Mobilizing against Dispossession: Gold Mining and a Local Resistance Movement in Mongolia
June 11 (Mongolia Today Blog) Dalaibuyan BYAMBAJAV. Graduate School of Letters, Hokkaido University, 2012. "Mobilizing against Dispossession : Gold Mining and a Local Resistance Movement in Mongolia" Journal of the Center for Northern Humanities, 5: 13-32.
Civil society scholars and practitioners have long been curious about the mechanisms that enable ordinary people to take collective action in conditions that normally would present little opportunity of emergence and sustenance, be it local or global. It was the same kind of intellectual curiosity that led this research to examine a local resistance movement in rural Mongolia, which emerged in response to the threats imposed by gold mining.
With its coverage of extensive surface and expansion into new territories, gold mining activities across the Mongolian countryside since the late 1990s have presented a significant challenge to the livelihood of Mongolian herders. Mining expansion has threatened the environmental, material, and cultural bases of the livelihood of herders (Tumenbayar 2002; High 2008; Dierkes, in press). Local herders in Mongolia, whose living environment has been affected by mining activities, have rarely complied with such disturbances without opposition. Local resistance movements emerged in response to mining-related environmental problems and livelihood risks since the early 2000s in Mongolia presented in part a societal defensive reaction to the destructive mining activities.
However, the majority of the local resistance movements have not been able to produce sustained collective action or community-based struggles. Even though, both academic and popular writing about mining, mobile pastoralism, and environmental management in Mongolia have discussed the role of local resistance movements, there is a lack of understanding of the actual staging ground of local collective action. What are the contradictory trends that facilitate or undermine local resistance movements? What forms of organization and collective action repertoires are available to local citizens in Mongolia?
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Civil society scholars and practitioners have long been curious about the mechanisms that enable ordinary people to take collective action in conditions that normally would present little opportunity of emergence and sustenance, be it local or global. It was the same kind of intellectual curiosity that led this research to examine a local resistance movement in rural Mongolia, which emerged in response to the threats imposed by gold mining.
With its coverage of extensive surface and expansion into new territories, gold mining activities across the Mongolian countryside since the late 1990s have presented a significant challenge to the livelihood of Mongolian herders. Mining expansion has threatened the environmental, material, and cultural bases of the livelihood of herders (Tumenbayar 2002; High 2008; Dierkes, in press). Local herders in Mongolia, whose living environment has been affected by mining activities, have rarely complied with such disturbances without opposition. Local resistance movements emerged in response to mining-related environmental problems and livelihood risks since the early 2000s in Mongolia presented in part a societal defensive reaction to the destructive mining activities.
However, the majority of the local resistance movements have not been able to produce sustained collective action or community-based struggles. Even though, both academic and popular writing about mining, mobile pastoralism, and environmental management in Mongolia have discussed the role of local resistance movements, there is a lack of understanding of the actual staging ground of local collective action. What are the contradictory trends that facilitate or undermine local resistance movements? What forms of organization and collective action repertoires are available to local citizens in Mongolia?
Download the full version of this article PDF
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