CFP AAG Annual Meeting, 21-25 April 2015, Chicago
Authoritarian resource governance, emergent resistance, and unequal development
Session organizer: Miles Kenney-Lazar (Graduate School of Geography, Clark University)
Political ecologists and resource geographers have well-theorized the profound ways in which social movements shape resource governance by advancing the claims of marginalized resource users to lands, forests, and fisheries that they have been denied access to as a result of unequal political-economic forces, such as historical land inequality and exclusion (Wolford 2010), rapid land use changes (Rocheleau and Ross 1995), and large-scale extractive investments (Perreault 2006, Himley 2013). Not only do such movements improve access of small-scale and marginalized peasants, forest dwellers, and pastoralists to land and resources, they also expand spaces of democratic resource governance to include the voices of everyday resource users and civil society (Bebbington et al. 2008). This rich body of work, while expanding understandings of how movements improve resource access and governance processes, has largely focused on contexts and cases in which popular movements—despite the significant political obstacles they face—can and do occur in open, direct, and confrontational ways.
In this session, we seek to answer how and why resistance emerges and operates in situations ‘where there is no movement’ (Malseed 2008), where social movements, and forms of open and confrontational protest, are highly repressed. In such authoritarian resource regimes, where resources are governed undemocratically, involving little participation by small-scale resource users and civil society, how can resistance emerge and make successful claims to land and resources, affecting development and governance outcomes, chipping away at divisions of access and power? Furthermore, how and why are some resistance efforts more effective than others, leading to unequal development outcomes? We seek to move beyond the literature on everyday resistance (Scott 1986) and ‘avoidance protest’ (Adas 1986) to examine how dissent of the repressed navigates the power-laden boundaries between covert and overt resistance (Walker 2008), seeking to make resource claims heard and generate social change without upsetting pre-existing structures of power in ways that invoke further political repression. We seek to understand how spaces of resistance are forged and expanded in places where they did not previously exist.
To address these issues we invite theoretically innovative and empirically driven papers examining emergent resistance in relation to all relevant themes or topics across a wide set of authoritarian or undemocratic resource governance contexts globally. Key themes include, but are not limited to:
- Navigating borders between authoritarianism and democracy, protest and repression in repressive and ostensibly democratic resource regimes
- The role of authoritarian legacies and memories of repression in shaping contemporary forms of resistance, dissent and refusal in democratic contexts
- How movements and governments negotiate boundaries between popular demand, protest, and repression
- The interactions and engagements of locally-based, underground resistance groups with broader, transnational agrarian social movements and agendas
- Spatial tactics of resistance, dissent, and refusal in authoritarian, undemocratic contexts
- Relationships between resource materiality and emergent forms of resistance
- Resisting unequal access to a diverse set of resources and environmental goods such as urban residential land, public spaces and commons, transportation and communication infrastructure, agricultural lands, forests, rangelands, fisheries, minerals, and carbon.
If interested in participating please send a 250 word abstract to Miles Kenney-Lazar (mkenneylazar@clarku.edu) by Wednesday, October 15, 2014. Participation in the session will be confirmed by Wednesday, October 22.
Note: We expect to have a discussant for this session and therefore presenters will be asked to submit a written paper a few weeks before the conference.
References
- Adas, M. 1986. From Footdragging to Flight: The Evasive History of Peasant Avoidance Protest in South and South‐East Asia. Journal of Peasant Studies, 13(2), 64–86.
- Bebbington, A., D. Humphreys Bebbington, J. Bury, J. Lingan, J.P. Muñoz, and M. Scurrah. 2008. Mining and Social Movements: Struggles Over Livelihood and Rural Territorial Development in the Andes. World Development, 36(12), 2888–905.
- Himley, M. 2013. Regularizing Extraction in Andean Peru: Mining and Social Mobilization in an Age of Corporate Social Responsibility. Antipode, 45(2), 394-416.
- Malseed, K. 2008. Where There Is No Movement: Local Resistance and the Potential for Solidarity. Journal of Agrarian Change, 8(2-3), 489–514.
- Perreault, T. 2006. From the Guerra Del Agua to the Guerra Del Gas: Resource Governance, Neoliberalism and Popular Protest in Bolivia. Antipode, 38(1), 150-172.
- Rocheleau, D. and L. Ross. 1995. Trees as Tools, Trees as Texts: Struggles Over Resources in Zambrana-Chacuey, Dominican Republic. Antipode, 27(4), 407-428.
- Scott, J. 1986. Everyday forms of peasant resistance. Journal of Peasant Studies, 13(2), 5–35.
- Walker, K.L.M. 2008. From Covert to Overt: Everyday Peasant Politics in China and the Implications for Transnational Agrarian Movements
- Wolford, W. 2010. This Land is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press.