development projects in Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Here, Riofranco’s critique of the lack of democratic decision-making is also present, as Altamirano-Jiménez describes how a wind farming project in the Isthmus lacked Indigenous participation and consent. While these wind projects are meant to be part of movements towards sustainability, the dispossession of indigenous lands without consultation results in activism that expresses Indigenous refusal of these types of development projects through joint assemblies, community organizing, and demonstrations. The latter are largely led by Indigenous women, despite this participation increasing their vulnerability as they challenge prescribed gender roles in their communities.
Both of these pieces offer examples of local resistance to global neoliberalism and capitalism. These examples provide a useful contrast to my own work, which is primarily focused on the construction of global narratives of ethical diamond consumption to cloak highly racialized capitalist extraction. Recognizing African labor movements and their participation in or rejection of these global narratives presents an opportunity for my work to expand. In particular, Altamirano-Jiménez’s detailed description of women at the forefront of community resistance inadvertently points out an opportunity in my own work to move beyond contextual backgrounds that are primarily focused on mining communities of men and expand to include how women were and were not participating in these movements.
In contrast, Offner complicates local movements by including a discussion of how different ethnicities participate in activism via efforts by smallholders and laborers in Colombia to respond to economic disruption caused by the Salvjina Dam. While residents of these areas used letters to governing bodies, meetings, and work with the press as opportunities for activism, they also used colonial-era land titles for indigenous groups to make new claims on the land. In this way, indigenous groups appropriated and redefined colonial language that was used against them, but also created room for Afro-Colombian demonstrators to join their indigenous mobilization. Offner highlights how this joint mobilization resulted in three days of demonstrations and a government agreement for compensation to those living by the dam. However, Offner points out that despite the joint movement, Afro-Colombian demonstrators received a different and less generous recompense than indigenous demonstrators. While Offner does not refer to this explicitly, the attempt to differentiate on the basis of Indigeneity by the state and corporate actors is reminiscent in my own work to efforts by corporate actors to divide black African miners and white settler miners. While corporate actors encouraged white settler miners to use physical violence against black African miners and strip their claims, the same actors were negotiating agreements with African authorities and British colonial government to strip white settler miners’ land access. By encouraging division between white and black miners and encouraging physical violence towards black miners, corporate actors in South Africa took advantage of the lack of unity to take control of huge swaths of land for unencumbered mining in a parallel fashion to Offner’s description of unequal recompense for demonstrators.
With their attention to connecting the global and the local together as distinct but connected points on the same continuum, the conference panels and presentations mentioned here provided a new lens for thinking through my own work. The ability to leverage these examples of local resistance to capitalism and neoliberalism will provide a helpful frame to address one of the major theoretical gaps of my own work: bringing the local back into the global reactionary movement against diamond mining.