Our Extractive Age: Expressions of Violence and Resistance emphasizes how the spectrum of violence associated with natural resource extraction permeates contemporary collective life. Chronicling the ...increasing rates of brutal suppression of local environmental and labor activists in rural and urban sites of extraction, this volume also foregrounds related violence in areas we might not expect, such as infrastructural developments, protected areas for nature conservation, and even geoengineering in the name of carbon mitigation. Contributors argue that extractive violence is not an accident or side effect, but rather a core logic of the 21st Century planetary experience. Acknowledgement is made not only of the visible violence involved in the securitization of extractive enclaves, but also of the symbolic and structural violence that the governance, economics, and governmentality of extraction have produced. Extractive violence is shown not only to be a spectacular event, but an extended dynamic that can be silent, invisible, and gradual. The volume also recognizes that much of the new violence of extraction has become cloaked in the discourse of "green development," "green building," and efforts to mitigate the planetary environmental crisis through totalizing technologies. Ironically, green technologies and other contemporary efforts to tackle environmental ills often themselves depend on the continuance of social exploitation and the contaminating practices of non-renewable extraction. But as this volume shows, resistance is also as multi-scalar and heterogeneous as the violence it inspires. The book is essential reading for activists and for students and scholars of environmental politics, natural resource management, political ecology, sustainable development, and globalization.
In July 2013, a consulta popular (referendum) was organised by municipal authorities in Tolima, Colombia, to judge public opinion on the establishment of activities by an international mining ...conglomerate ie the Colosa (the Giant) gold mine. In this article study is made of the referendum, and emphasis given to its linkages with wider regional, national and Latin American efforts to anticipate damage and derail projects for resource extraction. Recognising the techniques and networks, and similar expressions of identity and territoriality, expressed in other campaigns against extraction, resource sovereignty is suggested as an approach to interpret the motivations for and dynamics of recent popular consultations.
In this article critical consideration is given to the idea that natural resource extraction can pay for peace and justice. The Colombia government claims that the mining and energy sector represents ...a driver for economic growth and a key source of the financing needed in a post-conflict period following the forthcoming signing of peace accords. Recent research suggests this argument is severely flawed. Legal and socio-economic dynamics indicate that the encouragement of the extractive sector does not represent a route to justice, but rather an increase in insecurities and a new phase of human rights violations in the country.
Recent reports by the media and academic studies throughout the region have discussed the tendency towards conflict and controversy caused by an expanding frontier of extraction. The Environmental ...Justice Atlas is perhaps the best known international effort to map those issues. However, while there are now increasing reports on the growing intensity of these socio-environmental conflicts, in-depth analyses of their causes, impacts and responses remain limited. The extraction of natural resources, and energy resources in particular, link together local social and political changes with capitalism and the global economy--the setting of the interventionist interests of the great powers. In line with Neruda, academic analyses recognizes that there are synergies between energy and social development, and that this relationship relies not only on systems of value, but systems of violence. Here, McNeish analyzing the current wave of socio-environmental conflicts that has resulted from natural resource extraction in Latin America.
Gender Justice and Legal Pluralities: Latin American and African Perspectives examines the relationship between legal pluralities and the prospects for greater gender justice in developing countries. ...Rather than asking whether legal pluralities are 'good' or 'bad' for women, the starting point of this volume is that legal pluralities are a social fact. Adopting a more anthropological approach to the issues of gender justice and women's rights, it analyzes how gendered rights claims are made and responded to within a range of different cultural, social, economic and political contexts. By examining the different ways in which legal norms, instruments and discourses are being used to challenge or reinforce gendered forms of exclusion, contributing authors generate new knowledge about the dynamics at play between the contemporary contexts of legal pluralities and the struggles for gender justice. Any consideration of this relationship must, it is concluded, be located within a broader, historically informed analysis of regimes of governance.
In this article we discuss the comparative impact and significance of Community-Oriented Policing (COP) in Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua). We emphasize in particular the ...formal role of COP as a means to re-establish trust between the state and community, demonstrate professionalism and to evidence the democratic accountability of the police to the population. Although these formal goals remain the goal of community oriented policing, we demonstrate in this article that there has been an increased emphasis on more kinetic or militarized forms of policing in recent years. Hard handed, heavily armed and interventionist police policies have spread from El Salvador to Guatemala, and more recently Nicaragua. Moves towards more aggressive policing are explained by governments and police forces as a necessary response to the rising threat of gangs and drug cartels and horrifying levels of homicide statistics. However, as we highlight there is also evidence of these changes reflecting undemocratic shifts within national administrations and the repositioning of people within government and national institutions with links to these countries' earlier military governments.The net effect of these changes we argue is to erode the intentions of COP initiatives, and severely reduce levels of trust and accountability between people and the democratic state.
Until the wave of political violence in 2018, the Nicaraguan model for community-based policing (COP) was viewed by many as the means by which the country had avoided the crime and insecurity ...reported elsewhere in Central America. Paralleling these positive claims, the Nicaraguan National Police have emphasized particular characteristics of the COP model as the basis of this success. The Nicaraguan COP model is founded on three ethical pillars i.e. that it is communitarian, proactive and preventative. In this article, we detail the development of the Nicaraguan community-policing model and evaluate its historical and persisting significance as the guarantor of law and order through a critical evaluation of these claims and characteristics. The article demonstrates the abiding significance of the Nicaraguan COP model, and the distinctive nature of its operation. In contrast to prevailing regional trends there is much to learn from policing that emphasizes dialogue with the community over a reliance on technological or strong-arm solutions. However, the article also observes severe challenges regarding its current capacities and its erosion as a result of the pressures of presidential authoritarianism, political corruption and securitization. This erosion of the COP model has negatively affected the conditions of human security in Nicaragua and is a significant factor explaining the character of recent violence.
Security and development McNeish, John- Andrew; Lie, Jon Harald Sande
2010., 20101115, 2010, 2010-11-25, 20100101, Letnik:
11
eBook
Since 9/11 ideas of security have focused in part on the development of ungovernable spaces. Important debates are now being had over the nature, impacts, and outcomes of the numerous policy ...statements made by northern governments, NGOs, and international institutions that view the merging of security with development as both unproblematic and progressive. This volume addresses this new security-development nexus and investigates internal institutional logics, as well as the operation of policy, its dangers, resistances and complicity with other local and national social processes. Drawing on detailed ethnography, the contributors offer new vantage points to understand the workings of multiple, intersecting, and conflicting power structures, which whilst local, are tied to non-local systems and operate across time. This volume is a necessary critique and extension of key themes integral to the security- development nexus debate, highlighting the importance of a situated and substantive understanding of human security.
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